Jaelynn Scott is paving the way for Black, transgender women and girls in Washington.

Scott secured the Democratic nomination for Washington’s 37th legislative district, located in Seattle, earlier this month. She faces Evon McCorkle, a college student running as an independent in the general election. But Scott is widely regarded as the projected winner of the race this November, which would make her the first openly trans Black woman to be elected to a state legislature in the country.

It’s a welcome reprieve from the current tenor of trans politics in the state. Conservative groups have poured millions of dollars and countless hours into anti-trans statewide ballot initiatives this year, including two in Washington; one to ban trans girls from most women’s sports teams in schools, and another that would forcibly out trans students.

“The engineers of Project 2025 have hand-picked millionaires and billionaires to move ballot measures that promote this Administration’s agenda in blue states,” Scott told the crowd at a No Kings rally last year. “We will not let authoritarians dictate how we legislate in this state.”

Despite some mainline Democratic handwringing, positioning trans rights as too much of a “fringe” issue, Scott enjoys a vast and diverse roster of endorsements from across the left: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the state branches of both the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, and the district and county Democrats to name a few.

Even more, Scott unabashedly told the Washington State Standard, she believes an “incrementalist approach” to equal rights is “one that is too moderate.”

“This urgency of this moment actually kind of demanded that I try at least to go in to be a voice for the community,” she said.

Scott grew up in a Black Christian tradition in Mississippi, and her religion remains important in her work. She received her Master of Divinity from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She was ordained as a Buddhist minister and practiced ministry with the Unitarian Universalist Church for years before entering politics.

She currently works as the executive director of the Lavender Rights Project, which supports the state’s Black trans community through “policy and legal advocacy, movement lawyering, community organizing, and wraparound supportive housing,” as per the LRP’s website.

These experiences have informed her goals as a candidate. “We have to take seriously the threat of the federal administration on our bodies,” Scott said in an interview with The Urbanist at the start of her campaign.

“They’re literally ripping families apart,” she said, “threatening trans folks, right, and threatening anyone who comes here seeking abortion services and gender-affirming care services.”

Scott follows Mo Turner, a Black and nonbinary lawmaker, who was elected to Oklahoma’s legislature in 2020—making them the first out, Black trans person to hold such a position. They left office in 2024 and did not seek re-election.

Michigan is also expected to elect Joanna Whaley, a progressive, to its state legislature this November. If she wins, she will be the first out trans woman ever elected in her state, joining Whaley join Rep. Emily Dievendorf, who is nonbinary, in the state’s legislature.

Like Scott, Whaley is a woman of faith; a seminary-trained hospital chaplain.

“As a Black trans woman, I’ve faced many of the same challenges others in QT2BIPOC and marginalized communities face—unstable housing, barriers to employment, addiction, and ideologically motivated violence and threats to our civil liberties,” Scott said on her campaign website.

“Guided by my faith and informed by my lived experiences, I have dedicated my life to building a community where all can live in freedom, dignity, and belonging.”

A critical deadline passed yesterday in the federal fight to preserve transgender people’s access to health care. States and providers have sixty days to respond accordingly.

On August 11, the Trump Administration released a final rule that is set to ban Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) from covering most kinds of gender-affirming care for trans young people—including some legal adults at age 18. But “final” is different than “enacted,” and it’s not slated to take effect until October.

“Despite this being called a ‘final rule,’ we have time to fight back,” said The Trevor Project’s Vice President, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen. “Nothing will change overnight.”

States can offset the rule by subsidizing such care with their own dollars. They could also sue the Administration for what many see as a power grab by Trump officials.

“The rule announced today will face legal challenge,” a press release put out by GLAD Law reads, emphasizing that there is precedent in this arena—and even in the recent past, equal rights groups have scored meaningful victories against the White House on this front.

“Federal courts have blocked previous efforts by the Trump administration to use funding threats to override states’ longstanding authority to regulate medical care, including transgender health care,” it says. “Thus far, Courts have consistently and resoundingly rejected the administration’s efforts to abandon the patients and families who rely on this care.”

The finalized rule does not ban care nationally, nor does it advance Trump’s efforts to ban hospitals from providing these services if they receive Medicaid funds in other areas of practice. It does not change the fact that there is still no federal law restricting gender-affirming care, and in fact, many states have laws explicitly protecting such care.

Ultimately, the rule places the ultimate burden on low-income trans youth and their families, who disproportionately rely on Medicaid services.

The policy is a product of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, led by television’s Dr. Mehmet Oz, and the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The rule was first proposed by CMS in February. It was met with swift backlash—nearly 35,000 comments were submitted, the overwhelming majority of them in opposition, the National Women’s Law Center found.

Earlier this year, the courts struck down the so-called Kennedy Declaration, in which the HHS Secretary attempted to restrict health care for trans youth through a “declaration” of what the anti-vaxxer unilaterally determined to be a lack of scientific rigor. But RFK didn’t have the authority to create or enforce the policy, the courts found.

“The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as a sacred,” the judge in that case said, as per news reports.

Members of the Congressional Equality Caucus similarly lambasted the proposal when it was first announced, arguing such anti-trans measures “exceed the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) statutory authority—and set a dangerous precedent of expanding the federal government’s role in the regulation of the practice of medicine,” in a letter sent to Secretary Kennedy.

On Tuesday, Caucus Chair Rep. Mark Takano condemned the final version, too. “In the midst of the Republican Healthcare Crisis, the Trump Administration is once again working to rip access to medically necessary care away from Americans that depend on lifesaving programs like Medicaid and CHIP,” he said.

“Decisions about a young person’s care should be between the patient, their parents, and their provider—not politicians.”

Some of the activists who spoke to Erin in the Morning did so on the condition that their last name not be published, citing safety and privacy concerns.

On August 8, police arrived on the scene of Long Branch Lagoon Water Park in Dodge City, Kansas, to the sight of three self-described “bearded, burly men” who had been in the women’s bathroom and changing area. The manager of the municipally run property allegedly screamed and rushed children out the door.

The men knew this was likely. They didn’t agitate any of the women; they didn’t remove their clothes or make crass comments. They simply used the gendered spaces that the state of Kansas requires them to use by law, because these men are transgender.

“Supporters of SB244, including Attorney General Kris Kobach and Senate Majority Leader Ty Masterson, billed it as a way to keep men out of women’s spaces; it clearly requires some men to enter women’s spaces,” a press release sent to news outlets reads. So, these men took action—using malicious compliance to prove their point.

“Segregating people by suspected genitalia does nothing to improve public safety; it does quite the opposite by opening Kansans up to sexual harassment and discrimination. At no point should anyone be asking anyone else what genitals they have in public.”

The men, dressed in yellow “Compliance Crew” shirts, were part of a small group of trans-masculine Kansans who used the women’s room at facilities across the state that day in a coordinated action. They were also spotted at a zoo, a library, a museum, and other parks. They were in Emporia, Great Bend, Garden City, and Dodge City. At the library, at least one patron complained; at other places, the men used the bathroom and received dirty looks, and simply left the space without confrontation.

But at Long Branch Lagoon, members of the Kansas Compliance Crew resorted to having to describe their genitals to police in order to resolve the matter and avoid arrest.

“The men had a discussion with the manager and police and explained the situation, including uncomfortable descriptions of their bodies,” the press release said. Furthermore, both the manager and the police reportedly said “they had never heard of SB244 nor been notified by any government entity of its passage.”

“I could easily continue using the men’s restroom under the radar,” said Ray Vieux, who participated as one of the demonstrators.

SB244 passed in February. It enshrined biological, immutable, and unscientific sex definitions into state law, established bathroom bans in many government owned buildings, and purported to invalidate driver’s licenses of trans Kansans who had changed their gender marker.

Since the bill passed, Vieux continued to use the men’s room in public spaces “enough to land me in jail several times over if I had been reported,” he said.

“As a trans man, I have the immense privilege of blending in. But these laws force me to choose between safety and obeying the law,” Vieux told Erin in the Morning. “I want people outside of Kansas to understand that many of us don’t want to leave, no matter how bad it gets. But every time I drive with an ‘F’ on my license or use the restroom, I fear for my safety.”

Charles, a 52-year-old ranch hand, said he participated to show the impacts of the bill. “It was pushed as a way to keep men out of women’s spaces,” he said. “As trans men and transmasculine people, we have a really unique opportunity to demonstrate, with action, visually, just exactly how wrong that was. That the law does not actually do what it was advertised to do.”

The group emphasized that they believed it was important for all trans people, but that trans women, in particular, were bearing the brunt of this anti-trans rhetoric about so-called “men” in women’s spaces. They’re not the only ones taking similar action; Samantha Boucher, a trans activist in Topeka, used the restroom at the statehouse to protest the bill, and law enforcement declined to intervene. Police seemed to selectively enforce a similar ban during an action in Texas.

Meanwhile, in states like Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Louisiana, transgender and cisgender people alike have been accosted by law enforcement and/or civilians determined to enforce bathroom sex segregation, even in places where no such law applies. It has resulted in multiple arrests and physical altercations.

In February, the ACLU of Kansas sued the state on behalf of two transgender men who had their driver’s licenses invalidated due to SB244, which a senior attorney for the organization called “a transparent attempt to deny transgender people autonomy over their own identities and push them out of public life altogether.”

In the aftermath of Saturday’s action, Theodore, another demonstrator who is a case manager and transgender man in his 30s, said he was surprised by the sheer level of vitriolic backlash. But for the most part, in his experience, it wasn’t in the bathrooms. It was on social media.

When news broke of their small but mighty protest, there were threats of rape and violence, of people calling them pedophiles, of people spewing anti-trans conspiracies and hatred.

“I’m just a boring dad,” Theodore said, looking at some of those comments. “I’m out here trying to keep my kids safe, too.”

Michigan is on track to welcome its first openly transgender woman to serve as a state representative.

Erin in the Morning readers likely first met Joanna Whaley in April or May of this year, when we reported that the 38-year-old hospital chaplain was running to be the state representative in Michigan’s 2nd House District. She had been temporarily knocked off the ballot because her opponent in the Democratic primary, Frank Liberati, contested her eligibility, arguing her name change documents were invalid and therefore disqualifying.

This maneuver didn’t work. Whaley beat Liberati and one other opponent in the Aug. 4 primary with 56% of the vote, with the second-place candidate trailing over 20 points behind. It was a margin of victory that surprised even Whaley. Now, Erin in the Morning can re-introduce her as the official Democratic nominee for Michigan’s 2nd House District.

She will face off against Republican Ronald Kokinda. But this district leans Democratic, making Whaley the predicted winner of the general election this November. If she crosses that finish line, she will be the first transgender woman to serve in the Michigan Legislature.

While equal rights for transgender people remains a priority, Whaley emphasized that she hopes to represent all constituents. She is campaigning primarily on issues like cost of living, health care access, and public safety. She also denounced corporate money and Christian nationalism as key culprits behind America’s democracy in decline.

