Category: LGBTQ+ / Gay / Trans / Gender

A Winding Literary Hoax

Many names in this story. You can listen to it on the page; it says it’s a 22 minute listen.

The erotic poems of Bilitis

A lush translation of this late-discovered lesbian poet added to the legacy of Sappho, but there was a trickster at work

In 1894, a German archaeologist named Herr G Heim made a groundbreaking discovery. On the island of Cyprus, he excavated a tomb that belonged to a hitherto unknown ancient female poet by the name of Bilitis. Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia. They would have remained little known – accessible only to a small, scholarly audience who could decipher ancient Greek – had a Frenchman named Pierre Louÿs not taken it upon himself to hunt down Heim’s Greek edition, hot off the press, and translated Bilitis’s poetry into French for a broader reading public that same year (published as Les Chansons de Bilitis or The Songs of Bilitis). Bilitis might have been an obscure historical figure – no other ancient author mentions encountering her or her poetry – but the cultural and literary significance of Heim’s discovery was not lost on Louÿs. For, in several of her poems, Bilitis revealed that she crossed paths with classical antiquity’s most renowned and controversial female poet: Sappho.

Art Nouveau painting of people by the sea, with a woman playing a lyre and others swimming and relaxing on the beach.
From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris

Sappho (c630-c570 BCE) lived in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where she composed lyric poetry – songs performed to the accompaniment of the lyre. Her poetry was widely admired throughout antiquity. Plato dubbed her ‘the tenth Muse’. In the 1st century CE, the Greek philosopher Plutarch recalled listening to Sappho’s poetry performed at symposia – wine-drinking parties – remarking that her words were so beautiful, he was moved to put his wine cup down while he listened.

Photograph of ancient papyrus fragments with Greek text displayed in a black frame on a white background.
A 3rd-century Egyptian fragment of Sappho’s poetry from papyri found at Oxyrhynchus (modern-day Al-Bahnasa in Egypt). Courtesy the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK

Sappho was significant enough to have her work copied by scholars at the Library of Alexandria a few hundred years after she lived – the same scholars who first systematised Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into the books we are familiar with today. Of the nine book rolls of Sappho’s work these scholars produced, only a sliver survives. There is one complete poem, the so-called ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’, in which Sappho prays to the goddess of love to bring a female lover back into her good graces. The rest are scraps. Our knowledge of her poetry relies largely on papyrus fragments and partial quotations from later authors. As the classicist Emily Wilson put it in the London Review of Books: ‘Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw.’

Among these precious fragments, we find some of the most stirring and exceptional representations of desire in all ancient Greek literature. In fragment 31, for example, Sappho sees a man sitting across from a woman and listening to her sweet voice and lovely laugh. She compares him to a god, but then this man, ‘whoever he is’, quickly fades to the background, and Sappho spends the rest of the fragment expressing in hair-raising detail the effects that beholding this woman has on her:

… oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
          is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
          fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead – or almost
          I seem to me …

(All translations of Sappho by Anne Carson)

Passionate desire, what the Greeks called eros, is no trifling matter for Sappho. In fragment 130 , Sappho calls eros the ‘melter of limbs’ who habitually stirs her, a ‘sweetbitter [glukupikron] unmanageable creature who steals in …’ If we are accustomed to think of love as bittersweet, Sappho inverts this: eros starts off sweet (gluku) but turns bitter (pikron), as some distance or barrier often comes between Sappho and her female loves, as in fragment 31 above.

We find expressions of the devastating stakes of eros among male lyric poets, too, but in those contexts, the poets sing of desire for beautiful male youths or ‘beloveds’. In classical Greek culture, this form of male homoeroticism, known as pederasty, is elevated as the most admired, virtuous, manly form of love, even superior to heterosexual relations. From our earliest Greek literary sources onwards, women’s desires and bodies are problematic. According to the poet Hesiod, Zeus invented the first woman – Pandora, a ‘beautiful evil thing’ – as a punishment for men. Her opening of the jar – not a box but rather a pithos, a giant storage jug as big as the human body – symbolises the misogynist view of women as leaky containers whose insatiable appetites, whether for food or for sex, must be controlled and regulated by men.

Ancient Greek pottery shows a seated figure reading and four standing figures, decorative red-figure design on a black vase.
A hydria (water jar) possibly depicting Sappho reading and surrounded by attendants. Greek, c450 BCE. Courtesy the British Museum, London

poem titled ‘Types of Women’, by Sappho’s contemporary Semonides of Amorgos, showcases this strain of misogyny on steroids. The poem attacks women through the form of a catalogue, listing different types of women and the animal-antecedents to whom they owe their shameful, negative traits. The only acceptable type of woman Semonides describes is the bee-woman, the ideal wife who directs her desire entirely towards enriching her husband’s household by bearing him legitimate children. This ideal woman never so much as mentions sex when in conversation with other women.

In comparison with this misogynist tradition, Sappho’s representation of women and desire could not be more different. Take fragment 16, which opens thus:

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
      what you love.

In these lines, Sappho articulates an expansive vision of beauty. She lists the different kinds of armies that men find the most beautiful, using the form of the catalogue to invoke Homer’s Iliad, a war story whose plot and heroic values are underpinned by the violent exchange of women as property between men. Sappho does not tell us whether or not she thinks armies are beautiful. She simply says that the most beautiful thing is what(ever) we love (and therefore subtly claims that men think armies beautiful because they love war).

Sappho recreates through memory a single person who is beautiful because she is loved

She then explains her point by citing the example of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, on behalf of whom the Greeks fight the Trojan War. Accounts differ as to whether Helen sailed to Troy willingly to be with the Trojan prince Paris or was forcibly taken. Rather than castigate Helen as the epitome of evil – female desire – as most traditions do, Sappho simply states that she left behind her husband, children and parents, and sailed to Troy, because something (the poem is fragmentary; perhaps desire itself?) led her astray.

