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:

Houston police arrest protestors during overnight crosswalk removal, by Gwen Howerton

If you’ve been following our reporting at Erin In The Morning, you already know about the wave of resistance that’s swept Florida as the state attempts to erase rainbow crosswalks—symbols of pride that have long marked queer neighborhoods as safe havens. Now, Texas is following suit. At the apparent urging of Libs of TikTok, a far-right provocateur account, Governor Greg Abbott has moved to strip cities of their rainbow crossings. But things aren’t going as planned. In Houston, when state road crews arrived to tear up a prominent crosswalk, residents met them with hours of defiance—forming a human barrier and refusing to let the state erase their colors without a fight. You’ll have to read to see how the showdown ended, but one thing is clear: the movement to defend queer visibility is spreading, and it’s not backing down.

3,000 march in Taipei to support transgender community, by Wu Kuan-hsien

It’s worth remembering that the fight for transgender rights doesn’t stop at America’s borders—it’s global. The same battles over dignity, autonomy, and recognition being waged in the United States are unfolding around the world. In Taipei, Taiwan, for example, transgender people are still barred from changing their legal gender unless they undergo surgery—a requirement that is often financially out of reach, medically unsafe for some, or simply unwanted. Nearly every blue state in the U.S. has already struck down such rules, and ending surgical mandates has become a core demand of the global trans rights movement. The issue is now being tested in other nations too—most notably Japan, where a recent court ruling allowed some transgender people to change their legal gender without surgery. The struggle for equality is shared across continents; read this article and see how trans people everywhere are part of the same fight for self-determination and freedom.

Why many transgender Americans are preparing to flee the country, by Avishay Artsy and Noel King

Donald Trump’s second term has been devastating for transgender Americans—a relentless barrage of policies and rhetoric designed to erase us from public life. We’ve covered every blow here at Erin In The Morning. Increasingly, transgender people are packing up and leaving the United States altogether. In a recent Vox feature, journalists spoke with Kate Sosin of The 19th, an outlet that has heavily covered LGBTQ+ issues, to explore why so many are seeking refuge abroad. You can also listen to the attached podcast that the same piece is based off of.