The Lavender Ledger: Your Strategic LGBTQ+ Weekend 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:

HHS changed the name of transgender health leader on her official portrait, by Selena Simmons-Duffin

One defining feature of this administration’s anti-transgender actions has been the sheer meanness of it. This has lead to multiple judges ruling that laws against transgender people by this administration have been improperly motivated by animus, which of course, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ignored. One glaring example of this meanness and animus is what the HHS Department did this week. For Admiral Rachel Levine, they changed the name on her portrait to her deadname. When saked why, the HHS Spokesperson Andrew Nixon said it was “biological reality.” I don’t know about you, but I know I can’t find my birth name in my DNA. Go give this a read, and if it makes you angry, know you are not alone.

A coordinated campaign to drive trans people out of public life, by Parker Molloy

There have been countless stories about the Oklahoma student who cited the Bible in an essay to call transgender people “demonic.” But one of the sharpest takes comes from Parker Molloy, the transgender tech and internet journalist behind The Present Age (and if you’re not already reading her Substack, you should be). In her piece, Molloy doesn’t linger on the essay itself so much as on the outrage-industrial complex that surrounds it. She lays out, step by step, how the far right plucks a person from obscurity, manufactures a viral scandal, spins them into a profitable avatar of grievance, and then funnels them into book deals, Fox News hits, speaking tours—the whole churn. It’s a smart read if you want to understand exactly how the machine works. Note that this post is paywalled, so if you want to avoid paying a fee to read just this article, it’s worth at least reading these excerpts from it.

Trump administration plans to end prison rape protections for trans and intersex people, memo says, by Adam Rhodes

This may be one of the most vile anti-trans decisions of the Trump administration yet. New reporting this week shows that the administration is moving to dismantle existing protections meant to shield transgender people in jails and prisons from rape and sexual violence. The changes reach every corner of carceral policy: how sexual-violence risk is assessed, where trans prisoners are housed, what happens during incidents, even who is subjected to body-cavity searches. Transgender people are already victimized at staggering rates behind bars—roughly twelve times higher than other incarcerated people. They are among the most vulnerable in the system, and these rollbacks put them in direct danger. Go read the full reporting to understand the scope of these changes.