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

Our 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:

In culture war backlash, Democrats sweep school boards, by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez

There’s been no shortage of 2025 election retrospectives, and we at EITM have covered the landscape in depth. But a new Politico piece does something unusually useful: it zooms in on local school board races across the country and uncovers a striking trend. Many Moms for Liberty–style candidates were swept out in 2025 and replaced by Democrats riding a growing backlash to the anti-transgender panic that has overtaken school boards in recent years. As Politico reports, voters “emphasized test scores and bus safety over debates about which bathrooms transgender students use and banning books from school libraries.” It’s a worthwhile read—go check it out.

Under Trump, U.S. human rights reports will flag abortion, gender care, by Adam Taylor and Hannah Natanson

In a newly revealed set of instructions, all U.S. embassies will now be required to report whether their host countries “participate in the chemical or surgical mutilation of children” through gender-affirming care. The directive explicitly reframes gender-affirming care as child abuse and could become a powerful lever to pressure other nations into adopting hard-line positions against transgender youth, mirroring efforts already underway in parts of the United States. Embassies are also being instructed to catalog diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives abroad, framing the mere existence of DEI programs as evidence of racism or sexism. It’s a reminder that anti-trans panic is almost never contained within one country’s borders—it is being exported and amplified globally.

Catholic Teachers Allowed Slurs and Food Hurled at Gay Student, New Lawsuit Alleges, by Samantha Reidel

Catholic schools have long had tensions with LGBTQ+ students, but a new report at them details a situation so severe it has now prompted a federal lawsuit. A student at Ursuline High School, a Catholic school in Ohio, alleges that a gay classmate was openly bullied for at least a year. According to the complaint, the student was called slurs in front of teachers, had food thrown at them, and endured months of harassment—all despite repeated calls to administrators. It’s a stark reminder that anti-LGBTQ+ hate remains deeply entrenched in many American schools.