UK Doctors reject ban on youth gender care
Massachusetts finally updates parenting laws for same-sex couples
🇬🇧 UK: The British Medical Association has rejected the Cass Review, which urged a rethink of gender care for youth, and the BMA has called for the ban on puberty blockers to be lifted.
🇵🇱 Poland: The governing coalition is working on bringing forward a bill or regulations to ban conversion therapy. While this wasn’t part of their original program, I’m guessing this is leadership trying to prove that they’re doing anything on LGBT rights, after the failure to pass key bills on civil unions, hate crimes, and abortion rights in the first part of the year.
🇱🇹 Lithuania: A columnist warns that if the Social Democrats win October elections as polls predict, they are unlikely to legalize civil unions, given that they’re claiming support from a president who’s threatened to veto them, and are wooing far-right parties to be part of an eventual coalition.
🇳🇵 Nepal: The Supreme Court has for the first time ordered that the government recognize a transgender woman as a woman, without her having to submit to medical verification. The ruling applies only to this specific case, but may set a precedent for future cases.
🇱🇷 Liberia: Another West African country is considering a bill to make its anti-gay laws so much worse. This current bill would impose sentences up to life imprisonment for being in a gay relationship, and would criminalize promoting homosexuality with sentences up to twenty years.
🇬🇭 Ghana: Spiritual leaders are calling on the president to sign and the supreme court to uphold their own recently passed, extremely draconian anti-LGBTQ bill.
Olympics
🇫🇷 French police are investigating hate speech and death threats targeting the designer of the opening ceremonies, which featured a tableau of drag queens interpreting a bacchanalia, which some demented Christian Americans misinterpreted as being a parody of The Last Supper.
🇩🇿 🥊And the right-wing Twittersphere is losing its collective brain cell over Algerian boxer Imane Khalif, who they’re accusing of being trans, despite the fact she is not trans, she was born female, is legally female, and being legally trans is not actually possible in Algeria. The controversy arose because she had previously been disqualified from an event for reasons that were not made public by the International Boxing Association, a now-discredited association that is associated with Russia, for reasons that have always been considered shady. The IOC has denounced the IBA and the ensuing controversy, the other women Khalif is about to face have said they’re not afraid to compete against her, and the Italian boxer whose concession of her fight against Khalif ignited some of the controversy has since apologized for her behavior.
Fun
🛒A gay couple who appeared on the 1990s game show Supermarket Sweep went viral on Twitter this week, and then again, when they posted on Facebook to reveal that they’re still together 25 years later. Wow.
🇺🇸 Meanwhile in the States
A federal judge refused to grant a preliminary injunction to block the Biden administration’s new rule extending Title IX protections to LGBT students in four states: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina.
The new rules took effect Aug 1, but only in 24 states following court challenges from Republican states.
🦞🦞 Massachusetts: In the final hours of the legislature’s session, the two houses came to agreement and passed the Parentage Equality Act, which normalizes and regulates different family structures, including same-sex parents, surrogacy, and de facto parents.
Unfortunately, the sodomy decriminalization bill failed to pass, and while it’s possible it could be brought back in the fall or in informal sessions, it’s unlikely.
Massachusetts Democrats have a trifecta with overwhelming supermajorities in both houses, but they seem incredibly unproductive. They should take a page from their colleagues in Minnesota and Michigan, who passed enormous amounts of progressive legislation with bare majorities.
😡 Texas: State Republicans have released their platform, which once again calls homosexuality “abnormal”; opposes all efforts to “validate transgender identity”; calls trans gender care “child abuse”; endorses conversion therapy; and opposes same-sex marriage. A reminder that a bill to delete the state’s sodomy law from the penal code was sponsored by a majority of the Texas state house last year, but wasn’t brought to a vote because of Republican leadership.
Meanwhile, a reminder that the federal Republican Party Platform did not meaningfully end its opposition to gay marriage, despite what some in the press would have you believe. Fully 80% of Senate Republicans opposed the Respect for Marriage Act just two years ago.