“I had a pastor who would, from the pulpit, would say, if you listen to anything other than Fox News, you’re letting the devil into your house,” she told Erin in the Morning. “As a pastor myself, I think that is a terrible, terrible mistake to let a pastor think for you.”

The seat Whaley seeks is currently held by Democratic Rep. Tullio Liberati, the brother of Frank Liberati, who tried to get Whaley booted from the ballot. The current representative, Tullio, was one of eight Democrats who crossed party lines to vote in favor of a resolution calling upon the Michigan High School Athletic Association to discriminate against trans people.

Whaley faces unique obstacles that cisgender candidates may not. In addition to opponents trying to weaponize name and gender marker changes for political gain, trans people are plagued by an endless stream of questions about “electability.” In New Hampshire, for example, State Rep. Alice Wade recently said she was pressured not to run for higher office by a fellow Democrat who cast doubt on whether a trans woman could win in their state.

“I just remember standing in the poll lines,” Whaley said, recounting the primary. “Trans person after trans person, parents of trans kids—coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re making us feel like we can come out of our house again.’”

Meanwhile, Whaley said one of her highest campaign expenses was a security detail due to the sheer volume of anti-trans threats of violence that she receives.

But she credits her time in seminary and the two decades she spent at an evangelical megachurch—an experience that included surviving coercive anti-LGBT conversion therapy—with giving her a unique ability to connect with voters across backgrounds. “I speak fluent Republican,” she told Erin in the Morning. The proud parent added: “The term ‘family’ does not belong to conservatives.”

She admits change will take time, but she said she’s ready to be part of that process. “I don’t think I’m going see the fruits of some of this labor,” Whaley explained. “But it’s just continuing to be that voice of, you know, letting someone’s grandmother hear: ‘Oh my gosh, this trans person talked about something I never thought they would. They talk about loving their family. I thought Fox News told me they hated family.’ I think that that stuff’s gonna matter in the long term.”

Whaley said she will not back down in the fight for civil rights, including those of trans Michiganders. “I’m going to go into the belly of the beast for you,” she said.

Although many outlets are reporting that she will be the first transgender representative there, period, Rep. Emily Dievendorf, of the 77th House District, is nonbinary, and has served since 2022.

Content Note: This article depicts images and descriptions of violence against transgender people. Reader discretion is advised.

On May 31, Aurora Rush and Shae Sanders would do something that would forever change the course of their lives: The couple, both of whom are transgender, would use a public restroom in Bossier Parish, Louisiana.

Louisiana does not have an anti-trans bathroom ban on the books that would prohibit the pair from using their restroom of choice at the park, so this was wholly legal. Nonetheless, Sanders and Rush told Erin in the Morning that a mob of people at Cypress Black Bayou Park would exact revenge for this perceived transgression by beating them so severely that Sanders lost consciousness.

Sanders was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where they needed four stitches above their eye. Rush sustained injuries all over her body, including a concussion, but she wasn’t taken to a hospital. Instead, police took her to a men’s jail. Erin in the Morning could not find evidence that anyone else was arrested that day, and the Sheriff’s Office would not immediately provide those details. Sanders was charged with one count of disturbing the peace, and Rush with two—one for “fighting” and the other for the purported use of offensive language—meaning they face fines and up to six months or one year in prison, respectively, if convicted.

They say they didn’t even punch back. Still, a plea deal may help them avoid jailtime. But Sanders and Rush aren’t signing.

“I’m more angry at the response of the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office than I am at the people who beat us up,” Rush said. “They further victimized me. I cannot just go to court, sign a piece of paper, pay a couple hundred dollars in fines, and let it just go away like it never happened. It’s an egregious miscarriage of justice.”

In the weeks that followed the incident, the Police Jury—state nomenclature for what other parts of the country might call a county board of executives—unanimously voted for one of the most punitive anti-trans bathroom bans in the country, reportedly at the request of Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington himself. He was not available for comment ahead of publishing for this piece.

Courtney Newburry, the couple’s attorney, said that in her opinion, what happened to her clients is nothing less than a hate crime.

“I believe the facts will show that this attack was targeted, calculated, had been simmering all day, and is the direct result of the dangerous and harmful rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes transgender people,” she told Erin in the Morning. “I believe the facts will show that the attackers had made a determination as to Aurora’s gender and that determination led them to believe they had the power to do what they did; that they believed themselves to be the heroes here.”

It began as a stereotypical “all-American summer day,” Rush recalls; friends gathered lakeside, had hot dogs grilled over an open flame, and tried to cool off from the relentless Louisiana sun.

But this is Trump’s America, meaning transgender people are being subjected to new and creative terror campaigns every single day. Even Rush, who has been living as a transgender woman in the deep south for over a decade, was blindsided by what happened next.

Rush had stepped away from the festivities to use the women’s room, and returned to the lake without incident. The day came to a quiet end. Then the couple parted from their friends and began walking back to their car, but first, Sanders needed the restroom. They are nonbinary, but assigned female at birth, so they often feel safest using the women’s room. They handed some belongings to Rush so that she could wait outside the building with it.

In Rush’s telling, that’s when a man began harassing her. She had never met him before; she didn’t recognize him. But as she walked back to her car in the parking lot, he followed. She said he threatened her if she entered the women’s room, called her slurs, and tried to goad her into a fight. Rush put her belongings down in her car, and returned to a pavilion area outside of the women’s room to wait for Sanders, and the man kept following her, she said.

But in the time it took Sanders to finish and wash their hands, a crowd of about ten people had formed. Sanders remembers emerging from the building to see their partner terrified, trapped at the center of a circle of men and women alike screaming profanities and threats. “It was every single hateful thing you can come up with that people say to a trans person,” Sanders said.

Sanders had to push past the crowd because, in addition to surrounding Rush, they were blocking the exit.

Sanders put their arm around Rush and tried to leave, but people blocked them.

What followed was a stream of vitriol. They allegedly called Rush a “tranny” and a “faggot.” They allegedly said they would stop Rush from entering the bathroom by any means necessary. They allegedly threatened to murder Rush. And they allegedly said they were protecting the children.

“I was in a total, complete, closed up circle,” Rush said. “There was no getting out of it. I could feel people behind me breathing down my neck.”

“We knew, at that point, that we were pretty much screwed,” Sanders said.

It’s not totally clear why the beating stopped, but evidently, a parks employee called the police. Sanders had been knocked unconscious and needed stitches for a gash above their eye. They were taken away in an ambulance. Rush sat in her car as police questioned her and others at the scene.

Both maintain they didn’t even really fight back; more than anything, they weren’t in fighting condition. Rush lives off of disability benefits because of a hip injury; she has trouble lifting heavy objects and moving one of her legs. Sanders has a structural defect in their spinal cord. An injury as mild as whiplash could render them in need of emergency surgery. After the ordeal at Cypress Bayou, they were blind in one eye for several days—the product of a scratched cornea.

Sanders is also medically vulnerable due to a neurostim implant in their shoulder—a device similar to a pacemaker, but connected to the brain instead of the heart. Doctors are still trying to determine if the attack damaged the wires, which could kill them.

Rush also incurred head trauma, scratches, contusions, and massive welts; one knot above her knee swelled to the size of an apple. Blood pooled around her eyes, a sign of a concussion. But the physical injuries were compounded by the moral ones.

The worst part, for Rush, may have been when officers approached her car, told her to step out of her vehicle, and informed her that she was under arrest. Despite the “female” gender marker on Rush’s driver’s license, they took her to a men’s jail, had her patted down and searched by a male guard, and initially booked her under a man’s name—and not even one she had ever used or heard of.

A photo she shared with Erin in the Morning appears to show a plastic bag where they had collected her belongings, labelled with a moniker she didn’t recognize. The name is crossed out and her proper, legal name is scrawled underneath. Upon her release from police custody, she looked up the name on Facebook, and she immediately recognized the face staring back at her.

It was one of the men, she says, who had attacked her.

Rush and Sanders were scheduled for arraignment on July 15, but that date was changed at the last minute. Their next court date is expected to be in August, Newburry told Erin in the Morning.

Coincidentally, July 15 was also the date the Bossier Parish police jury voted unanimously in favor of Ordinance No. 22—a resolution that would impose criminal sanctions on anyone accused of being in a gendered bathroom that deviates from their sex assigned at birth, and who refuses to leave upon request. It covers any bathroom, locker room, or changing room owned or operated by the Parish, including at courthouses, government buildings, and public parks.

It cited the passage of the Women’s Safety and Protection Act, a bill pushed by anti-trans activists “establishing definitions relating to biological sex and recognizing the authority of governmental entities to maintain separate accommodations based upon biological sex,” a resolution from the July 15 police jury meeting reads.

Ordinance No. 22 would require any and all municipal employees, from police officers to janitors, to monitor bathrooms for suspected trans people using the “wrong” one. If an employee fails to eject the individual whose gender or sex has been called into question, then they must be met with disciplinary action, the ordinance reads.

And if a trans person, or presumed-trans person, does not leave upon request from a stranger making assumptions about their gender, genitals, and biological make-up, then they could face criminal charges and up to a year in jail. The criminal charges and threat of incarceration make it perhaps the most severe anti-trans local bathroom policy in the country.

It’s also unclear whether the ordinance is actually in effect; government officials gave Erin in the Morning different answers when asked. Initially local news reports said there would be a final vote on Aug. 5; several jurors told Erin in the Morning the adoption was final; the Parish attorney did not respond to requests for comment; the Sheriff’s office said it had not yet been adopted at all.

A document posted ahead of this week’s Aug. 5 meeting indicates they will consider having another public hearing; nobody showed up to testify at the first one. The ACLU of Louisiana sent the governing body a letter alleging it didn’t properly advertise the vote, violating Open Meetings Laws, and that they would need to restart the process. If that resolution passes, then there will be an opportunity for public comment on the matter scheduled for Sept. 2, Parish documents indicate.

Now, community groups are mobilizing both to support Rush and Sanders and to challenge Ordinance No. 22. “Things have gotten bad,” said Peyton Michelle Rose, executive director for the statewide advocacy group Louisiana Trans Advocates. “But we’ve already had it bad. We’re used to standing up for ourselves.”

Meanwhile, multiple jurors told Erin in the Morning that the ordinance was requested by Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington himself in the weeks following what happened to Rush and Sanders.

“There was nothing on the books for him to do as law enforcement,” juror Glenn Benton said in an interview. “That’s why he asked us to do it.”

For Rush and Sanders, the uphill climb that remains is not just legal or political. They continue to struggle with chronic health problems as a result of the physical assault they experienced. They are still adjusting to their new normal of chronic migraines, shifting court dates, mounting medical bills, and severe PTSD.

“I am a completely different person,” Sanders said. “I am terrified now. I’ve never been scared like this before.”

