An incredible video. One I hope no one ever has to make, and this young man is so brave to face his own death so well. At 11 years old and to understand your body is shutting down and you are going into and fighting organ failure. I know adults who do not face end of life with such dignity. Warning the video deals with a child struggling to live since birth and the pain and hardships in that struggle. Remember everyone who subscribed to his channel helped make his end of life wish come true. He also has been getting stuff off a wish list he has and the amazing thing is he asked for things for other sick kids and for the hospital where he was treated. Please click the link to go to YouTube and watch the video, his fight is not over yet. Hugs
A very real video about Koris journey. Viewer discretion is advised.
As the article says, this building hate is not happening in a vacuum. It is also not a natural happening phenomenon. It is being drive, the outrage stoked, the anger directed at trans, gays, drag queens by the republicans in office and the right wing media. Social media right wing influencers have found it is their way to fame. Matt Walsh has made a career out trans bashing and trans misinformation. Before he did that he was an unknown but shot to fame once he targeted the trans people. Libs of TT wouldn’t have any fame if they were not the darlings of the right by increasing the hate and outrage with lies against the LGBTQI+ especially the trans people. These people are not the real funders of this hate. That is the dark money republican / extremely far right think tanks funded by dark money. The same people trying to create a Theocracy, the same people trying to get rid of democracy, the same people trying to make the US another Russian style government. There is billionaire money behind this to drive the country into a regressive point in time and into a morality these people think really existed but never was true. Plus foreign countries also try to increase the hate and outrage to drive chaos in the US to weaken us as their competitors. We need every online person to do their best to fight this or there will be much more deaths. Hugs
Henry Berg-Brosseau, a prominent transgender rights advocate and the son of Kentucky Sen. Karen Berg has died at the age of 24. His death was confirmed by the Democratic lawmaker in a statement released Tuesday afternoon.
“Last Friday morning my son Henry died by suicide. He was a beloved son, brother, nephew, dog parent and friend,” she wrote. “The depth of his loss is yet to be absorbed.”
Berg-Brosseau, who was trans, served as the deputy press secretary for politics at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization. Part of his job was to deal with the “hateful and vile anti-trans messaging being circulated around this country on a daily basis,” according to his mother.
“This hate building across the country weighed on him. In one of our last conversations, he wondered if he was safe walking down the street,” she wrote.
“The vitriol against trans people is not happening in a vacuum,” she added. “It has real-world implications for how transgender people view their place in the world and how they are treated as they just try to live their lives.”
Born in Louisville, Ky., the young activist began his short, yet impactful advocacy career as a student at Louisville Collegiate School, where he organized a protest against so-called LGBTQ “conversion therapy,” spoke to the Kentucky Senate Education Committee, and participated in other “local and national causes,” according to an online obit.
Henry Berg-Brousseau
“Henry was first and foremost a fighter and an advocate. He was fighting for transgender rights as a teenager in Kentucky, far earlier than he should have had to,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said in a statement.
“Losing Henry is an unfathomable loss to the Human Rights Campaign family,” Robinson said, describing Berg-Brosseau as “a light” and a “deeply passionate, deeply engaged, and deeply caring” co-worker who will always be remembered for “his hunger for justice.”
The funeral is scheduled for Wednesday, 1 p.m., local time, in Louisville, Ky.
Michael Anderson (left), a survivor of Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, and Matthew Haynes, a founding owner of the club, in a Congressional hearing on anti-LGBTQ+ extremism Wednesday.Tom Williams/Getty Images
Two sides swiftly emerged at Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on anti-LGBTQ+ violence: one that was ready to talk about our community’s rights and protections, and another that just wanted to blame the woke left.
The special hearing on “The Rise of Anti-LGBTQI+ Extremism and Violence in the United States” was assembled in direct response to the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs by a far-right extremist which left five dead. But while the witnesses and Democrats discussed the issue at hand, which outgoing committee chair Carolyn Maloney called “one of the most pressing issues that our nation will face in the years to come,” Republicans focused their efforts on turning anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes into just a symptom of an alleged wave of violent crime, blaming everything from Black Lives Matter and efforts to defund the police to poor border security and fentanyl.
