The Lavender Ledger: Your Strategic LGBTQ+ Reader By Erin In The Morning

Our new service for the week to cover the news we did not carry but do not want you to miss.

Inside EITM’s newsroom, we track dozens of breaking stories weekly—tips flood in from readers embedded in state houses, school boards, and organizations across the country. Our sources are everywhere. But here’s our strategic dilemma: while we’re chasing down original leads and working our exclusive angles, critical intelligence is moving through other channels that deserves your attention.

Consider this your weekend drop.

These are the stories that crossed our desk, passed our vetting, and matter to LGBTQ+ people—reported by trusted outlets while we were deep in our own investigations. Think of it as our intelligence-sharing agreement with you: the essential coverage from across the LGBTQ+ media landscape that we’ve been monitoring, verified, and deemed operationally significant.

This week’s important releases:

Trans Health Care “Skeptics” Lost a Key Ally—Now They’re Having a Meltdown by Henry Carnell

For those tracking the global assault on trans healthcare, you know SEGM—the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine—as the pseudoscience outfit that, despite its SPLC hate group designation, has successfully influenced policy from Florida to Finland by producing systematic reviews designed to manufacture doubt about gender-affirming care. Their latest crisis: Gordon Guyatt, whom the anti-trans movement literally dubbed “the father of evidence-based medicine” while citing his work, has now apologized for his involvement, formally denounced SEGM, and declared that his team’s research does not support gender-affirming care bans—a devastating blow to an organization that relied on his academic credentials to legitimize their campaign. Carnell meticulously documents the resulting meltdown, tracking how quickly SEGM’s allies pivoted from celebrating Guyatt as their scientific validator to scrambling for damage control, offering a real-time case study in what happens when the academic veneer gets ripped off a political operation masquerading as medical concern.

Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement by Yessenia Funes

Regular EITM readers know we track the money flowing into anti-trans campaigns—the hedge fund billionaires, megachurch networks, and Musk’s various ventures—but Yessenia Funes just exposed a critical piece of the funding puzzle we’ve been missing: fossil fuel billionaires are weaponizing trans panic as political cover, pouring petroleum profits into culture war operations while they torch environmental regulations and accelerate planetary destruction. It’s a calculated strategy where the same extractive industries destroying our climate are manufacturing moral panics about trans kids to keep voters distracted from pipeline approvals, drilling permits, and carbon emissions—using our community as a political heat shield while they literally set the world on fire. Funes lays out the receipts and the strategic coordination between oil money and anti-trans legislation in a way that reframes the entire battlefield.

Trump administration strips NYC of millions in funding because of trans student policies by Giulia Heyward and Jessica Gould

The Trump administration just pulled millions in federal funding from New York City schools after the district refused to implement transgender bathroom bans, adding NYC to a growing resistance list alongside Chicago, Denver, and five Northern Virginia districts that have all chosen to protect their trans students over federal dollars. This is the extortion playbook in action: comply with discriminatory mandates or watch your federal funding evaporate overnight. With more demands expected to hit school districts nationwide in the coming weeks, even boards in deep-blue areas need to start preparing for this exact scenario: will they protect their most vulnerable students or buckle under federal financial pressure? If your district hasn’t had this conversation yet, now’s the time to ensure your school board understands what’s coming and where they’ll stand when the ultimatum arrives.

Administrative Note: We’re Finally on Facebook

We’ll be honest—Facebook isn’t our natural habitat, but we recognize the strategic reality: many of you are fighting information wars at family dinners and in hometown group chats where Facebook links are important. So we’ve established a beachhead on Zuckerberg’s platform, giving you ammunition to breach those information bubbles where your relatives get their news. The page is live now—deploy accordingly.

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to keep our important journalism going, we are only able to do the work we do because of readers like you.