Art Nouveau painting of two individuals playing a pan flute together against a backdrop of blue sky and clouds.
From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris

The point is this: even she who ‘overcame everyone in beauty’ pursued what she found the most beautiful thing on earth, what(ever) she loved. And this, Sappho says, reminds her of a woman named Anaktoria, who is gone. Sappho says:

I would rather see her lovely step
and the motion of light on her face
than chariots of Lydians or ranks
         of footsoldiers in arms.

For Sappho, the beauty of armies pales in comparison with the beauty of Anaktoria because Sappho loves Anaktoria. ‘Ranks of footsoldiers’ behold women as exchangeable, dehumanised objects of beauty, not love. Sappho recreates through memory a single person, Anaktoria, who is beautiful because she is loved. What makes Sappho’s articulation of eros so exceptional, then, is how she challenges the dominating, misogynist attitudes about women and their desire as expressed by the male-authored Greek literary tradition. As the classicist Ella Haselswerdt writes in ‘Re-Queering Sappho’ (2016):

Sappho’s fragments show us eros and pleasure for their own sake, not as an exchange of property, the exploitation of one for the sake of the other, or in order to achieve virtue in the eyes of a moralising philosopher like Plato or Aristotle.

From antiquity onwards, however, Sappho’s expressions of lesbian eros attracted a medley of misogynistic and homophobic responses. In the 5th century BCE, following the tradition of pathologising women’s desires (whether homo or hetero), Athenian comic playwrights transformed Sappho into the stock character of a sex-crazed woman, insatiably hungry for men. In his Heroides, a collection of literary letters in which female heroines express their grievances to the men who have mistreated them, the Roman poet Ovid composed a letter in Sappho’s voice. His version of Sappho claims that her love for a young boatman named Phaon surpasses the thousands of loves she has had with girls on Lesbos. The ancient biographical tradition performs the ultimate act of heterosexualising Sappho by claiming that she leapt to her death from the cliffs of Leucas because Phaon would not reciprocate her love. Flash-forward to the late 19th century, when archaeologists were beginning to find papyrus fragments in Egypt containing new bits of Sappho: as Miriam Kamil writes in ‘I Shall — #$% You And *@$# You’ (2019), many English translators censored Sappho’s lesbianism by changing female pronouns to male.

Given this history, it is difficult to overstate the significance of Heim’s discovery of Bilitis’s poetry: here, at last, was the material evidence and textual perspective of a female contemporary to Sappho and her lovers.

The catch? ‘Bilitis’ was fake.

Bilitis’s poetry and the story of its discovery were all the invention of Pierre Louÿs, the man who purported to have translated her poems for the first time. We might be tempted to classify Louÿs’s concoction as a forgery, a text created by a person who intends to deceive an audience by passing it off as something other than what it is. However, upon closer inspection, The Songs of Bilitis is a thinly veiled literary hoax, a creation that is more of a literary game than a genuine attempt at deception.

Louÿs was no stranger to the contemporary literary scene as both a translator and an imitator of (authentic) ancient texts. He also happened to be close friends with Oscar Wilde, sharing with him literary interests in art’s power to imitate and deceive, as well as erotic interests in sexual tourism in French-colonised Algeria. Only one year before releasing The Songs of Bilitis, Louÿs had published a French translation of epigrams by the 1st-century BCE poet Meleager of Gadara (now the city of Umm Qais in Jordan). It is likely that Louÿs found inspiration for fabricating Bilitis in the genre of the epigram itself. Epigrams are short poems originally written upon objects such as pots, walls or tombs – the site of Bilitis’s discovery. As a ‘lower’ literary genre, epigrams are often sexually explicit. Louÿs lifted some of Bilitis’s songs wholesale (with minor tweaks) from the erotic Book 5 of the Greek Anthology, a collection of thousands of Greek poems. Finally, by composing epigrams under the name of Bilitis, Louÿs took his cue from an ancient authorial move associated with the epigram: some epigram authors, remaining anonymous themselves, composed epigrams pseudonymously, that is, by attaching someone else’s name (often that of a dead author) to their epigram. Some of the epigrams in the Greek Anthology purport to be composed by Sappho herself, something Louÿs no doubt had in mind as he chose ‘Bilitis’ for his authorial mask.

The book was published amidst intense cultural debates about the quality and nature of Sappho’s lesbian desire

Louÿs ‘plays’ the forger and wants his readers to appreciate the cleverness of his performance. One clear example of this lies in the fiction Louÿs creates around the poems’ provenance. In The Songs of Bilitis, Louÿs inserts a prefatory ‘Life of Bilitis’, in which he narrates how Herr G Heim excavated Bilitis’s tomb and brought her poetry to light. The choice of this name encodes a clever joke: when read with a German pronunciation, Herr G Heim becomes Herr Geheim, aka ‘Sir Secret’. The real origin of Bilitis’s poetry – not Herr G Heim’s pickaxe but Pierre Louÿs’s pen – is a secret lying in plain sight for clever readers to detect. We also learn from this preface that Bilitis had a Greek father and a Phoenician mother, but that she might have never known her father, given that he is nowhere mentioned in her poetry. It is tempting to see Bilitis’s dubious paternity as another place where Louÿs tips his hat as Bilitis’s literary progenitor.

Art print of a nude dancer with flowing ribbons flanked by two red figures playing flutes against a dark sky.
From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris

Another playful way that Louÿs generates an aura of mystery around Bilitis’s poetry is the inclusion of a table of contents that labels some of the poems ‘untranslated’. Readers who are taken in by the ruse might believe that, given the sexual nature of many of the songs, some of them were too explicit to translate for a popular audience. But for readers who get the game Louÿs is playing, this performance of self-censorship puts Bilitis in the same category as actual ancient writers such as Catullus, Martial or Juvenal, whose sexual obscenities were handled in 19th-century translations by leaving them in untranslated Latin.