A picture can speak a thousand words—but sometimes, all that’s needed are three.

The Minnesota Lynx Coach Cheryl Reeve was seen sporting a “Trans Kids Belong” shirt at Sunday’s match against the Indiana Fever. This comes after Fever guard Sophie Cunningham used her platform to reject the notion that trans girls deserve the same equal rights in sports as cisgender girls.

The crowd was equally indignant. “Sophie Cunningham is getting booed every time she touches the ball here in Minneapolis,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice reported during the game.

“I come from a space of inclusion,” Reeve told reporters. “The narrative that I think is problematic is to suggest that transgender athletes are the biggest problem in women’s sports. This is what’s bothersome. There is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.”

Sunday also marked the end of the Fever’s five-game winning streak, losing to the Lynx 108-100. (Cunningham scored a whopping three points.)

Afterwards, reporters asked the Fever’s point guard Caitlin Clark—arguably one of the most magnanimous figures in the league—her take on the matter.

“I think it’s for leagues and governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions,” Clark told reporters. “Our focus is on basketball. That’s what we talk about and how we can get wins and obviously we didn’t do that tonight. So we need to find an area to improve in that way.”

Outside protestors also gathered in pro- and anti-trans camps.

On the court, Reeve was also seen talking to Cunningham, appearing cordial. “Both of us understand that we have platforms and we both talked about wanting to, more than anything, educate,” Reeve said, as per ESPN. “There are some things that we have in common, and maybe some things you differ on, just like any issues. I think it’s how you handle things. It was nice to be in person, for sure.”

As the ultra-right has openly stated time and time again, the manufactured crisis around transgender athletes is just a gateway drug for transphobia. It’s a wedge issue, conservative strategists have boasted; once they get people “comfortable” debating trans women in sports, it opens up endless possibilities for a full-scale attack on all trans rights, women’s rights, and the rights of the LGBTQ community at large.

Last week, a similar scene erupted outside a Fever game against the Seattle Storm, Erin in the Morning reported. A far-right sportswear brand founded for the purpose of promoting anti-trans ideology latched on to Cunningham’s comment to drive a wedge between WNBA players, seemingly placing a paid spokesperson courtside during the recent Fever-Storm game, with signs and shirts supporting Cunningham and promoting a subtly anti-trans message. They thanked her for “speaking up for girls.”

Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton allegedly confronted them and was suspended and fined because she supposedly called them “fucking insane” over the course of that interaction.

Keaton and Reeve’s acts of solidarity, however small, are far from the only resistance to Cunningham. Backlash from the WNBA’s overwhelming LGBTQ fanbase was swift. “I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,’” Cunningham told ESPN. In the same interview, where she doubled down on calling trans women “biological men,” she insisted: “I think that I am here to extend love.”

Coach Reeve, on the other hand, used Sunday’s game to reiterate her support for the trans community. “We need to protect trans kids,” she said. “It’s a human rights issue.”

Support for trans youth remains widespread in the league. In fact, in 2021, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association filed an amicus brief before a federal court to protect transgender student athletes.

“At the WNBPA, we honor the diversity of identities and perspectives our members bring to the table,” said the group’s Executive Director Terri Jackson at the time. “The players believe in the power of sport to fundamentally change the lives of all young people. As attacks across the country continue to escalate, we want to send an unequivocal message to trans and nonbinary youth in sports: we see you, we are an ally and we will fight for you.”

In liberal democracies, advocacy groups are often free to criticize what they see as groups opposing the rights of those they advocate for. In the United States, for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center designates groups opposing the rights of minorities as “hate groups,” an effective moniker that helps organizations and people avoid association with such movements. One of the most effective organizations at opposing hate and violence worldwide is Amnesty International, which has stood up to dictators and death squads to report accurately and advocate for globally marginalized people. Now, though, Amnesty appears to have met its greatest threat—not a government or a military junta, but the anti-trans activist and writer J.K. Rowling, and the anti-trans “gender-critical” movement she finances, who has successfully forced the organization as of this morning to issue an apology for calling anti-trans groups “anti-rights.”

On July 8, Amnesty International UK released a report titled “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK.” The report mapped 117 organizations working to restrict the rights of, among others, transgender and queer people in the United Kingdom, and documented the financial infrastructure behind them, including far-right Christian nationalist organizations, U.S.-based legal powerhouses like Alliance Defending Freedom, and conversion therapy promoters. Many “gender critical” groups were also listed—a moniker used in the United Kingdom to describe trans-exclusionary activists who have driven much of the extreme downturn in civil rights for trans people in the country—including Sex Matters, a policy group that helped bring the Supreme Court case redefining “woman” under the Equality Act as excluding trans women, and Beira’s Place, a sexual assault support center founded and funded by billionaire J.K. Rowling that explicitly excludes transgender women from its services and was established after Rowling objected to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre’s inclusive policies.

The response was immediate. Anti-transgender activists, financed by Rowling, flooded Amnesty International UK with legal threat letters demanding the report be withdrawn. Rowling herself posted on twitter: “Should any of the women’s organisations targeted by AmnestyUK’s recent ‘anti-rights’ blacklist wish to take legal action, applications can be made to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund.” That fund is a private legal war chest she launched in May 2025, backed by an immense personal fortune, with no public board and no outside oversight. The threats were serious due to UK policies allowing the mega-wealthy to sue people who criticize them into submission. Unlike the United States, where anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants to get these suits dismissed early, the UK has no comprehensive protections for those using their freedom of speech to criticize abuses. Likewise under UK defamation law, the burden of proof falls on the defendant. The report came down within 48 hours. For three weeks, the question was whether Amnesty would stand behind its own research or capitulate entirely. This morning, we got the answer: a full, groveling apology from the organization that has weathered the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia, and the Bush administration’s defense of Guantánamo Bay—but could not weather J.K. Rowling.

In its apology, Amnesty completely capitulated, saying the document “should never have been published” and calling its publication “an error.” It specifically disavowed the labeling of anti-trans “gender critical” organizations as “anti-rights,” stating: “In particular, we apologise to Beira’s Place and other groups, which we categorised as gender critical organisations, which we should not have collectively labelled as anti-rights.” The apology identified no factual errors in the report. It did not retract any specific finding. It did not name a single inaccuracy. It simply surrendered the entire document. You can read the full apology here:

Rowling celebrated. She posted on twitter: “Your apology for labelling women-only rape support centre Beira’s Place ‘anti-rights’ is a nice birthday present, AmnestyUK. Cheers. And congratulations to all the other women’s and LGB organisations Amnesty acknowledges having wrongly smeared as ‘anti-rights’.” She then turned to Genevieve Gluck, co-founder of Reduxx, an anti-trans website the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as “nothing but rabid transphobia” and compared to white nationalist crime-listing sites for its obsessive cataloging of alleged trans offenders—a site whose co-founder has appeared on the Daily Wire to claim that pornography is turning men transgender. Gluck expressed disappointment at not making the Amnesty list herself, posting: “To be honest, I was a little disappointed to not have gotten even an honorable mention.” Rowling replied warmly: “I like to think you were on the long list, Genevieve. 😘”

This is not the first time Rowling has used the threat of litigation to silence critics in the United Kingdom. In 2022, she threatened legal action against a social media user who called her a Nazi, forcing a public apology. In 2024, her lawyers compelled journalist Rivkah Brown—whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors—to publicly retract a tweet calling Rowling a Holocaust denier after Rowling dismissed the Nazis’ well-documented targeting of transgender people; her lawyers even required Brown to edit the apology’s phrasing. However, Rowling’s reach does not extend to the United States, where the First Amendment and anti-SLAPP legislation protect news publishers from accurately reporting on her promotion of anti-rights policies.

The capitulation of Amnesty International signals a bleak new era for transgender people in the United Kingdom. The country that once ranked first in Europe for LGBTQ+ rights now sits 22nd on the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map, after 11 consecutive years of decline. Under the Labour government, the rollbacks have only accelerated: bathroom bans, school guidance erasing trans students, a trans youth care bans, and more. Now, major institutions cannot even criticize the groups responsible for this. Meanwhile, transgender people in the United Kingdom are watching groups cow in submission to these threats and are left wondering if there is anyone left they can turn to for help.

The WNBA has long been considered “the most LGBT-inclusive professional sports league,” as per The Advocate; it was the first professional sports league to launch a Pride Month campaign. But Celeste Keaton, co-owner of the Seattle Storm, has been fined and sidelined—at least for now—because of a heated confrontation with a paid anti-trans advocate sitting courtside at a game.

Ahnaleigh Wilson, a Washington teenager, is an activist in the anti-trans movement’s political crusade against athletes. She and another young woman, who has not been publicly named, donned t-shirts from XX-XY Athletics—a sportswear company founded for the explicit purpose of advancing the assault on trans rights. It sponsors Wilson, a high school runner, and its “charitable” arm awarded her $5,000 for publicly outing and deriding another student athlete who was reportedly transgender.

Wilson and her counterpart also carried signs praising WNBA player Sophie Cunningham “for speaking up for girls,” as Wilson’s poster read. Cunningham, a guard for the Indiana Fever, also recently won words of support from the White House because she denounced equal rights for trans people in sports and called trans women “biological males.”

Political tensions were boiling ahead of Tuesday’s Storm-Fever face-off. Outside the Seattle stadium, opposing protests formed. Wilson joined a few dozen people sporting pro-Cunningham signs, XX-XY merchandise, and advertisements for the conservative organization Let’s Go Washington. The group is spearheading efforts to install a statewide ban on trans girls in women’s sports.

Afterwards, Wilson and the other young woman made their way to courtside seats, clutching their Sophie Cunningham posters with the social media handle of XX-XY scrawled by hand along the side.

Wilson told a far-right podcaster after the game that they “weren’t trying to be political.” Still, they were seemingly primed to grab the attention of viewers at home. Their propaganda also caught the eye of Keaton.

As per Wilson’s telling, Keaton approached the young women and said: “Jesus loves everyone.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, I know. I’m religious,’” Wilson said. “And [Keaton is] like, ‘I hope Jesus can forgive you for what sin you’ve done,’ something like that.”

The exchange allegedly escalated. According to Wilson and her seatmate—who, again, wore shirts prominently advertising an anti-trans organization—Keaton called them “fucking insane” and said they’d “better stop pulling this shit.”

Keaton has not publicly commented on her side of the story, but the Storm’s majority owner, Ginny Gilder, apologized on Keaton’s behalf. “We are aware one of our co-owners made comments to two fans in attendance at last night’s game,” Gilder told Front Office Sports in a statement. “We apologize that this happened. Everyone who attends a Storm game deserves to feel welcome, and we remain committed to creating an inclusive environment where every fan is treated with respect.”

Apparently, however, this excludes trans people and allies who don’t want to be subjected to dehumanizing rhetoric on the court; the WNBA fined Keaton an undisclosed amount and suspended her from five home games.

