A Sad Anniversary This Date In Peace & Justice History

The FBI employee was fired on the first day of the government shutdown as President Trump threatened more terminations.

President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel in the White House briefing room on Aug. 11.Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images file

Oct. 2, 2025, 7:49 PM EDT

By Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian

FBI Director Kash Patel on Wednesday fired an agent in training for displaying a gay pride flag on his desk while appointed to a field office in California last year, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The trainee, who previously worked as an FBI support specialist in Los Angeles, received a letter — dated Oct. 1 and signed by Patel — claiming he had displayed an improper “political” message in the workplace during his assignment in California under President Joe Biden, according to a copy of the letter shared with MSNBC.

The letter cited President Donald Trump’s Article II powers under the Constitution to dismiss federal agency career personnel, a justification used in several recent firings at the Department of Justice and FBI. The terminations are currently being challenged in several lawsuits.

“After reviewing the facts and circumstances and considering your probationary status, I have determined that you exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage in your work area during your previous assignment in the Los Angeles Field Office.”

FBI DIRECTOR KASH PATEL

“You are being summarily dismissed from your position as a New Agent Trainee at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and removed from the federal service,” read the letter, which was sent on the first day of a nationwide government shutdown that created job uncertainty throughout the federal workforce.

“After reviewing the facts and circumstances and considering your probationary status, I have determined that you exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage in your work area during your previous assignment in the Los Angeles Field Office,” Patel wrote, without referencing a flag.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment about this story. MSNBC was unable to reach the fired trainee for comment and, therefore, is not identifying him. The termination over the pride flag was first reported by CNN.

Wednesday’s dismissal comes after Trump and Russell Vought, the White House director of the Office of Management and Budget, threatened widespread firings of federal employees in the event of a government shutdown.

The agent trainee, who had most recently been assigned to the FBI Academy in Quantico, won an Attorney General’s Award in 2022 in recognition of his work, according to a Justice Department news release.

News of the trainee’s firing spurred some agents in the FBI’s Washington field office to scour their work stations and social media accounts for signs or comments — anything that could be viewed as offensive to Trump, his top appointees and MAGA supporters, according to one person familiar with the reaction within the government.

FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors warned one another, ahead of Trump’s inauguration, to be careful about displaying information revealing their sexual orientation or support for LGBTQ rights.

When Trump was weeks away from inauguration in January, FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors were warning one another to be careful about displaying information revealing their own sexual orientation or support for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender rights. After the inauguration, one person said, FBI agents warned colleagues that they heard new pro-Trump appointees installed at the FBI were combing through internal employee files to find lists that identified employees as LGBTQ.

DOJ Pride, an LGBTQ employee resource group at the Department of Justice, shut down in late January, less than 10 days after Trump signed an executive order seeking to root out all diversity, equity and inclusion measures from the federal government.

The group “ceased to operate effective immediately,” DOJ Pride’s board wrote in an email sent to members at the time.

“In this time of uncertainty and concern, we have taken the extraordinary measure of ceasing operations of DOJ Pride,” the message said. “We have made this decision in the interest and for the protection of all members.”

The email, which was shared then with NBC News by two DOJ staffers, thanked members for their “understanding during this time” and expressed hope that the group could “rebuild in the future.”

The FBI’s firing of a trainee for displaying a gay pride flag on his desk last year came as more than a dozen federal agency websites trumpeted that the “radical left” had caused the government shutdown.

Carol Leonnig

Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter and four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Ken Dilanian

Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MSNBC.

FBI to Categorize Trans People As “Nihilistic Violent Extremist” Threat Group, Report Says

I just read how Pete Hegseth has decided that the best military in the world is “too woke and not male enough to have the warrior ethos”. He wants a military modeled off the 1940 model with all male white straight cis people. A few women in the offices are OK but none of that integrated military that Eisenhower did, whites and blacks serve in different military units and of course now being Christian is going to be a new requirement. I don’t know if Hegseth is paid by Russians or if his Christian nationalism is causing him to idealize the very Russian military propaganda of a male only hyper aggressive military … the same military that has been getting its ass kicked in the Russian war against Ukraine. We are witnessing the dismantling of 80 plus years of integration and what made the US military so powerful. Think of how warfare is done today. With drones and weapons that reach targets over the horizons. You don’t need to be a Rambo for those tasks. I worked in a satellite intel unit. We were not really soldiers. When I was in the Navy we did not have the requirements for PT that the Army did, but we were still as deadly or even more so. This fixation of purging the military of the LGBTQ+ and female members is destroying what makes our military so great. Ask countries that have those people in their military like Israel! Their LGBTQ+ and female members are just effective as the men. But it doesn’t fit with the Christian Nationalist identity that Hegseth and his ilk are trying to push the US into.

Recently the heritage foundation pushed the idea of a trans terrorist idealization that was behind the public shootings and they used faked data that they created to prove their point. It is all to further the push of theirs to make the US a Christian Theocracy where only the biblical pairings they consider hole to be accepted. But in truth the bible allows for a male to have as many sexual partners as he wishes and only constrains the females from having sex with anyone but their husbands or their owners. The entire Christian teachings these people push is constriction for females and complete freedom for males on the issue of sex and marriage. Hugs

https://www.them.us/story/trump-admin-fbi-trans-nihilistic-violent-extremists-terrorist

The choice is being championed by the Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025.

By Abby Monteil

September 19, 2025

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly preparing to categorize transgender people as “violent extremists,” a categorization supported by organizations affiliated with Project 2025.

The most important LGBTQ+ news and politics stories delivered straight to your inbox

SIGN UP

By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.

