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 dilemma: while we’re chasing down original leads and working our exclusive angles, critical news 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 significant.

This week’s important releases:

She’d Never Changed Her Gender Marker. Kansas Invalidated Her License Anyway. By Natalie Zuke - Assigned Media

Many people have heard about the sweeping attacks on transgender people in Kansas, where the state legislature moved to invalidate transgender people’s driver’s licenses and created a statewide bounty system empowering citizens to target transgender people in bathrooms they believe they do not belong in. The state sent letters to thousands of transgender residents invalidating their licenses overnight. What has received far less attention is that the letters did not only go to people who had previously changed their gender marker. Even some people who had simply changed their names saw their licenses invalidated. That became clear when one person received the letter despite never having changed her gender marker. Good reporting on this from Assigned Media.

Indiana’s Anti-Trans Attorney General is Preparing to Revoke Trans People’s Documents, By Aleksandra Vaca - Transitics

Speaking of driver’s license invalidations, carrying out such a policy requires something more than legislation—it requires a system capable of identifying transgender people in state records and tracking gender marker changes. Aleksandra Vaca called Departments of Motor Vehicles across the country and found that most states simply do not maintain databases capable of doing this. One state, however, does: Indiana. In new reporting, Vaca explains why that system could make Indiana the next state where mass driver’s license revocations like those in Kansas become possible.

Trans Porn Is Booming. Trans Rights Are Fading, By Playboy

In recent years, a trend has become increasingly clear in the data: while anti-trans politicians work aggressively to strip transgender people of their rights, consumption of transgender pornography is rising at the same time. Some research even suggests that this consumption is highest in the very states passing the harshest anti-trans laws. Activists argue this contradiction reveals something deeper—that many of those seeking to harm transgender people also view us primarily as objects of sexual fascination rather than as human beings deserving dignity and a place in civil society. Playboy has excellent reporting on this phenomenon in its latest piece.