Even if The Songs of Bilitis was more of a literary hoax than a forgery, Louÿs nonetheless followed the forger’s playbook in targeting the desires of his contemporary audience. Not only did his ‘discovery’ hit the shelves as new papyrus fragments of Sappho’s poetry were being excavated in Egypt, but the book was also published amid intense cultural debates about the quality and nature of Sappho’s lesbian desire. For Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien – two prominent lesbian intellectuals (and close friends of Louÿs’s) – it was irrelevant that Bilitis was fake: they praised Louÿs for representing an unequivocally lesbian Sappho, and they went on to publish their own translations and imitations of Sappho’s poetry.

The greatest badge of honour for Louÿs’s literary creation, however, came from its most incendiary critic: the German philologist giant Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. In 1896, Wilamowitz published a scathing 16-page review of The Songs of Bilitis. His ire did not mellow as time passed, for he reprinted this same review as the centrepiece to his monograph Sappho und Simonides (1913). The opening of the review is worth quoting in full (my translation from German):

A volume of French poetry, some of which is disgustingly lewd, may seem unsuitable for review in this place: but I find it worthy of consideration, and seize this opportunity to address matters long dear to my heart. I’m concerned with the purity of a great woman: I’m not afraid to put my hands in shit.

The ‘great woman’ Wilamowitz refers to here is not Bilitis, of course, but Sappho. Bilitis is the filth that has corrupted her ‘purity’, by which Wilamowitz means Sappho’s (hetero)sexual chastity. In this regard, Wilamowitz used his review of contemporary French poetry to rekindle an argument made about Sappho in the early 19th century by the scholar Friedrich Welcker. Welcker wrote a book called Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreyt (1816), or ‘Sappho: Freed from a Prevailing Prejudice’, in which he argued that Sappho was not, in the lingo of the time, a ‘tribade’, but rather a schoolteacher preparing girls for society and marriage with men. Wilamowitz follows the path paved by Welcker, claiming that it is later readers such as Louÿs who bring their own ‘unnaturalness’ (Unnatur) to Sappho’s poetry.

Wilamowitz’s fiery takedown did not succeed in quashing the hype

The motive of Wilamowitz’s review is to purify Sappho of lesbian eroticism via her association with Bilitis (whose primary female lover is not, in fact, Sappho, but rather someone called Mnasidika, whose beauty Sappho herself praises in fragment 82a: ‘Mnasidika more finely shaped than soft Gyrinno …’). Curiously, however, most of his review is spent criticising various poetic and linguistic aspects of Louÿs’s poetry. Wilamowitz plays the philological critic in unveiling the many anachronistic details littered throughout the poems, observing that they suit more the literature of the later Hellenistic and imperial period (when Greece was under Roman control) rather than the ‘true Hellenic’ (ie, classical) spirit of Sappho’s time. Wilamowitz is as upset at Louÿs’s anachronistic mixing of literary genres and language as he is by Sappho’s sexual mixing with Bilitis. For him, The Songs of Bilitis presents both a moral and textual threat to a supposedly pure Sappho. Wilamowitz’s review promulgates a misogynist, homophobic theory about Sappho, and it cloaks this mission in the seemingly objective rhetoric of classical philology.

Wilamowitz’s fiery takedown did not succeed in quashing the hype around The Songs of Bilitis. In fact, the opposite occurred. Louÿs himself cited Wilamowitz’s review in the bibliography to the expanded 1898 edition of The Songs of Bilitis. Why would Louÿs draw attention to such negative reception? Wilamowitz’s eye as a philologist laid bare for readers all the potential sources that Louÿs imitated as he composed his fake ancient poems, thus highlighting the scholarly work that went into making Bilitis. Wilamowitz takes Louÿs’s poems so seriously as imitations that he treats them as if they actually were translations of authentic ancient Greek poems. The critic’s takedown becomes the forger’s badge of pride.

Black and white photo of an elderly man in a suit sitting on a chair in front of bookshelves.
Professor Dr Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, c1917. Courtesy Wikipedia

Still, Louÿs’s bold citation of Wilamowitz’s homophobic review should give us pause. If Wilamowitz was concerned to carry Welcker’s torch and purify Sappho from the taint of female homoeroticism, Louÿs did not exactly free Sappho from male-centred, misogynist approaches to her poetry, a tradition that, as we’ve seen, was underway already in classical antiquity.

Although he represented a homoerotic Sappho – and received praise from contemporary lesbian readers for doing so – Louÿs in fact had drawn inspiration for the character of Bilitis from his sexual involvement with a 16-year-old Algerian girl. Louÿs invented a literary fiction that fit squarely in a 19th-century French literary tradition of male-authored, voyeuristic, orientalising portrayals of lesbian desire, a tradition grounded in the material conditions and power dynamics of European colonialism and sexual tourism. In this regard, Sappho and Bilitis were simply springboards for Louÿs to cater to a European readership hungry for images of the exoticised lesbian other.

These lesbians took the licence that they, too, could participate in the contested afterlife of Sappho

But this is not the end of Bilitis’s story. Some 60 years after the ‘discovery’ of Bilitis, a remarkable coincidence occurred, igniting a new legacy for Bilitis that Louÿs could never have predicted. In 1955, The Songs of Bilitis, previously available only through limited, expensive and privately printed editions, was republished by Avon, a press that sought to rival Pocket Books (the first mass-market paperback publisher in the United States) by making a wider range of literature – from science fiction to smut – accessible to a popular audience in the form of cheap paperbacks. That same autumn, four lesbian couples gathered in San Francisco to form a secret club. They desired a space where lesbians could socialise beyond the surveillance of their parents, families and employers, and outside of gay bars, which were frequently subject to police raids.

When it came time to make a name for their group, they had to be careful not to pick anything that could put their members at risk, given the intense homophobia of the McCarthy era. Nancy, a factory worker whose last name we don’t know, suggested ‘Daughters of Bilitis’. She was met with blank stares. Nancy explained: she had encountered a translation of Bilitis’s poetry in a volume by Pierre Louÿs. She had brought that very volume with her to the meeting. What intrigued Nancy was that this Bilitis was a contemporary of the ancient Greek poet Sappho on the island of Lesbos in the late 7th century BCE. Nancy’s partner Priscilla chimed in: ‘“Bilitis” would mean something to us, but not to any outsider. If anyone asked us, we could always say we belong to a poetry club.’ The women agreed to name themselves after this obscure figure. Thus was born the ‘Daughters of Bilitis’ (or DOB), a group that would become the first lesbian social-political organisation in the US, active until 1995.

