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:

ICE Warden Put Transgender Detainees into Forced Labor Program: Complaint, by Dan Gooding

Sometimes the political crises of our era collide, and few intersections are more stark than immigrant rights and transgender rights. A new complaint alleges that ICE agents have subjected transgender detainees to sexual assault, physical abuse, and forced labor. With the agency’s powers expanding and its funding increasing, conditions for transgender detainees—and for immigrants in custody more broadly—are likely worsening. The result is a sobering picture of what it means to be both transgender and an immigrant under an abusive government apparatus that denies basic humanity.

Kash Patel fires FBI agent trainee for displaying gay pride flag, by Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian

Attempts to target transgender people rarely stop there—they often sweep in the broader LGBTQ+ community. Now comes news that the FBI is firing agents simply for having displayed a Pride flag at some point in their past. The move looks like a deliberate purge, echoing the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, when the government carried out mass firings of employees suspected of being gay. One agent has already been dismissed, and support systems for LGBTQ+ staff across the bureau have been dismantled, signaling a chilling return to state-sanctioned purges.

Trump asks 9 colleges to commit to his political agenda for better access to federal money, by Aamer Madhani

In recent months, several universities—even in blue states with legal protections for transgender people—have capitulated to Trump administration demands to bar trans students from bathrooms, sports, and more. Now new reporting shows the effort is expanding. The administration is targeting Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, USC, MIT, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown, and the University of Virginia. The offer: large sums of federal money in exchange for compliance. Some of these schools are reportedly weighing the bribes, raising alarms about how quickly higher education institutions may fold. This is a critical development for anyone engaged in the fight over the future of transgender rights on campus.

Update on the shutdown fight

This week, LGBTQ+ people and allies flooded their elected officials with calls urging them not to sacrifice transgender rights in negotiations over the appropriations bills. While the immediate fight centers on a clean continuing resolution—one without anti-trans provisions—that measure is only a temporary patch meant to negotiate those bills, and is not a certainty in terms of passage. Now the government is shut down, with parties failing to agree on passage of a “clean” CR.

The real battle lies ahead, as House appropriations bills remain loaded with anti-trans riders. At the same time, Punchbowl News reports that the military NDAA—technically separate from appropriations bills but tied to them in negotiations—is nearing a deal. Democrats must be pressed to hold the line: they cannot pass appropriations bills or the NDAA if they contain anti-trans riders, and they must use their filibuster power to block them. Please take the time to call your senators, even Republican ones, and make clear that this is a red line for you.