Cunningham and the Fever, for their part, said they were not aware of the rally or the signage stunt ahead of the game, and that no Fever player coordinated with the protestors in any way.

But Cunningham’s reputation precedes her. Despite her fanfare about wanting to “protect” women in sports, she was perhaps best known before this for a vicious physical attack on another woman athlete. Cunningham put the Connecticut Sun’s Jacy Sheldon in a headlock and “yanked Sheldon down by her neck,” resulting in a flagrant foul and causing Cunningham to be ejected from the game. The incident sparked a dedicated fanbase for Cunningham.

“I guess when you take a girl’s head off, people love that stuff,” she told ESPN.

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.

"I approached this meeting with high hopes—despite the fact that Acton would not be present—for a meaningful, productive conversation about the pain caused to the trans community by her recent comments and a commitment to repair the damage. That was not this meeting,” said Childrey in the aftermath of the meeting. "Our voices were actively suppressed. Myself and a number of other LGBTQ+ leaders were refused entry into a meeting we had been invited to attend. One trans advocate—Ciara Keeton—was booted from the meeting entirely just for pointing out the campaign's refusal to allow trans leaders into the room. When we were digitally locked out, it took the Chair of the Pride Caucus calling my personal phone and putting me on live speakerphone inside the room just for my voice to be heard."

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.”

From there, the meeting only worsened. Attendee after attendee demanded that Acton apologize for calling trans girls “boys,” chastised the campaign for convening a meeting with activists and then not sending the candidate, and pressed for concrete commitments. One leader did not mince words: “She is either a candidate who does not care enough to be here, or has a staff who told her it wasn’t important enough to be here.” another called Acton’s absence “borderline disrespectful” and turned on the party leadership: “Why isn’t ODP here? Kathleen Clyde should have been here. This is not how we get Ohio back.” Kyle Herman, Chair of the Pride Caucus, summarized the room’s frustration: “I am disappointed at how this was handled. I hoped to get clarification that could let us say, ‘See, Acton cares.’ This wasn’t it. It is very disappointing to have people disincluded from the call, especially people from the trans community.” When asked at the close of the meeting what the next steps were, Stein offered only: “This was first, that is what we have determined, and we will be figuring that out.” He did not commit to a retraction of Acton’s words or any specific action.

In the aftermath of the meeting, multiple attendees went public with their accounts Erick Detweiler, Vice Chairman of Rules and Bylaws of the Progressive Caucus stated: “I was shocked. I could not have prepared myself for the sheer contempt the campaign staff demonstrated toward Pride and Progressive Caucus leaders and the hundreds of grassroots constituents we represent. When they kicked the Pride Caucus Vice Chairwoman from the meeting without a chance to speak, it was as shocking as watching a friend be physically assaulted in front of me. When they retaliated against our trans rights advocate for the crime of demanding an explanation, I was forced to abandon hope of rationalizing the original act and recognized it for what it was: intentional targeted suppression of minorities; a preview into a future Acton administration. Drunk with power, unbeholden to the people, believing behind closed doors it is safe to shed its sheepskin.”

Detweiler continued: “They have, in a fit of transphobic sadism, forced a no-win scenario for their Democratic constituents and every Democratic nominee in Ohio: If this campaign loses, we will suffer under a Ramaswamy administration; but if we reward this campaign with victory, corporate Democrats at every level of government across the nation will think themselves justified in replicating this unconscionable campaign philosophy.”

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.

A Missouri library refused to back down from hosting an LGBTQ children’s book event, even as the state threatened to cut its funding or potentially levy criminal charges.

Last week, Missouri’s Attorney General and its Secretary of State, both Republicans, launched a full-fledged attack on the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia. According to conservatives, the library’s planned Rainbow Story Time event—a children’s event meant for LGBTQ families and their allies—was nothing less than an “attempt to mold and manipulate innocent young minds with radical liberal ideology,” reads a public letter from Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ office.

He called Rainbowsaurus, a book featuring same-sex parents chasing a rainbow dinosaur, and Big Wig, which is about gender non-conforming kids playing dress-up, “a form of sexual grooming [that] is unconscionable, if not criminal.”

But the letter was more than your typical conservative pearl-clutching. It was a threat. The AG’s office sent a letter citing criminal penalties against those who are “furnishing any material pornographic to minors.”

Meanwhile, Hoskins wrote: “Please be advised if this inappropriate endeavor for children takes place, I will do everything in my power to block every dollar of state and federal funding one can from future events at the Daniel Boone Library System.”

Nevertheless, the children read.

“We never wavered from holding Rainbow Story Time as planned,” said Mitzi St. John, a library spokesperson, to Erin in the Morning. “We weren’t doing anything illegal.”

Yesterday, Hoskins joined Republican State Senator Rick Brattin for a press conference on the matter, announcing they would be attempting to launch an investigation into the library. Brattin does not represent the area that the Daniel Boone Regional Library serves, but he is running for Congress, and Missouri primaries are next week. The seat he’s seeking also does not cover the community DBRL serves.

“They need something to stay in the headlines,” said Rep. Wick Thomas, a Democrat and former librarian, in a speech to reporters. The state’s only nonbinary legislator drove two hours when they heard about Hoskins’ press conference to host a counter-event of their own. “This is all they’ve got.”

These kinds of manufactured moral panics have become a common playbook by the right. In fact, Project 2025 explicitly calls for classifying “transgender ideology” as pornographic so that it can repress trans expression—and then some. The far-right blueprint says that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

Though it sounds extreme, many of Project 2025’s proposals have already come to fruition. Across the country, state and federal lawmakers have made it virtually illegal for trans and gender nonconforming people to simply exist in public—banning them from bathrooms, sports, the military, and, of course, library shelves.

During Hoskins’ event, they repeatedly—and without citing sources—argued the majority of Missourians opposed the Rainbow Story Time. But if there was community concern or opposition, Mary Lamberton—a grandmother, Columbia resident, and retired public school secretary—didn’t see much of it. There were maybe one or two protestors who came the day of the event and stood outside, she told Erin in the Morning.

Inside the library, roughly 150 people crammed in. Overflow crowds spilled out from the reading room and into the commons. It was a “positive atmosphere,” she said. She attended Rainbow Story Time as an ally; her niece is transgender.

Even in the face of funding cuts to her community library, for Lamberton, capitulation was not an option. “Immediately backing down, as a strategy, that will not get us ahead,” she told Erin in the Morning.

Meanwhile, at yesterday’s Republican presser, Brattin and Hoskins compared same-sex parents to parents who show their children pornography. When pressed, Brattin also conceded he hadn’t read the books in question, because he didn’t want to “spend money” on it, but that he had “Googled it,” which was enough to tell it was pornographic.

Immediately after that press conference wrapped up, Rep. Wick Thomas—a nonbinary legislator who had also attended Rainbow Story Time—held their own press conference, deciding at the last minute to drive over two hours to be in Jefferson City that day. As a former librarian, they told the press gaggle they felt compelled to be a counterweight to Hoskins and Brattin’s twenty-minute anti-trans tirade. In Thomas’ hands as they spoke were copies of Rainbowsaurus and Big Wig, borrowed from the local library.

They spoke to Erin in the Morning for an interview shortly thereafter. “This isn’t isolated to Missouri,” Thomas said. “It doesn’t end here if we don’t stop it here.”

Conservatives’ Rainbow Story Time spectacle is merely part of a broader effort to censor LGBTQ content and suppress the existence of LGBTQ people, they said. “That is a very dangerous slope into authoritarianism.”

Colbey Stosberg, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office—which had issued the initial public letter about Rainbow Story Time—rejected characterizations that this constituted discrimination against LGBTQ people and families.

“We’re not intending to discriminate based off of what sexual orientation is being furnished to minors. It’s any and all sexually explicit content,” he said in an interview with a local TV station. “That’s the way the law reads, and we’re enforcing it.”

“If anybody can find any library that’s furnishing, you know, heterosexual explicit content towards minors, call our office, please,” he said.

Many Missourians aren’t buying it.

“Public libraries exist to educate, foster curiosity, and serve their communities,” the statewide LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO told Erin in the Morning in a statement.

“Librarians, not politicians, are best equipped to determine what programming reflects those needs.”

As the 2026 elections approach, transgender people across the country are watching one fight in particular: a wave of anti-trans ballot measures heading directly to voters this November. Five states—Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington—are set to put measures before the electorate that would target transgender people in sports, medical care, and in Arizona’s case, bathrooms and locker rooms in schools, with funding tracked by a groundbreaking new Ballotpedia investigation. A sixth measure in Maine was invalidated. It is the first time in American history that voters will decide on anti-transgender measures at the ballot box—a strategic shift that advocacy groups have compared to the anti-gay-marriage amendments that swept state ballots in 2004. For transgender people who have sought refuge in blue states to escape the bans spreading through Republican-controlled legislatures, these measures represent a new and more direct threat: the possibility that their neighbors, not distant lawmakers, will vote to strip their rights.

One of the central fights will be in Washington, where a ballot initiative funded by conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood would institute a K-12 sports ban—and require every girl who wants to play to have her sex verified by a doctor first. The measure’s language is explicit: to be eligible, a student must provide a statement from her health care provider “that verifies the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” That requirement applies not to transgender students specifically but to every girl in the state who wants to play any sport with a sex-separate classification—from basketball and soccer to cheerleading, bowling, and golf. The initiative is bankrolled by Heywood’s Let’s Go Washington PAC, which has raised $7 million. The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, which has allowed transgender students to compete in line with their gender identity since 2007, is aware of roughly 10 out transgender student-athletes among the more than 200,000 who compete statewide. Opposition is being led by the No Hate in WA State coalition, which has raised roughly $1.6 million, according to reporting at Ballotpedia.

“In their witch hunt for a few trans kids in the entire state who play school sports, I-638’s backers will drive thousands of girls out of sports because their parents cannot afford the necessary testing or refuse to submit their daughters to genital inspections,” said Megan Rapinoe in an op-ed against the Washington initiative. “That’s a feature, not a bug, of these laws. Preventing girls from playing sports is the whole point. Spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered are the spaces they want to constrict—and then eliminate.”

Another fight drawing national attention is in Colorado, a blue state with some of the strongest transgender protections in the country. Two initiatives will appear on the November ballot: one banning all gender-affirming surgery for anyone under 18—a category that includes not only genital surgeries opponents fixate on (and vastly do not happen for trans youth) but also chest masculinization surgery for older transgender teenagers—and another banning transgender students from playing on sports teams matching their gender identity from kindergarten through college. Both are backed by Protect Kids Colorado, led by anti-LGBTQ activist Erin Lee. The opposition campaign, Families Not Politics, is led by One Colorado and includes Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. “One could expose students to invasive inspections just to play sports, while the other would place politicians between families and their doctors in deeply personal health care decisions,” said Nadine Bridges, One Colorado’s executive director, in a statement to Colorado Newsline.