It is easy to take a cynical view of these lesbians’ decision to name themselves after a fictive ancient lesbian. The women were cognisant of the fact that Louÿs had invented Bilitis, but that did not deter them from making something out of what was available to them – and conducive to their precarious social conditions – at the time. If these lesbians took anything from Louÿs, it was the licence that they, too, could participate in the contested afterlife of the fragmentary Sappho. Unlike Louÿs, they would author a chapter under Bilitis’s name by and for lesbians.

Yet another study proves puberty blockers are life-saving for trans youth

I have never understood the rights hate of LGBTQ+ people just for being different.  I used to think it was they couldn’t understand it because they did feel that way.  If they did not feel that way then it must be wrong or not exist.    The very same things they say about trans people they said about gay people when I was a school kid.  I remember that people were pushing to ban gay guys, and it was always gay guys just like it is always trans women, from teaching because they would molest the kids.  Now it is we can’t let trans people use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity because of some fear they will molest the little girls.  Always to protect the kids but if that was the goal then may I mention religious leaders?  I think also the fear some religious right wingers have is that they find trans women attractive and that terrifies them.  They want to force kids to go through the wrong puberty so it is harder for them to fit in with the stereotypes people have of what is masculine or feminine.   For some they think they are doing the bidding of their deity but I don’t remember reading Jesus saying anything about trans people.  But he did preach love and tolerance a lot.  Maybe the pain and cruelty is the point after all.  Hugs

https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/01/08/puberty-blockers-study-another-one/

Trans youth almost always feel less suicidal while undergoing treatment. (Getty

Trans youth almost always feel less suicidal while undergoing treatment. (Getty)

Yet another study proving that trans youth almost always feel less suicidal on gender-affirming care has been thrown on the pile of evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective.

Research set to be published in the Journal of Paediatric’s February volume has once again proved that trans adolescents show “meaningful reductions” in depression and anxiety after beginning clinically-endorsed hormone therapy.

Co-written by paediatricians in Nevada, Texas, and Missouri, the study examined the wellbeing of 432 patients before and after undergoing treatment.

The participants, aged 12 to 20, were surveyed on their mental health before and at least 364 days after beginning appropriate medical treatment such as puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

Trans youth regularly come under attack by politicians. (Getty)

Using the Ask Suicide-Screening Questions (ASQ) toolkit – an internationally acknowledged assessment of suicidality in young people and adults – researchers found significant improvements in the mental health of patients across the board.

Suicidality among participants decreased significantly over time, according to the study’s results, with rates continuing to decrease as time went on.

The reductions, clinicians noted, were consistent regardless of gender identity, treatment duration, and, interestingly, the age at the start of therapy.

This not only once again proves that gender-affirming care is remarkably effective in improving the wellbeing of trans patients, but that its effectiveness in reducing suicidal tendencies does not diminish as patients get older.

Clinicians recommended following-up the study with a “larger sample and longer follow-up” to sufficiently prove the consistency of gender-affirming care’s mental health treatments.

Politicians continue to ban puberty blockers despite evidence

Numerous studies across the globe have proven that gender-affirming care is almost always a good thing for trans people, especially trans young people.

One study from October 2024 found that 97 per cent of trans under-18s were “highly satisfied” with the results of gender-affirming treatment, while another from March in the same year found that, out of 548 patients who accessed trans healthcare, just two regretted it.

Regret rates for gender-affirming treatment are very low according to a paper from May 2024, which found that patients are more likely to regret knee surgery, breast augmentation, and even having children than those starting gender-affirming care.

Despite the mountain of evidence proving that gender-affirming care can be, and almost always is, life-saving, anti-trans politicians and political pundits regularly claim trans young people shouldn’t be allowed to access clinically-approved medical treatment.

Wes Streeting, pictured.
Wes Streeting has routinely come under fire for his policies on trans people. (Getty)

At least 27 states in the US ban gender-affirming care in some capacity, preventing over 40 per cent of America’s trans youth population from accessing care. Puberty blockers are also banned for trans youth in the UK, despite being freely available for cisgender youth.

The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention organisation, warned these bans have “detrimental impacts” on the mental health of trans young people, who are already disproportionately likely to feel suicidal.

Research conducted by Dr Natacha Kennedy in the University of London found that Wes Streeting’s ban on puberty blockers for trans young people is “significantly, extensively, and relentlessly harming trans children and young people”.

She spoke to the parents of trans young people who were once “happy, well-adjusted, and little different from most cis children”, but who have now resorted to self-harm because of an inability to access care.

Suicide is preventable. Readers who are affected by the issues raised in this story are encouraged to contact the Samaritans on 116 123 (www.samaritans.org), or Mind on 0300 123 3393 (www.mind.org.uk). Readers in the US are encouraged to contact the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255.

Whew-Breathe Again, For A Bit

Democrats Successfully Strip All Anti-Trans Riders From Final Appropriations Bills

The HHS and Education bills once contained the most sweeping anti-trans provisions in congressional history. Now they contain none.

Erin Reed Jan 20, 2026

Early Tuesday morning, final appropriations bills for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education—and related agencies—were released, marking the last major funding measures to be negotiated in the aftermath of the record-breaking government shutdown fight in 2025. That standoff featured multiple appropriations bills loaded with anti-transgender riders and poison pills for Democrats, ultimately ending in a short-term continuing resolution that punted many of those provisions to the end of January. While other “minibus” packages funding individual agencies moved forward, the Education and HHS bills were conspicuously absent, as they contained some of the most sweeping and consequential anti-trans riders ever proposed in Congress. Now, with the final bills released, it is clear that no anti-transgender riders were included—meaning transgender people will largely be spared new congressional attacks through most of 2026 should they pass as-is.