Witnesses at the hearing included Michael Anderson and James Slaugh, two Club Q survivors; Club Q owner Matthew Haynes; and Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the PULSE shooting, all of whom gave impassioned testimony about their experiences, trauma, and hope for the future. “Hate speech turns into hate action, and actions based on hate almost took my life from me at 25 years old,” Anderson told the committee. Wolf echoed the sentiment, calling out “cynical politicians and greedy grifters” like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who willfully “pour gasoline on anti-LGBTQ hysteria” to make money and accumulate political capital.
Haynes, who said attending the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act on Tuesday was “the first joy and pride I have felt since these horrific events at Club Q,” bluntly shared with the committee several examples of anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech he’d received since the shooting. The messages were filled with slurs, professing happiness that five people were dead and disappointment the killer hadn’t shot more.
“I ask you today not simply what are you doing to safeguard LGBTQ Americans,” Haynes said, “but rather what are you and other leaders doing to make America unsafe for LGBTQ people.”
Witnesses also included Human Rights Campaign president Kelly Robinson, who called hate-motivated violence like the Club Q shooting “the tragic result of a society that devalues our lives, particularly the lives of Black and brown transgender and gender-nonconforming people.” Most of the witnesses stressed that Republicans’ fearmongering and misinformation around trans people and drag performers in particular directly emboldened open violence on hospitals, libraries, and on the street.
But Republicans brought one witness of their own to frame their points — Charles Lehman, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which has long pushed for policies like “broken window” policing that harm marginalized communities. Lehman was on hand not to talk about anti-LGBTQ+ violence in any specific capacity, but to generally advocate for more police funding and harsher federal hate crime penalties, “bringing the full power of the justice system to bear” on offenders.
Lehman’s testimony was an obvious overture to what Republicans really wanted to talk about, the same talking point they’d stressed throughout this year’s midterm campaigns: that violent crime is allegedly on the rise, and it’s actually the Democrats’ fault any of this happened. Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the incoming committee chair who literally opened his remarks with the phrase “thoughts and prayers,” squarely blamed left-wing “defund the police and soft-on-crime policies” for a general rise in violence he denied is unique to LGBTQ+ communities.
“We should be focused on the alarming rise of violent crime across our country, crimes that target all races and ethnicities,” Comer said, citing elevated homicide numbers in several large cities. Recent analyses from both the Bureau of Justice Statistics and FBI show that while homicide rates have increased during the pandemic, there was no national increase in overall violent crime over the last three years.
Comer, of course, has a motive for obfuscating culpability: he’s one co-sponsor of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Protect Children’s Innocence” bill, currently in committee, which would make providing a minor with any gender-affirming care a felony and prohibit federal funds from paying for such care.
On Friday, Club Q family and supporters fundraised to reopen the nightlife haven at the center of the Colorado Springs shooting.
Other Republicans followed suit, like Pennsylvania Rep. Fred Keller, who said the committee should be “looking at this holistically as an American crime crisis.” Jody Hice of Georgia, in his last committee meeting as a representative, equated anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech to Maxine Waters’ 2018 comments encouraging people to make then-current Trump administration officials “not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Pat Fallon of Texas, aggressively questioning Wolf, invited comparison to James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders supporter who shot Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and four others in 2017. “None of us blamed Bernie Sanders because he didn’t do it,” Fallon told Wolf, clearly agitated. In fact, some Republicans including then-President Trump did blame Sanders and other Democrats for allegedly inciting the shooting.
David Cicilline, co-chair of the House Equality Caucus, said he was “disappointed, but not surprised” that almost no Republicans asked the witnesses about anti-LGBTQ+ extremism. “Republicans are happy to discuss our community when they’re attacking our rights, when they’re crying on the House floor because they oppose marriage equality,” Cicilline pointed out during the hearing. “But when it comes to actually discussing the violence against our community and its causes, just a quick condemnation of what happened at Club Q, and violence broadly, and nothing more.
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