Though Arizona is not a blue state, it bears close watching for the same reason. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed anti-trans legislation for years—Proposition 318 is now their vehicle to bypass her. The measure would extend Arizona’s existing ban on transgender girls in girls’ sports to private schools and club sports, and add a new restriction barring transgender students from using restrooms, locker rooms, and showers matching their gender identity. The ACLU of Arizona condemned the measure: “Trans youth deserve the same opportunities, experiences, rights, and protections as every other student,” said Katelynn Contreras, the organization’s policy strategist. There appears to be no broad-based campaign against this measure, according to reporting at Ballotpedia.

Two red states round out the list. In Missouri, Republican lawmakers bundled a ban on all gender-affirming care for minors with a repeal of the abortion rights amendment voters approved less than two years ago. The Stop the Ban Missouri coalition has raised $5.2 million to fight it, including $2.5 million from the ACLU Foundation, against proponents’ $1.6 million, per Ballotpedia. In Nebraska, the Fairness for Girls campaign submitted 211,000 signatures for a constitutional amendment permanently banning transgender students from girls’ sports, funded almost entirely by a single dark-money group whose donors are undisclosed, per Ballotpedia. Meanwhile, a sixth state narrowly avoided the ballot: in Maine, a sports and bathroom ban bankrolled by Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein was struck down after the state Supreme Judicial Court affirmed that more than 12,000 signatures had been improperly and some potentially fraudulently collected.

These five measures will mark the first time voters directly decide whether to strip rights from transgender people in the modern era—a playbook last deployed during the gay marriage fight and seeing new life in today’s anti-trans panic. Right-wing donors have poured millions into making these discriminatory measures happen, while opposition campaigns are outspent in nearly every state. If these measures succeed in blue states like Colorado and Washington, the map of where transgender people can safely live and raise families shrinks again, unless significant opposition from allied organizations can stand up to the onslaught.

Bossier Parish’s Police Jury—the equivalent of a county executive board, but with different naming conventions—voted on July 15 to advance a criminal ban on trans people using restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms on municipally owned land. This would impact government properties like libraries, parks, and courthouses.

“The Bossier Parish ordinance sets three penalty levels for violations,” the Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate reports. “A first offense can carry a fine up to $250, a second offense can carry a fine up to $500 and up to 30 days imprisonment, and a third or subsequent offense can carry a fine of up to $500 and imprisonment for up to six months.”

It also turns any municipal employee into a sort of mandatory reporter, who must police which people enter a gendered bathroom.

“Any employee observing a violation shall request that the individual leave the facility designated for the opposite biological sex,” the ordinance reads, as per The Advocate. Exceptions are made for maintenance crews or caretakers assisting a person with a disability. It also would not apply to schools, private businesses, or facilities owned by the federal or state government, as they are overseen by other entities.

Meeting minutes are not yet posted, so Erin in the Morning could not independently verify this phrasing, but The Advocate further reports the policy adopts its definitions of biological sex from the 2024 Women’s Safety and Protection Act, which declares that sex is based on the sex gametes (sperm or ova) a person “has, had, will have or would have, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident.”

How a bathroom spectator can reliably verify personal medical information remains unclear; Police Juror Jimmy Cochran told Erin in the Morning “biological sex” could be substantiated with one’s birth certificate, but this document is not generally carried around. And if someone is wrongfully arrested for the bathroom they enter, because someone wrongfully guessed their sex assigned at birth? “That’s what they got the court system for,” Cochran said.

Louisiana does not have a statewide bathroom ban for government buildings. Still, Bossier Parish isn’t the only locale to go above and beyond a state law to restrict the bathroom usage of transgender people. In 2024, the City Council of Odessa, Texas, passed an ordinance granting private citizens the right to sue anyone they believed to be a transgender person in the “wrong” bathroom. The policy never went into effect due to a technical error.

Members of the Bossier Parish Police Jury told Erin in the Morning that the ordinance was crafted in concert with, or even at the behest of, Sheriff Julian Whittington.

“There was nothing on the books for him to do as law enforcement, so that’s why he asked us to do it,” Glenn Benton said in an interview. “All the sheriff is trying to do is protect young ladies from predators that want to dress up and go into the female locker room or dressing room.”

It is a dangerous myth that trans women are using women’s restrooms to commit sex crimes. There have, however, been numerous instances of law enforcement intervention gone awry in states with and without bathroom bans on the books, even in instances where individuals used the bathroom aligning with their sex assigned at birth.

Transgender women have been targeted by law enforcement over bathroom usage in states like Florida and Texas. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, law enforcement apprehended a transgender man because he used the women’s restroom at a bar. In Boston, hotel security accosted a cisgender woman using a bathroom because they falsely assumed she was assigned male at birth, and a cisgender woman in Arizona had male police officers sicced on her for using a Walmart women’s room. She resorted to showing police part of her breasts to convince them she did, in fact, belong there.

Whittington’s office could not provide comment in time for publication of this piece.

“This is more of the same from our local governments, which is just a repeat of violence perpetrated by ignorant bigots within the community, reinforced by local law enforcement and then codified into rules by our local legislators,” said Bobby Woodruff, an organizer with the Shreveport-Bossier chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. They told Erin in the Morning the group is mobilizing on the issue to push back against local instances of violence against members of the transgender community.

The final vote for Bossier Parish’s transgender bathroom policy is slated for Aug. 5.

Florida has been ground zero for book bans in the United States. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, a series of laws opened the door to challenges targeting LGBTQ+ content, racial justice titles, and any book a single resident deems objectionable—making the state the national leader in school library removals. Now one of its most conservative school districts is considering the logical next step many activists have warned about: eliminating school libraries altogether. Clay County School District, a conservative school district which serves over 40,000 students south of Jacksonville, has removed more books than nearly any district in the state. Now, the fate of school libraries themselves appear to hang in the balance.

“Perhaps at some point we revisit this discussion too, just around what do we do with the senior high libraries. The circulation rates are less than in most schools—less than one checkout a day,” said Rodger Dailey, the district’s chief academic officer, at a recent school board workshop. “The options on the table are kind of nuclear options like close the library, take all the fiction books out, just leave the non-fiction—things that, to people who aren’t abreast of this, would be shocking to them.”

You can watch the full exchange here:

Dailey’s remarks opened a sprawling, nearly thirty-minute discussion among board members and district administrators about the toll of Florida’s book-challenge laws on the district. Under HB 1069, signed by DeSantis in 2023, any county resident can challenge a book by filling out a single form, and the school is required to remove it from shelves within five days. Putting it back requires a formal hearing. In Clay County, one man exploited that asymmetry to file more than 400 challenges, resulting in 287 books removed in a single school year—titles that included The Handmaid’s Tale, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Color Purple. The weight of that process was audible in the room. “I’d love to know what the off-ramp is because I’ve been on this crazy highway for 5 years. And if we can find an off-ramp, I’ll be the first to jump on it,” said Dailey.

To be clear, the board members and administrators in the meeting were not opposed to removing books—they are frustrated by the inefficiency of it. Their discussion centered not on whether to ban books but on how to do it faster. One member, Beth Clark, asked why the district cannot sue publishers for “providing pornography to our children,” telling the board she is exploring AI tools to screen titles. Dailey proposed banning entire authors rather than reviewing title by title: “This author has had three, four, or five books removed. Maybe we just say that author, we’ve had too many problems to look for the one good book that author has.” And when asked what might replace the library space, Dailey suggested replacing them with school stores or research centers and computer labs: “I think research makes sense. School stores make sense.”

The research on what school libraries do for students is not ambiguous. A Center for American Progress review of over 60 studies spanning five decades concluded that students with access to well-resourced school libraries with certified librarians consistently perform better academically, and that the benefits are strongest for the most vulnerable populations: students of color, low-income students, and students with disabilities. Research has also shown that access to books can offset the impact of poverty on reading achievement—and that losses of school librarians are associated with declines in scores. “Libraries are a place of self-selection and volunteer reading,” said Stephana Ferrell from the Florida Freedom to Read Project in a statement to Jacksonville Today in response to the discussion on removing libraries. “If you don’t like a book, you don’t have to read it, and I think we’ve lost sight of that.”

Clay County’s debate is a local example of a much broader fight over the future of school libraries in Florida. One of the laws that enabled this—HB 1069—was ruled partly unconstitutional in August 2025 by federal Judge Carlos Mendoza, who found that it “mandates the removal of books that contain even a single reference to the prohibited subject matter, regardless of the holistic value of the book.” The ruling is currently on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, and the law remains in effect while the case proceeds. Meanwhile, local officials continue to deal with the consequences of repeated harassment by any citizen who wishes to force schools to remove books they find objectionable.

If you’re transgender, you can die for our country—but you cannot receive life-saving health care, access it for your transgender family members, or expect your family to be treated equally in schools run by the armed forces, should a new provision in the House NDAA become law.

This appears to be the politic of Democratic Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, of Texas; Donald G. Davis, of North Carolina; Shomari Figures and Terri A. Sewell, of Alabama. These lawmakers voted in favor of two proposals by South Carolina’s Nancy Mace, to amend the pending National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). If passed in the Senate, Amendment 255 would gut gender-affirming care for uniformed service members, retirees, and their family members around the world. Amendment 256 would in turn ban transgender girls from women’s sports in K-12 schools run by the military.

That same night, however, the very same Democrats that sided with Mace voted against the proposed codification of Trump’s anti-trans military ban. In other words—they think transgender people should be able to enlist, but not enjoy the very freedoms they are supposedly fighting for.

The so-called trans military ban is already in place through federal policymaking and Trump’s Executive Order 14138. But it’s not as permanent as a formal law on the books would make it. That amendment, brought by Colorado’s notoriously anti-trans Representative Lauren Boebert, failed.

“We’re never going to give up the fight to protect our nation’s transgender servicemembers,” the Congressional Equality Caucus proudly declared after the ban was defeated, unequivocally calling it “good news.”

And it’s true that staving off a discriminatory policy targeting trans people on the basis of their gender identity is a victory. The amendment claimed trans people are fundamentally at odds with the “readiness and discipline” needed from a member of the armed forces. Four Republicans—Reps. Brian K. Fitzpatrick (PA-1) and Michael Lawler (NY-17), plus legislators from U.S. territories such as Kimberlyn King-Hinds (Northern Mariana Islands) and James C. Moylan (Guam)—even crossed party lines to quash the amendment.

But all of them, plus that small cadre of Democrats, turned their backs on trans people when it came time to protect their right to be free from discrimination in health care and in schools. This may be in lockstep with the Republican Party Line, but Democrats who defected drew ire over their vote.

“It’s not just an attack on transgender kids,” said Kara Corcoran, the executive director of SPARTA Pride, an advocacy group for transgender military communities. “It’s an attack on evidence-based care across military treatment facilities, and throughout the Department of Defense, not only here in America, but overseas.”