As the government shut down on Oct. 1, the state of appropriations bills needed to reopen the federal government for any extended period was extraordinarily dire for transgender people. Dozens of anti-transgender riders were embedded across House appropriations bills, even as those provisions were largely absent from the Senate’s versions. The riders appeared throughout nearly every funding measure, from Commerce, Justice, and Science to Financial Services and General Government. The most extreme provisions, however, were concentrated in the House HHS and Education bills, including language barring “any federal funds” from supporting gender-affirming care at any age and threatening funding for schools that support transgender students. Taken together, those measures would have posed a sweeping threat to transgender people’s access to education and health care nationwide.

Those fears eased somewhat when the government reopened under a short-term continuing resolution funding operations through the end of January. In the months that followed, Democrats notched a series of incremental victories for transgender people, advancing multiple appropriations “minibus” packages that stripped out anti-trans riders as the government was funded piece by piece. As amendment after amendment fell away, those wins grew more substantial, including the removal of a proposed ban on gender-affirming medical care from the NDAA—even after it had passed both the House and Senate. Still, the most consequential question remained unresolved: what would ultimately happen to the high-impact anti-trans provisions embedded in the HHS and Education bills.

Now, the package has been released—and for the moment, transgender people can breathe again. The final HHS and Education bills contain no anti-transgender provisions: no ban on hospitals providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, no threats to strip funding from schools that support transgender students or allow them to use the bathroom, and no mandate forcing colleges to exclude transgender students from sports or activities like chess or esports. The bills are strikingly clean. As such, they avert yet another protracted shutdown fight in which transgender people are once again turned into political bargaining chips—and, at least for now, remove Congress as the immediate vehicle for new federal attacks, should they pass as-is.

When asked about the successful stripping of anti-trans provisions, a staffer for Representative Sarah McBride tells Erin In The Morning, “Rep. McBride works closely with her colleagues every day to defend the rights of all her constituents, including LGBTQ people across Delaware. In the face of efforts by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to roll back health care and civil rights, she was proud to work relentlessly with her colleagues in ensuring these funding bills did not include anti-LGBTQ provisions. It takes strong allies in leadership and on committees to rein in the worst excesses of this Republican trifecta, Rep. McBride remains grateful to Ranking Members DeLauro, Murray, and Democratic leadership for prioritizing the removal of these harmful riders.”

This does not mean that transgender people will not be targeted with policies and rules that affect them in all areas of life. The Trump administration has acted without regard to law in forcing bans on sports, pulling funding from schools and hospitals, and banning passport gender marker updates. The Supreme Court has been increasingly willing to let the office of the presidency under Trump do whatever it would like to transgender people. However, the lack of passage of bills targeting transgender people means that these attacks will only last for as long as we have Trump in the White House, and a future president should hopefully be easily able to reverse the attacks.

https://open.substack.com/pub/erininthemorn/p/democrats-successfully-strip-all?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Sorry, GOP. There’s no Christian revival

Just like maga a small very vocal group of people are demanding the entire country roll back all progress made since the 1950s by minorities.  Any new discovery by science no matter the field because it clashes with their holy book which they misread to form their warped view of reality.  They do not care to let other others live their lives as they get to live theirs in peace and freedom.  No they demand that everyone follow and live by their church doctrines because that way their god will favor them, come back sooner to give them rewards while killing the rest of us.   Think of it, these people are OK with creating a situation where the majority die horribly to please his god as long as they get rewarded.  Seems selfish to me not Christian.  Also another important point is the constant repeating of the Christian surge of republican voters despite it being a lie is to shore up the idea that there was voter fraud that stole the midterms from the republicans.  Think of it tRump people used a normal occurrence of vote totals shift as mail in votes are counted as evidence of fraud leading to the Jan 6th insurrection.  Below I will post a quote from the article that will be used by republicans to show the democrats stole the midterms.   Hugs.  

Even as GOP leaders who can read a poll know that the upcoming elections are not looking good for their party, this fantasy of a Christianizing America is leading the everyday MAGA faithful to believe otherwise. A September poll from September shows that 89% of Republicans think their party will win the midterm elections, which is up seven points from April. In fact, the party is forecast to lose seats as its support continues to erode under Trump’s chaotic mismanagement.

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/07/sorry-gop-theres-no-christian-revival/

Republicans are betting the midterms on mass conversions that aren’t happening

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
A United States and Christian flag are sandwiched together (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
A United States and Christian flag are sandwiched together (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Turning Point USA ended 2025 with AmericaFest, a blowout conference for the MAGA powerhouse organization started in 2012 by the now-deceased Charlie Kirk. As described by Teresa Wiltz at POLITICO, “the vibe felt less like a political panel than an evangelical revival.” Watching the speeches from this fireworks-laden shindig, Wiltz’s observation felt like an understatement. Many speeches from the event’s main stage were simply sermons extolling a fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity as the one true faith.

“We’re here for one name, and that’s Jesus,” declared Bryce Crawford, a 22-year-old who makes videos of himself accosting strangers, including mentally ill homeless people, under the guise of “winning souls” for Christ. He went on declare that “we’re in the last days” and that every person who doesn’t believe in his version of the gospels will soon “be cast into hell.”

“We’re all on our knees, shoulder to shoulder, under the blood of Christ,” proclaimed the British comedian Russell Brand, who is facing seven charges of sexual assault, including three rape charges, in the United Kingdom. He included Ben Shapiro, by name, in his list of believers, even though Shapiro is Jewish. He then proceeded to insist that Christianity is the key to resolving the conflict between Israel and Gaza, which have primarily Jewish and Muslim populations.

Even rapper Nicki Minaj, newly out as MAGA, understood the primary assignment was talking up Christianity, claiming that she has had “the kind of faith that you think a person is crazy” since she was a little girl.

AmericaFest, as its name implies, is supposed to be a political event, not a church service. By including speakers like Shapiro and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Hindu, TPUSA’s organizers were even nodding to the idea that the GOP is supposed to believe in religious freedom and diversity. Or, as Vice President JD Vance put it, “We’re all part of the same American family.” Yet he quickly undercut that message by proclaiming that “By the grace of God, we will always be a Christian nation.” While Vance may claim that you don’t have to be a Christian to be an American, implicit in his words is the idea that only Christians are truly Americans, and everyone else is, at best, second class.

The blunt reality is that AmericaFest wasn’t just overtly religious — it was steeped in Christian nationalism. They equated being an American with being a Christian. But being a Republican, as Crawford suggested in his speech, is synonymous with being an evangelical Christian whose main duty is to convert non-believers. The political message of the event was inseparable from a religious one: that the purpose of the GOP and the MAGA movement is to usher in a religious revival and turn a decadent, secular country into one devoted to a narrow, right-wing version of Christianity.

For decades now, the Christian right has been the most powerful and influential force in the GOP, and yet even by their standards, this marked a dramatic shift toward the theocratic impulse. From a purely rational perspective, this is bad politics. Only 23% of Americans identify as evangelicals. Trump was able to win in 2024 only by convincing large numbers of people outside of evangelical Christianity that he has a secular worldview. This was aided by the fact that he quite clearly doesn’t believe all the Christian language, both coded and overt, his aides coax him to say.

The hype at AmericaFest suggests they are pinning their hopes on this imaginary religious awakening to deliver big wins to the Republicans in November’s elections.

But none of that seems to register with MAGA leadership right now. They’ve convinced themselves — or at least are trying to persuade their donors and followers — that the U.S. is undergoing a massive religious revival. Right-wing media has been pushing the view that huge numbers of Americans, especially young Americans, are converting to fundamentalist Christianity. The hype at AmericaFest suggests they are pinning their hopes on this imaginary religious awakening to deliver big wins to the Republicans in November’s elections.

As my colleague Russell Payne and I reported on in November for Salon’s “Standing Room Only,” Fox News in particular has been running a number of stories claiming a “Charlie Kirk effect” — that the MAGA influencer’s killing in September led to a tidal wave of Americans, especially young Americans, discovering or returning to Christianity.

Since then, there’s been a constant drumbeat of similar claims from right-wing media. “Gen Z embracing faith as more young people return to religion,” Fox News declared again on Dec. 21. NewsNation ran a new year segment that reported a “religious revival” was taking place among the young. This follows many similar segments from both channels dating back months, all swearing to their largely elderly audience that the Zoomers are flooding church services, despite what they may be seeing at their own local congregation. Conservative ministers keep insisting on social media that waves of young people are converting, even as no such numbers show up in surveys with more rigorous research methods.

Much of AmericaFest was also devoted to propping up the narrative that young adults are giving up sex and secularism for Christian nationalism in record numbers. Anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, 25, spoke about how Christianity calls on women to “Get married, have babies, have as many as you can and as early in your married life as you can.” Pastor Keenan Clark, 30, preached, “If you have not submitted to the lordship of Jesus Christ, though you were a conservative, you will find yourself in the bowels of a devil’s hell.” Angela Halili, 29, and Arielle Reitsma, 36, hosts of the “Girls Gone Bible” podcast, preached about saving sex for marriage because “sexual immorality is the only sin that you commit against your own body.”

The presence of Halili and Reitsma is a big clue that this Christian hype may be rooted in something other than an outpouring of faith. As I reported last year, there’s overwhelming evidence that the two podcast hosts were working as poker girls — women who make money at underground poker games by offering flirting and often much more to male players — while launching a Christian channel devoted to preaching the virtues of chastity to young women. Whatever they personally believe, their entire endeavor is rooted in dishonesty, a sin the Bible tends to have more to say about than sexual “immorality.”

There is no evidence-based reason to believe there’s a religious revival among the young that is about to create massive election windfalls for Republicans. On the contrary, a December report from Pew Research found that, “On average, young adults remain much less religious than older Americans. Today’s young adults also are less religious than young people were a decade ago.”

But there’s little doubt that the kind of people who write massive checks to organizations like TPUSA — wealthy, older Republicans — are very interested in hearing that there’s a religious revival in the U.S. It’s worth remembering that TPUSA began as a secular organization, but in 2020, Kirk started to shift to the Christian nationalist cause, arguing there should be no separation between church and state. With this newly religious agenda, money started to pour into TPUSA. Better yet, Kirk nabbed the support of extremely rich Republicans, with half of TPUSA’s $55 million haul in 2020 coming from 10 anonymous donors. In contrast, the organization raised only $8 million in 2016. 

TPUSA and right-wing media aren’t the only groups that have a strong interest in creating the illusion of a mass revival swelling among America’s young. Conservative Christian audiences are notoriously gullible, so there’s a big market out there for attention-seekers and outright grifters to cash in using social media. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are awash in young people claiming they have access to Biblical prophecy or know how to perform exorcisms, or who, like the hosts of “Girls Gone Bible,” pair glamorous packaging with claims that young people are embracing an especially sex-free and fundamentalist Christian faith.

There are various degrees of sincerity in these influencers, yet one thing is undeniable: They are exploiting huge audiences of conservative Christians who want desperately to believe in a religious revival and would rather give their time and money to people who are telling them it’s real than to look at the statistics that show that it’s not. 

Between groups like TPUSA, right-wing media outlets and social media influencers, there’s now an entire machinery propping up this false narrative that young people are stampeding into the pews. Even as GOP leaders who can read a poll know that the upcoming elections are not looking good for their party, this fantasy of a Christianizing America is leading the everyday MAGA faithful to believe otherwise. A September poll from September shows that 89% of Republicans think their party will win the midterm elections, which is up seven points from April. In fact, the party is forecast to lose seats as its support continues to erode under Trump’s chaotic mismanagement. But none of that matters: TPUSA is here to take Republicans’ money and sell them a story about how all the kids are coming to Jesus — and to the GOP.