The first Mace amendment would prohibit TRICARE from covering “gender affirming medical treatment” for transgender people, including servicemembers, retirees, and dependents like children or a spouse. The second Mace amendment would require all on-base K-12 schools operated by the military to ban trans girls from girls’ sports teams.

Last year, many of these same Democratic defectors—such as Cuellar, Davis, Figures, and Gonzalez—voted in favor of athletics bans or gender-affirming health care restrictions for trans servicemembers, veterans, and their families. Cuellar and Davis even lent their support to what amounted to a Pride flag ban at military facilities, as Erin in the Morning has previously reported. Sewell marks the addition of a new name to this list. And while some of the defectors live in highly contested districts, Sewell’s district is safely blue.

Still, Corcoran and others are hopeful that these amendments will face the same fate as their many, many predecessors of anti-trans NDAA amendments or riders passed in the House. Anti-trans provisions snuck into spending, budget, and authorization bills have also been shot down. In a worst case scenario, Senate Democrats can also opt to filibuster.

“I’m hopeful that the Senate will kill it,” Corcoran told Erin in the Morning. “They know there are far more important things to focus on, and they are seeing through the scapegoat tactics that certain politicians are using to gain power and influence through the use of fear.”

In a landmark two-year review, the Health Council of the Netherlands—the country’s highest scientific advisory body—has delivered its verdict on gender affirming care for transgener youth. The council’s conclusions were universally positive for gender-affirming care: it endorsed the treatments as careful, lawful, and effective, framed quick access as a matter of the right to health, warned that “doing nothing” is harmful, cast aside the Cass Review as not applicable to Dutch care, reported zero cases of regret among trans youth patients, and called the reduction of the country’s years-long wait times “morally urgent.” In doing so, the Netherlands becomes the latest in a series of European countries to reaffirm and strengthen care for transgender youth, refuting a right-wing talking point in the United States that Europe is “pulling back.”

The review was commissioned in May 2024 in the wake of the Cass Review. The Health Council’s committee ran systematic literature searches and consulted outside clinical experts chosen for their differing perspectives on the care—a list that included Hilary Cass herself. The panel was chaired by Olaf Dekkers, a Leiden University Medical Center professor of internal medicine whose academic specialty is research methodology, and seated professors of health law and medical ethics alongside practicing physicians and psychiatrists. From that foundation, the committee dismantled the argument at the center of the American campaign against this care—that the evidence is too weak to justify treatment—answering that the evidence quality for trans youth care is in line with the norm across pediatric medicine, and that doing nothing carries documented harms of its own, pointing specifically to harms produced by America’s own care bans.

The committee concluded that the care is lawful and careful, and that it works as intended, stating in its summary: "The committee concludes that somatic treatment for young people with gender dysphoria fits within the health law framework. It further finds that scientific research shows the intended physical effects are achieved, that there are indications of some improvement in mental outcomes, and that the number of cases of regret is low. In the committee's view, the current data on unintended physical and mental effects are not cause for concern."

The advisory also rejected the framing that treating transgender youth is a risky intervention while not treating them is a neutral default. Delaying care, the review found, carries its own harms: youth develop unwanted and often irreversible physical changes—some of which can only be undone later with surgery—while mental health suffers in the meantime, and some young people locked out of careful care turn to unregulated hormones on their own. The committee's answer, in a passage aimed directly at that framing, calls the reduction of wait times a moral imperative: "Non-treatment is therefore not a neutral option. In the public debate, treating is often presented as intervening, while waiting is treated as self-evident. From the perspective of autonomy it becomes clear that delaying or withholding care also has consequences for young people's lives and their developmental possibilities—and that those consequences are morally relevant. From that perspective, shortening the waiting times is morally urgent."

They also examined rates of stopping treatment and of regret—and found both to be rare to nonexistent, stating: "Dutch research shows that 0% to 3.5% of people with gender dysphoria stop hormone treatment that they began as minors. No cases of regret were found in the studies." The international picture matches: across five systematic reviews, between 0% and 8% of youth stop hormone treatment, with regret rates described as low. Among the Dutch youth who did stop puberty blockers, the most common reason recorded was that their gender dysphoria had resolved—an outcome the Dutch model counts as the system working, since blockers exist precisely to give young people time to explore. The committee also cautioned that stopping and regret should not, on their own, be read as a verdict on the care itself, noting that many forms of regret trace not to the treatment but to discrimination and social hostility toward the people who received it.

The review also documented benefits of treatment across several mental health outcomes: depression, suicidality, self-harm, and emotional wellbeing. "Dutch trans youth report on average worse mental health before treatment with GnRH agonists than their cisgender peers," the review states, using the clinical term for puberty blockers. "After starting GnRH agonists, they report better mental health compared with the situation before treatment. This applies to emotional problems, depressive symptoms, suicidality and self-harm." For gender-affirming hormones, the committee found: "The limited research does show a significant improvement in general functioning and wellbeing after treatment." The committee then pointed out what delays cost transgender youth. A youth overwhelmed by distress about their own body or struggling with depression and social withdrawal, it wrote, has fewer chances "to form an identity, develop talents, and make plans for the future"—and untreated gender dysphoria therefore damages "the right to an open future."

The review directly engaged the argument that "evidence-based medicine" and the GRADE rating system prove the evidence for trans youth care is too weak to act on. The GRADE tier that critics often cite measures study design, the committee explained, and in pediatric medicine, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are largely off the table: "Ethical thresholds for conducting randomized controlled trials are much higher for children than for adults," the review notes—and in this field specifically, young people refuse to join a no-treatment control group, and blinding is impossible when treatment visibly changes the body. "A lack of RCTs has the consequence that the level of evidence will necessarily be assessed as (very) low." That places trans youth care on the same evidence tier as much of children's medicine: "For many questions in pediatric medicine, the evidence is low and will likely remain low," the committee writes, which is why evidence-based medicine, properly practiced, weighs research alongside clinical expertise and the patient's own individualized treatment goals.

The review's recommendations mark the latest step in an unmistakable movement across Europe: the expansion of transgender healthcare. For years, American coverage fixated on restrictions in the United Kingdom to claim the continent was turning back. That claim was always false, as more countries affirm the importance of such care. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland issued joint guidelines recommending the care, while France's pediatric endocrinologists published their first national consensus endorsing it. And now the country that pioneered gender-affirming care for trans youth has reviewed the care and found yet again that it gives those youth the greatest chance to thrive.

The Baltimore Ferals will not be tamed.

The Maryland Division 3 rugby team—and its opponents—made headlines this week for speaking out in defiance of trans-exclusionary attacks from the Trump Administration.

“I’m ready to keep playing rugby until they drag me off the field,” Ferals forward Christa Robinson told Kyle Goon of The Banner. “You can pry this ball out of my cold, dead hands.”

In February, after years of fighting the rising tide of global transphobia, USA Rugby bowed to federal pressures, adopting a policy to indicate that only those “assigned female at birth” could play on women’s teams. That hasn’t stopped the Ferals—a team playing under the Baltimore Flamingos Club, which specifically welcomes LGBTQ rugby players—from playing the game they love with the teammates they refuse to sideline.

They aren’t the only D3 rugby team with trans players—the Banner article notes that they faced another trans-inclusive team, too—but the new rules stipulate complaints about trans athletes can only come from an opposing team. As The Banner reports: “The Capital Union teams decided not to tell on one another, rendering the ban functionally meaningless in regionwide games.”

However, the Ferals are taking it one step even further. They refuse to keep quiet and hope nobody notices; instead, they are outwardly taking up space, making noise, and calling out discriminatory policies from USA Rugby and the Trump regime.

“Trans women are women and belong in women’s sports,” a post by the Flamingos read, issued shortly after Trump’s anti-trans Executive Order 14201 earlier this year.

“We are proud that so many of our opponents have shown us that they share these values and we hope that clubs around the nation continue to recruit and uplift trans players, especially in the face of transphobic policies.”

And of the Trump regime?

“They Can’t Stop Us.”

So while anti-trans groups offer cash rewards and viral fame to athletes who refuse to compete against trans opponents, it is clear that rugby teams across the country are going the other way—welcoming trans women, trans men, and nonbinary players wherever they feel most comfortable. If USA Rugby won’t fight for trans players, these teams say, they simply won’t comply. And they’re not being quiet about it—they are openly defying the demands.

“We’re not asking for permission to be here,” Val Pizzo, a trans man and former Flamingos president, told The Banner. “We’re playing.”

Now, teams from across the globe are preparing for August’s Bingham Cup and Amanda Mark Cup, the world’s foremost rugby tournament for LGBTQ rugby leagues and players, which will take place in Australia this year.

Pizzo helped organize the first all-trans competition within the tournament series. “We’re not going to forfeit matches,” Pizzo said. “We’re gonna show up as we are. We’re gonna shoulder that burden for our players.”

There were some fears by rugby players and officials alike that there would be backlash from within the league itself—that even if other Flamingos or Ferals accepted trans teammates, their opponents might take umbrage with trans athletes on the field. But the exact opposite happened. There was an outpouring of support from women’s rugby teams across the board, with players donning trans flags at games in protest.

Rugby in the U.S. is uniquely queer and trans friendly. “While most trans-exclusionary policies in sports face opposition, advocates say that no sport has seen the immediate, collective cry of resistance that US women’s rugby has in the aftermath of its ban,” The Guardian reports. Even when World Rugby first began adopting anti-trans policies in 2020—the first international sports federation to do so—USA Rugby resisted.

But World Rugby wouldn’t budge, and not long after Trump’s return to office, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee followed suit. USA Rugby finally implemented its own ban on trans women in the women’s category in March. Otherwise, the organization faced the threat of decertification, which would seemingly render it powerless as a sports governing body, and further allow the government to “replace USA Rugby with a governing body of its own design,” The Banner reports.

But that hasn’t stopped rugby players across the country from continuing to compete—and continuing to fight. Your Scrumhalf Connection, a women’s rugby news blog, called for a nationwide campaign for all women’s teams to rebrand as “open” or mixed-gender teams, rendering a restrictive women’s category functionally useless—there can’t be a competition in a category with no teams. The resulting campaign, Rugby for All, is continuing to work behind the scenes, The Guardian reported. The group is “building a collective bargaining movement across the sport.”

“As International Rugby Athletes, we love the game and have dedicated years of our lives to it, including doing the work that leaves rugby better than we found it,” the Rugby For All campaign mission statement reads. “We are deeply committed to equity and access for all girls and women, including trans girls and women. This is why we firmly oppose World Rugby’s reversal of inclusive policies that have allowed transgender women to train and compete in women’s rugby for decades.”

Countless other rugby teams are also speaking out against the ban, including the Golden Badgers of Golden, Colorado—a Division 1 team, meaning it competes at the most elite level. The Badgers posted in May that trans players “will always be welcome and protected on our team.”