 ——————————————————————————————————————-

By Amanda Marcotte

Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself.” Follow her on Bluesky @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.

 

New video analysis sheds light on Minneapolis ICE shooting

I just posted a video from Hasan Piker on the same topic.  However some people prefer verified news sources instead of podcasters, so here is another discussion of the NYT frame by frame breakdown of the videos by the reporter and Anderson Cooper.   Again showing that Ross’s torso is several feet from the car and he was in no danger until he murdered Renee Good.   Hugs

NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW…

This is a playing of the New York Times breakdown of the videos of the Renee Good murder by Jonathan Ross.  In a frame by frame slow down the video that the right claims shows that Ross was struck by Good’s car instead clearly shows that his torso was several feet away from her bumper.  He was not struck by the car.   He was not in danger.   As he was not in danger why did he shoot.   He was angry and out of control because a lesbian insulted him and another lesbian made his life harder so knowing he would face no consequence for his actions and had no restraint on what he could do he acted on his anger.   This has happened many times with ICE already and will continue until these people face consequences for their actions.   

The border patrol guidelines had to be changed because so many officers were shooting people in frustration using the excuse they were in danger after they deliberately moved in front of cars.   Ross knew this, he used the same excuse that they had to make a rule against doing because he was so angry and frustrated.  He shouldn’t have been on duty or be allowed to carry a weapon!   Hugs

 

ICE’s Violent Terror Campaign Is Worse Than You Thought…

ICE is not following any police procedures or laws.  They are disregarding all civil right granted by law or the constitution.  ICE white supremacist gang thugs believe they have no restraint or can be held accountable in any way.  I see their criminal actions in almost every clip and the way they use their weapons is horribly wrong.  I was trained in pepper spray and can tell you that we had to be sprayed to be certified.  I can bet none of them did.  Because they wouldn’t do it at point-blank range as then it is no longer nonlethal but very lethal.  In this clip a woman describes being picked up by ICE and harmed, harassed, taunted, threatened, and she is a citizen.  She said ICE had no qualms about detaining her nor harming her.  Plus ICE is proudly damaging people’s cars and phones and there is no one to go to for repairment.  So the citizen must pay the costs for the ICE thug’s temper tantrums.  Land of the free much?   Hugs

 

You Are A Domestic Terrorist Now | Ken Klippenstein TMR

This is about the post Ali sent me the link to and I then posted.   This is where I first heard it.  I love when Sam shares the news.  He says that being terrorism as anyone who holds anti-Christian, anti traditional family values (read LGBTQ+), anti capitalism, anti ICE, anti American exceptionalism sediments.  If you have any of those ideas or feeling you are a terrorist according to Stephen Miller and Russell Vought.  Hugs

Vermont Bill Would Create State Trust Fund For Private Trans Youth Care Clinics As Trump Threatens Hospital Funding

I love Erin’s posts and reporting.  The attack on trans rights and health was planned and coordinated by religious conservatives who felt they lost the culture war on gay acceptance and same sex marriage so they decided to jump quickly on the trans issue with lots of money.  Their first attempt failed because they went after the idea of trans people itself.  So then they changed to the old “protect the children” play book with the entire focus on protecting little cis girls but they never mention the trans boys that cis boys need to be protected from.  See how patristical it is?  It is all about males needing to protect the little womans.  They don’t care about trans kids, they don’t care about female sports.   It is about not letting trans kids transition with puberty blockers and the correct hormones as then the kids will grow up as they are fitting the societal view of what men and women look like.   That scares the straight cis male religious guys because they are terrified they will be attracted to a trans woman.   Imagine the horror if trans people moved freely in society not raising any question of their gender because they conformed to how society sees each gender.   That sounds like a grand thing to me, but it terrifies these fanatical religious grifters that want to control how everyone lives to please their god.   They make up untrue and scary what ifs, what if a man uses the letting trans people use the bathroom of their gender ID to go into a girls … notice they phrase it girls not womans because that make people more protective from the start, and they harm a little girl, your little girl?  Well nothing stops a man from doing that now!  Predators don’t need permission and won’t wait for it.  And that has happened where a straight cis male dragged a little girl into the male bathroom and raped her while his friend watched.   There was a famous court case on it.   Look it up if you want.   Want to know what has not happened, a trans woman going into the female’s bathroom and assaulting a female.  Sorry.  The right has tried hard to make one happen, but each claim of a trans person in a  locker room or bathroom acting inappropriate has been debunked and disproven.   This is all a made up scandal and crisis by people who can not accept the society progressing beyond the old traditional binary they grew up with and they think their holy books claim must be as their god insists on it.   Weird how it is always how their god insists on what they already believe or promote.  Handy that.  So many people can not move past the idea that if it dangles you MUST be a boy regardless of how you feel and if it is an inny you must be a girl regardless of anything else idea.  They can not seem to grasp personal feelings, needs, or medial science.  Hugs

 

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/vermont-bill-would-create-state-trust?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3nse02&triedRedirect=true

The bill would establish the Affirming Health Care Trust Fund, administered by the State Treasurer, to support clinics and providers outside the reach of federal funding threats.

Erin Reed
Jan 07, 2026
 

Vermont Bill Would Create State Trust Fund For Private Trans Youth Care Clinics As Trump Threatens Hospital Funding

The bill would establish the Affirming Health Care Trust Fund, administered by the State Treasurer, to support clinics and providers outside the reach of federal funding threats.

Erin Reed
Jan 07, 2026

Vermont Statehouse, Adam Fagen, Creative Commons
 

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Across the United States, gender-affirming care has come under sustained attack in Republican-led states and from the Trump administration. For transgender youth, those attacks have been especially severe, with roughly half of U.S. states now banning such care outright. At the federal level, the administration has waged an intense pressure campaign against hospitals, threatening funding and prompting many systems to drop their care programs altogether. That campaign has now escalated further, with the federal government moving to threaten hospitals’ entire Medicaid and Medicare funding if they continue providing transgender youth care. In response, some states and cities are beginning to fight back by establishing their own funding mechanisms for trans healthcare. The latest example comes from Vermont, where lawmakers have introduced a bill to create a trust fund for gender-affirming care designed to be entirely insulated from federal funding threats.

H.576, introduced by Representatives Daisy Berbeco, Tiffany Bluemle, and Troy Headrick, would establish the Affirming Health Care Trust Fund. Administered by the State Treasurer, the fund would provide direct monetary support to healthcare providers and nonprofits offering gender-affirming care in Vermont. It would cover costs for patients who would otherwise go without treatment, fund the establishment of Vermont-based clinics, and pay for malpractice and liability insurance for clinicians who continue offering care. The bill is part of an increasing movement towards private clinics as a mechanism to survive federal threats.

The bill also includes provisions designed to protect patient information from both federal pressure and out-of-state threats, going further than the recent “refuge” or “shield” laws passed in several blue states to protect transgender youth care. It explicitly bars the board and other state actors from disclosing patient-identifiable data, the identities of providers, or the identities of award recipients to the federal government. This is a significant protection given the wave of abusive legislation and attempts to subpoena transgender healthcare records nationwide. While federal preemption may ultimately be litigated, these provisions give clinics a stronger legal footing to resist such demands—particularly as similar subpoenas have been repeatedly quashed in recent court cases.

The bill comes as families scramble to locate alternatives to hospital systems that are abandoning them. With more than 20 hospitals closing their doors to transgender youth care out of fear and preemptive compliance with the Trump administration, many families have been forced to seek alternatives. Just this week, major hospital systems across Colorado, for example, have stopped providing care. Groups like the Trans Youth Emergency Project say they have the capacity to refer displaced patients to private clinics, and in many places those clinics do exist and are absorbing demand. But as hospital-based programs continue to shut down and demand rises, those private providers will need sustained support—and more clinics will need to be created. Bills like this are a targeted way to do exactly that.

If this bill passes, Vermont would be the latest state to protect care in this way—but it would not be the only one. Massachusetts passed a similar measure last year, allocating $1 million toward transgender youth care clinics, though that funding has already come under criticism as insufficient to meet statewide need in the wake of major clinic closures. In New York City, newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani has pledged $65 million for transgender healthcare. If that funding is realized, it would position New York City as a major hub for private clinics capable of absorbing demand created by hospital closures across the country. This strategy could prove to be a critical backstop for private providers that are already emerging—and that are likely to come under increasing strain in the years ahead.

The bill allows funding from state appropriations, private donations, grants, and—importantly—federal funds under a future administration that is protective of transgender healthcare. It would take effect immediately upon passage, with the board required to convene by August 1, 2026. There are still hurdles ahead: the bill must advance through committee, pass both chambers, and ultimately receive meaningful funding to function as intended. But its introduction alone signals something important. At a moment when hospitals are retreating and families are being forced into crisis planning, Vermont lawmakers are putting forward a concrete framework to protect access to care rather than surrender it. For Vermonters who want to see their state take a clear stand, residents can find and contact their legislators through the Vermont General Assembly website to make clear where they stand on protecting transgender healthcare.

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Taking Joy In Ourselves

21 Inspiring Quotes from Transgender Activists

Supporting and learning from trans people is essential in fostering an inclusive and compassionate world. Members and allies of the trans community recognize the unique struggles and challenges that trans individuals currently face: discrimination, marginalization, and dangerous legislation.

By actively supporting and learning from trans activists and leaders, we can better understand these challenges and work together to create an environment where everyone is treated with respect and dignity, regardless of their gender identity.

We’ve compiled a list of impactful quotes from trans activists to foster understanding and appreciation for the trans community.

Please share and utilize these quotes to promote support for trans people and create a more inclusive, respectful, and supportive environment for everyone.

‍

Explore inspirational transgender quotes and captions — to help celebrate trans liberation & fight for trans rights

“I’ve never been interested in being invisible and erased.”
— Laverne Cox

“Trans people are extraordinary, strong, intelligent, persistent and resilient. We have to be. And we will not stand for the picking and choosing of rights. We still have hope.”
— Grace Dolan-Sandrino

“Despite the constant hatred we face as the LGBTQ+ community, we must stand united and strong in spreading our message of love.”
— Jazz Jennings, in a tweet

“I think trans women, and trans people in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms.
A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you’re supposed to be to live a more authentic life.”
— Laverne Cox

“They can try to ban us. They can try to get rid of our health care. They can try to deny us housing, credit, and public accommodations. They can try to shame us. They can try all they want to erase us, but at some point, they will realize the trans community is never going away.
Trans people are everywhere.
Every country, every race, every ethnicity, every religion, every socioeconomic level, every period of human history — we are everywhere. We are natural. You can’t rid of what’s natural. I think they know that, and it terrifies them.”
— Charlotte Clymer

“I want to make a difference in the world by speaking out and spreading hopeful messages. I want to send the message of “you are not alone and you are safe” to other transgender kids.”
— Rebekah Bruesehoff

“I don’t know what I am if I’m not a woman.”
— Marsha P. Johnson

“We have to be visible. We are not ashamed of who we are.”
— Sylvia Rivera

“Being transgender is not just a medical transition. … [It’s about] discovering who you are, living your life authentically, loving yourself, and spreading that love towards other people and accepting one another.”
— Jazz Jennings

“We have to remain visible. They have to see us, they have to know that we’re not going [nowhere], that we’ve been here ever since God made man and woman, and they have to get over it.
I don’t need their permission to exist; I exist in spite of them. I want you to train and teach and love on and create families within my community and gender non-conforming people, so that we can understand that we have a culture, we have a history, we have a reason to be here.
We have a purpose.
We’re entitled to be loved, and seek happiness, and share that with the people that we care about.”
— Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

Snip-There are a few more, and some graphics with the quotes that we can snag and share, too.

https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/transgender-quotes