Earlier this week, Ohio's Democratic nominee for governor, Amy Acton, made headlines as one of her party's most prominent political candidates to stake out an anti-trans stance, calling transgender girls "boys" and declaring that she would enforce Ohio's sports ban, which she cast as a matter of "fairness" and "kids' health and safety." The rebuke from her own party was severe. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, an official advisory group of the state party, issued a blistering page-long statement declaring that its members were now less willing to doorknock for her—before the post puzzlingly vanished shortly thereafter, prompting days of questions about why criticism of Acton's anti-trans stance had been scrubbed. Now, after prodding by Erin In The Morning, the caucus has revealed the answer: the Ohio Democratic Party itself demanded the criticism be removed, effectively barring those within the party from publicly critiquing a major candidate's transphobia.

The intra-party firestorm began shortly after the Supreme Court's ruling in West Virginia v. B.P.J., in which the Court held that Title IX does not protect transgender athletes and that the law's protections extend only to "biological sex"—breaking with years of lower court precedent. Asked for her reaction by the Toledo Blade, Acton stunned voters in her own party by calling transgender girls boys and vowing to enforce Ohio's ban, endorsing its premise outright: "I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law," Acton said. "As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids' health and safety."

Criticism was swift and severe—and perhaps the most prominent rebuke came from inside her own party infrastructure. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus released a page-long statement declaring that its members would be less likely to knock doors for a candidate who had thrown trans kids under the bus in a state with some of the most severe anti-trans laws in the country. "ZERO Ohioans have become better able to buy groceries by keeping child sport players away from their favorite sport," the caucus wrote. "Our hearts break for those kids. Those who disagree with that will never vote—let alone doorknock—for Amy Acton." Its members were less willing to volunteer, the caucus said, "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests." And it noted standing issues with the candidate not inviting LGBTQ+ voices into her campaign room: "Any one of us could have warned her of that natural consequence if any one of us had been in the room with her."

That post was quickly taken down, with no explanation. After several sources reached out to Erin In The Morning with inside information, we sent the caucus a request for comment. We never received an email back—but shortly after, the caucus posted publicly on Facebook, revealing exactly what had happened: the Ohio Democratic Party had demanded the criticism be removed. The caucus protested, appealed, but then relented. The criticism never went back up. Whatever the rule's official purpose, its effect in practice was unmistakable: the “progressive” arm of the Ohio Democratic Party is not permitted to publicly call out its own nominee's transphobia.

“A lot of people have been asking why we removed our statement addressing Amy Acton’s comments regarding transgender athletes. As a new caucus, we are still learning the ropes when it comes to being an internal part of the ODP. While operating outside of the party, we were afforded a bit more freedom with respect to our communications with the public. By posting a statement without going through the official approval process we inadvertently broke the rules we agreed to when we were recognized as an internal caucus,” stated the Progressive Caucus.

“We don’t necessarily agree with this policy and we are still negotiating how we can best comply with the party’s regulations while continuing to advocate for our members. However, despite our protests, ODP insisted that the post be removed and we follow procedure…. After deleting the original statement, we promptly asked about submitting the post for approval through the proper channels so that it could be reposted. At this point, ODP staff informed us that a meeting with Acton was on the table. After thorough discussion, caucus leadership determined this offer aligned with our goal to bring our message directly to her.”

You can see the full post here:

The news threatens to rock the party further, because the scandal is no longer just about the candidate. Acton called transgender girls "boys" and endorsed a sports ban; the party responded by disciplining the people who objected. The Ohio Democratic Party has now applied more pressure on its progressive caucus to quiet its criticism of anti-trans politics than it has applied on its own nominee to stop embracing them. One arm of the party endorsed discrimination and faced no visible consequence. Another arm objected and was forced into silence.

This is a moment worth marking for those who follow anti-transgender politics. Most state Democratic parties, even in deep-red states, have avoided endorsing trans sports bans. When Congress voted on a national ban early last year, just two Democrats supported it—members in swing districts held the line, and when the ban reached the Senate, not a single Democrat broke ranks. But there have been cracks. Gavin Newsom opened his podcast by telling Charlie Kirk that trans athletes in girls' sports are "deeply unfair." And in May, eight House Democrats crossed the aisle to pass a national forced outing bill—the largest Democratic defection on any standalone anti-trans bill of the modern panic.

The consequences of this shift could be severe. Some warn that a Ramaswamy victory would be worse for transgender Ohioans. But others see a deeper danger: an Acton victory built on anti-trans capitulation would teach Democrats everywhere a horrific lesson. It would spread the idea, through a party that has so far remained a relatively stalwart opposition, that embracing transphobia is what winning requires. That result could be more disastrous for transgender people than any individual right-wing victory. As long as trans people have an opposition party standing in unity against anti-trans policies, every ban, every restriction, every law remains reversible. But if enough Democrats come to see transphobia as acceptable—necessary, even—then trans rights could be eroded for a generation, with no mechanism left to reverse the losses, similar to what is currently happening with Labour in the UK. That is why, to those who understand the stakes, comments like Acton's likely read as a cancer on the party. And a candidate willing to throw transgender people under the bus to win has seemingly told every other minority exactly what their protection is worth when the polling gets tight.

In Ohio, this debate is no longer theoretical, but now is part of the political landscape, with a nominee who calls trans girls "boys," and a party apparatus that decided the real problem was the people who objected. The ODP got what it demanded. The post is gone. But the party has confused deleting dissent with resolving it. The caucus members who wrote "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests" will not see that feeling go away just because a post was deleted.

Update: The Vice Chair of the Ohio Democratic Party Pride Caucus has also posted a statement, where at the very end, she clearly calls out the Ohio Democratic Party and says "I'm posting this strictly in my capacity as a trans advocate" and telling ODP to "save yourself a phone call, because I will not be taking this down"

In light of recent anti-trans athlete rulings from the Supreme Court, a senior member of the Heritage Foundation is imagining a future that looks a lot like the past: one where a key provision of Title IX, a foundational law preserving gender equality, is gutted; one where women in sports and in academia are sidelined in deference to men; one where trans people don’t exist at all.

Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity is authored by Boise State University professor Dr. Scott Yenor. Relying on sexist stereotypes, it calls for the government to let some schools dismantle competitive women’s athletics, which is already comparatively underresourced, and let women funnel into more “feminine” physical activities, like yoga, hiking clubs, and team cheerleading (not to be confused with Stunt, the competitive cheerleading-adjacent sport that gained full NCAA championship status just this year). Such activities don’t come with the scholarships and opportunities that elite sports do.

Experts have been sounding the alarm about this threat since the inception of Project 2025, the far-right’s political playbook spearheaded by the dark money of the Heritage Foundation. The same regressive notions about sex, gender, and biological essentialism weaponized against trans women athletes are being deployed against cisgender women, too.

Yenor is a senior research fellow at Heritage. In his spare time, he is a member of a secretive Christian nationalist group that’s paid homage to the Afrikaner nationalist movement—white supremacists of apartheid-era South Africa, The Guardian reports.

At the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, Yenor said in no uncertain terms that women ought to be relegated to the home and be subordinate to men. “Yenor detailed what he sees as the ‘evils’ of feminism, labeled ‘independent women’ as ‘medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome’ and decried colleges and universities as ‘the citadels of our gynecocracy,’” The Associated Press reports.

As per the AP, he continued, “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers [...] not finding every reason for young women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or sufficiently independent.”

Efforts to recruit more women into fields like engineering, medicine and law should be replaced with efforts to recruit more men, Yenor said. “If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure. It’s kind of a cause for celebration.”

With these comments in mind, Yenor’s report—already dripping with contempt for women’s rights—takes on an even more ominous tone. He describes Title IX as “a powerful engine of feminist social engineering,” arguing that (cisgender) women’s ambition, competitive drive, career aspirations, and independence are an affront to “the destiny written in her sex or biology.” What women really need, in his telling, is preparation for homemaking and child-rearing.

“The current Title IX regime as applied to sports (and elsewhere) is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman—one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood,” Yenor writes, denouncing the “nature-denying extremism” and “coercion of America’s Title IX enforcement regime.” He laments the potential of competitive sports to cause “menstrual disruption” in student athletes and praises more “moderate” activities because it “assists fertility” of cisgender girls.

“This is only the most recent evidence that legal theories that rely on anti-trans talking points are carefully crafted to undermine civil rights protections generally,” Zane McNeill, a legal fellow at Lawyers for Good Government, told Erin in the Morning. “Although some of its arguments may seem far-fetched, the theories espoused by the Heritage Foundation have a tendency to show up in federal policy. For instance, the Heritage Foundation was one of the main organizations behind the conservative policy blueprint, Project 2025, which has now been more than 50 percent implemented by the Trump administration.”

The crux of Yenor’s report focused on one aspect of Title IX in particular: “proportionality mandates,” as he puts it. It’s a prong of a Title IX test of legal compliance that stipulates opportunities for women athletes should be proportionate to the number of women on campus. For example, if 60% of students on campus are women, then roughly 60% of that school’s potential roster for competitive athletics should be women, too. In other words, it’s not a required quota; it’s a push for equal opportunity and equal funding. And it’s not even universally binding, as the proportionality test is just one metric that can be used to evaluate a school’s Title IX compliance. It is, however, the most common.

Yenor’s proposal would undo decades of progress and take a more hands-off approach to women’s rights in sports. It would pave the way for sex stereotypes to manifest to preserve his proclaimed “humane social order.” If it materializes, Yenor’s plan could let schools replace elite women’s sports and competitions—including the prestige, potential income, and scholarships that come with them—with yoga classes and exercise clubs. In Yenor’s mind, women simply don’t possess the same desire for competition and contact sports as their male peers.

Further, the Yenor plan would carve out exceptions to Title IX data collection when it comes to “major revenue producing male sports”—most notably football, which journalist Katelyn Burns notes takes up a hugely disproportionate amount of competitive spots for men’s college teams.

The fact that there are fewer opportunities for elite women athletes is simply something to let be, Yenor argues; it is largely natural.

But experts, including those who wrote and passed this law decades ago, know that’s just not true. “The drafters recognized that the low participation of women in sports at the time of Title IX enactment was not because there was no interest. It was because they weren’t given opportunity,” said Shiwali Patel, the Senior Director of Education Justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

“Once you give them that opportunity, the interest develops, because then they can see what it’s like to play sports, develop those skills, and be in those spaces,” Patel told Erin in the Morning. “It’s mutually reinforcing in that way—the more you create that opportunity, the more interest you’ll see.”

Meanwhile, in Yenor’s eyes, while women’s supposed athletic inferiority is biological “destiny” not to be tampered with, gender disparities that disfavor boys necessitate outside intervention: Men are falling behind women when it comes to college enrollment and academic achievement, and Yenor blames, in part, gender equality laws. He argues that women’s athletic success is taking away resources that could be given to men’s teams, thereby stifling men’s access to college education.

“Reducing real male athletic opportunities at the very moment young men are falling behind in higher education has created many harms downstream,” he writes. “Restoring a healthier balance involves protecting and even expanding men’s sports while allowing natural variation in program offerings. Such a balanced approach could help to draw more young men to college. Addressing the growing boy crisis in education is not incidental to the health of our institutions or our families; it is central to the recovery of a flourishing citizenry.”

Dr. Anima Adjepong, the Department Head of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, put it simply: “It’s incredibly sexist,” they said.

Even some Democrats have adopted this harmful rhetoric. Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate for the 2026 elections, Amy Acton, became the latest on the left to turn on trans children, referring to transgender girls as “boys playing in girls’ sports” and saying she disagreed with it on the grounds of “kids’ health and safety.” She joins the ranks of Congressman Seth Moulton from Massachusetts, Congressman Tom Suozzi of New York, and California Governor Gavin Newsom on that front.

“The attack on trans women in sports was only a step and a broader attack on women,” Adjepong told Erin in the Morning. “It’s important to always remember that when we’re pushing back.”

You can read the full report from Yenor here.

A growing uproar is consuming the Ohio Democratic Party after Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, locked in a dead heat with Vivek Ramaswamy, took her turn at anti-transgender politics. In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that Title IX does not protect transgender people—a sweeping victory for the conservatives who have spent years engineering it—Acton was asked for her thoughts by a local newspaper, the Toledo Blade. She could have offered boilerplate responses or defended transgender kids. Instead, Acton embraced the ban, casting it as a matter of safety and vowing to enforce Ohio's "settled law." The fallout was swift: Democratic equality groups posted, then quietly deleted, criticisms of their own nominee, an intra-party rupture that now threatens the race itself—a pointless own-goal by a Democrat who apparently bought the idea that attacking her own most vulnerable constituents is how you win an election.

“I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law,” Dr. Acton said in a response to the Toledo Blade after the Supreme Court decision. “As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids’ health and safety… While my opponent tries to divide us, I’m laser-focused on issues that matter most to Ohioans: lowering costs, cracking down on corruption, and cutting taxes for working families.”

Acton's response was quickly seen for its anti-trans sentiment. Ohio is home to some of the most extreme anti-trans laws in the United States, pushed by the same organizations whose attorneys defended trans sports bans at the Supreme Court. In 2024, the Republican supermajority overrode Governor Mike DeWine's veto to enact House Bill 68, which simultaneously banned gender-affirming care for trans youth and barred trans kids from school sports from kindergarten through college. Months later, legislators slipped a bathroom ban into an unrelated college-credit bill. The resulting law forces trans students out of bathrooms matching their gender identity at every school in the state—including private colleges like Antioch, where more than 80 percent of students identify as LGBTQ+. Trans Ohioans now risk their education, their healthcare, and their safety simply by existing in public.

The statement drew swift condemnation from Democrats across the state. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, an official advisory arm of the state party, issued a blistering rebuke: "ZERO Ohioans have become better able to buy groceries by keeping child sport players away from their favorite sport. Our hearts break for those kids. Those who disagree with that will never vote—let alone doorknock—for Amy Acton." The caucus warned that its members were less willing to volunteer for her campaign "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests.” The party's Pride Caucus answered Acton's framing directly: "There are no boys in girls' sports. Trans girls are girls." Maria Bruno, executive director of Ohioans Against Extremism, called it "frustrating to see an otherwise strong candidate take the bait by trying to triangulate a response rather than just being frank: can we please just leave trans kids alone and get back to talking about how we can make life more affordable for Ohioans?" And in The Buckeye Flame, writer NV Gay put it plainly: "On the last day of Pride month, the transgender community of Ohio was betrayed—all for the sake of winning an election." But the condemnation itself became a controversy. The Progressive Caucus’s post vanished from the group's Facebook page. The caucus has not responded to questions about why—leaving Ohio Democrats to wonder who, exactly, wanted the warning unsaid.

The candidate's statement is all the more puzzling given recent elections. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger had every opportunity to throw transgender people under the bus with similar statements and never took the bait—even as Republicans poured millions into anti-trans attack ads, with more than half of all GOP ad spending in the race devoted to the issue. Spanberger won by more than 15 points and Democrats flipped 13 House of Delegates seats, transforming a razor-thin 51–49 majority into a commanding 64–36 majority. New Jersey told the same story: Mikie Sherrill faced a similar anti-trans barrage and won by nearly 14 points, outrunning Governor Phil Murphy's 2021 margin in all 21 counties. And in 2023, Andy Beshear vetoed both a trans sports ban and a sweeping ban on gender-affirming care in Kentucky—a state Trump carried by 26 points—then won reelection by 5. The evidence is not ambiguous. Democrats who refuse to abandon trans people have a good track record. Acton chose the one strategy with no record of success.

The law Acton has promised to enforce reaches far beyond the marquee sports conservatives fixate on. While bans like Ohio's are sold through images of swimming and volleyball, House Bill 68 prohibits athletic associations from making case-by-case judgments about competitive fairness and instead imposes a blanket ban on transgender participation from kindergarten through college—replacing the Ohio High School Athletic Association's individualized policy, which functioned without incident for eight years and saw a grand total of 19 transgender girls compete among roughly 400,000 student athletes. This sweeping approach means transgender Ohioans can be excluded from activities such as darts, billiards, dancing, disc golf, fishing, and other sports where claims of unfair advantage are tenuous at best. Even chess—recognized as a sport by multiple universities—could fall under the ban's scope, echoing a recent move by FIDE, the international chess organization, to bar transgender women from women's chess competitions. Notably, each of these sports has seen targeted attacks from Republicans in recent years. This is what "settled law" looks like in practice: a teenager barred from throwing darts with their classmates or from playing chess with other girls.

What Acton's statement will cost her is not yet measurable. What is measurable is the race: the polling average separates her from Ramaswamy by less than a single point. In an election that close, transgender people are not a rounding error. They are one to two percent of the population—more when nonbinary people are counted—and every one of them has partners, parents, siblings, and friends: a web of people who love them and vote like it. If Acton loses this one by a point, it will not be because she stood up for transgender kids. More likely, it will be because she didn't.

Billionaire TERF influencer J.K. Rowling has announced that she will cover the legal costs of anti-trans groups named in a report by Amnesty International (UK), which called them “anti-rights.”

The report was retracted shortly after publication and replaced with a statement from the organization saying the report was uploaded “without going through the established internal review processes” and that its “language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK, which is why it was promptly removed.”

But the withdrawal and public acknowledgement was not enough to sate the organizations that have fought tooth and nail to exclude and/or antagonize the transgender community in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is notoriously more perilous for free speech than the United States. For our neighbors across the pond, the burden of proof lies with the defendant to prove the statement is true; here in the United States, the burden of proof lies with the aggrieved to prove that a statement is categorically false, and published knowingly or at least recklessly regardless. The US also benefits from “anti-SLAPP” laws to prevent such frivolous lawsuits waged by wealthy individuals or powerful corporations against those who criticize them.

So Rowling capitalized on the spectacle to, in essence, help dozens of groups in what appears to be an attempt to sue Amnesty into oblivion.

The saga began earlier this month, when Amnesty International (UK) released a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It released a similar report last year, but this year, it added a new category for what appears to be the anti-rights movement’s most rapidly growing sector: “Gender critical” groups, or groups that are antithetical to transgender rights and inclusion.

Rowling rushed to tweet about the situation.

She lauded “LGB” groups—another anti-trans buzzword, which, as the name suggests, describes groups that wish to erase transgender people from the queer liberation movement—like the Gay Men’s Network, an organization that has pushed for anti-trans policies. That group posted a public letter indicating it might sue Amnesty International for defamation. The Network demanded a retraction of the report and then claimed that Amnesty is guilty of “trying to control gay and lesbian free speech.”

In the day or so that followed, Rowling retweeted around a dozen similar letters. The posted letters include groups like Genspect, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that threatened Amnesty International with legal action, as well as groups like LGB Alliance and Sex Matters.

Amnesty International (UK) did not formally reply to a request for comment for this piece.

Gender critical activists, often financed by Rowling, rely on legal “guerilla warfare” said one U.K.-based trans rights organizer, who could only speak to Erin in the Morning if granted anonymity. The tactic is familiar: Wear down non-profits and individuals who dare speak out against anti-trans and anti-rights groups. They don’t have to win a lawsuit; they can just file again, and again, and again, draining valuable time and resources.

“They have sued organizations into the ground,” the advocate said.

Some context for just a handful of these groups so up in arms about being labeled as hateful: Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy for Sex Matters, gave a speech at a Genspect conference (both are groups on the anti-rights list) about how “beauty” is “inimical to trans bullshit.

She also boasted about manufacturing a moral and medical panic about how, although only a “small” segment of trans kids are prescribed puberty blockers, it has been a strategic “rhetorical device” to erode the rights of transgender people more broadly.

Depending on who you ask, TERFs are considered either a self-branded liberal faction of gender critical ideology, or a different term for what is essentially the same movement. TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” a term to describe self-proclaimed “feminists” who oppose giving transgender women and cisgender women equal rights.

Many of these TERF or “gender critical” groups have close ties to far-right Christian groups. DonorsTrust, the conservative donor behemoth and primary financier of initiatives like Project 2025, also forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and Thoughtful Therapists, both of whom made the “anti-rights” list because, as Amnesty International (UK) among many others have put it, they promote “conversion practices.”

One major point of contention was the inclusion of Rowling’s own organization, Beira’s Place. It does not primarily seem to function as any sort of advocacy organization. Rather, it’s a women’s shelter for those fleeing domestic violence, but it also has an explicit anti-trans policy, banning transgender women from accessing its services.

However, as the report explained, none of these groups exist in a vacuum. “These entities must be understood as an ecosystem sharing values, goals, strategy and tactics and, for some of them, formal collaboration,” it reads.

Amnesty isn’t the first or last institution or expert to call out gender critical ideology for being anti-rights. UN Women has published materials saying as much.

Meanwhile, University of Sheffield sociologist Dr. Sally Hines has called this framework “deeply conservative.” In the Journal for Gender Studies, she writes that “despite its origins within a branch of radical feminism, [gender-critical ideology] has a profoundly misogynist agenda that stands opposed to the rights of women.” It is a “key force within a current conservative pushback against the rights of women and minoritized sexual groups.”

Gender critical activists continue to use the language of oppression to characterize their plight. Many say “TERF” is a slur. Others believe criticizing a group because of its arguably regressive politics is grounds for a lawsuit.

Despite the fact that the report was pulled down, Erin in the Morning was able to retrieve a copy reposted by an anti-trans news outlet. You can read a full version of that archived version below.

Report A Growing Threat The Anti Rights Movement In The Uk July 2026

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