According to a September 18 report by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, two anonymous national security officials said that the Bureau is discussing treating trans subjects as a subset of its new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs), which was created earlier this year. The Bureau defines “Nihilistic Violent Extremism” as “criminal conduct… in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos.”

Officials said that such a classification would give the Trump administration “political (and media) cover” as they escalate their anti-trans campaign in the aftermath of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death.

“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” an unnamed senior intelligence official told Klippenstein. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”

Last week, the false claim that there were “transgender” engravings on the bullets that suspect Tyler Robinson allegedly used to shoot Kirk began circulating widely, boosted by anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives like Rep. Nancy Mace and Steven Crowder. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox later confirmed that there was “no indication that the ammunition included transgender references.” On Sunday, Cox told Meet the Press that Robinson was allegedly in a romantic relationship with a roommate who is trans, providing no additional public corroborating data or information of the roommate’s gender. The authorities have stipulated the roommate has been cooperating with the investigation and was not aware of the shooting prior to its occurrence.

Despite no evidence linking an alleged trans roommate to Robinson’s motivation for shooting Kirk, right-wingers are nevertheless attempting to use this detail to push an anti-trans agenda. In a petition launched on Thursday, the Heritage Foundation — the far-right think tank behind the derided and controversial Project 2025 — and its spin-off group, the Oversight Project, asked the FBI to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE) as a domestic terrorism threat category.

The group defines “TIVE” as “the belief that violence is justified against people who oppose [the trans community],” as well as the belief that opposing trans rights “itself constitutes a form of violence towards people who identify as [trans or gender nonconforming]… or poses an imminent threat to such persons’ emotional, psychological, or physical safety, including through self-harm or suicide.”

As The Independent noted, if such a category is adopted by the FBI, it could be applied to rhetoric used by activists, writers, and allies speaking out against anti-trans policies and rhetoric.

At least a dozen hoaxes have claimed trans people were responsible for mass shootings and other incidents since 2012.In reality, there is no evidence suggesting significant patterns of violence committed by trans people. In 2024, The Gun Violence Archive’s Executive Director, Mark Bryant, said that out of 5,000 mass shootings tracked by the archive, the number of trans or LGBTQ+ suspects is in “the single digit numbers.”

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.

Abby Monteil is a New York-based writer. Her work has also appeared in The Daily Beast, Insider, Elite Daily, Thrillist, and others. … Read More

Intersex people in Europe face ‘alarming’ rise in violence, EU finds

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/18/intersex-people-europe-alarming-rise-violence-eu-finds

Increase in violence since 2019 is linked to online campaigns seeking to sow disinformation and fuel hatred

A Malta Pride participant carries a giant rainbow flag during the parade in Valletta. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters

Europeans who do not fit the typical definition of male or female are grappling with an “alarming” rise in violence, the EU’s leading rights agency has said, as concerted campaigns seek to sow disinformation and fuel hatred towards them.

The findings from the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, published on Tuesday, were based on responses from 1,920 people in 30 countries across Europe. All of them identified as intersex, an umbrella term referring to those with innate variations of sex characteristics and which can also include people who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse.

It found that since 2019, the rates of violence and harassment against intersex people have sharply increased – particularly among those who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse – far outpacing the increases reported by others in the LGBTQ+ community.

One in three surveyed, 34%, said they had been physically or sexually assaulted in the five years prior to the survey, up from 22% in 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, the rate of reported hate-motivated harassment had almost doubled, from 42% to 74%.

The survey also found that more than half, 57%, of respondents said they had been subjected “without their informed consent” to surgery or other medical treatment to modify their sex characteristics, while 39% said they were put through so-called conversion practices aimed at changing their sexual orientation or gender, compared with a rate of 25% among all LGBTQ+ groups.

The Vienna-based agency linked the rise to a wider climate of “increasing or persisting intolerance and bigotry, as well as intense online hatred campaigns” that had “instrumentalised” the LGBT+ community.

“Disinformation campaigns fomenting intolerance and prejudice are often waged by foreign and domestic actors acting to undermine European and western democracies and core values, such as dignity, equality and diversity,” the agency noted.

The result was a “weaponising” of the fact that many people know little about those who identify as intersex, trans, non-binary and gender diverse, allowing these campaigns to spread disinformation and “fuel hatred and violence against them”, it said.

The report echoes organisations across Europe, who have long warned of politicians using parliament, political rallies and media interviews to fuel anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and normalise discrimination across the continent.

In its findings this week, the EU agency warned that the impact of this discrimination was far-reaching for those who identify as intersex. “Their repeated victimisation and the multiple and compounded challenges they face can lead to severe exclusion and critical life situations such as homelessness, suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts.”

More than half of the intersex people surveyed, 53%, said they had contemplated suicide in the prior year. The figure was notably higher than the overall rate of 37% reported across all LGBTIQ groups.

The EU agency called on countries to add sex characteristics to the protected grounds in anti-discrimination legislation and do more to combat hate crimes and hate speech aimed at intersex people.

Their struggle requires an urgent response, said Sirpa Rautio, the director of the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights. “Intersex people in the EU experience alarming levels of exclusion, discrimination and violence,” she said in a statement. “They must be provided with targeted support that addresses their specific needs to ensure they can enjoy their fundamental rights and live in dignity.”

Responding to claims about homosexuality & the Bible

FBI’s War On Trans People | Ken Klippenstein | TMR

An important report on how the tRump bigots and trans people haters are targeting trans people. It shows how clearly they are lying and spreading disinformation so they can erase trans people from society. They flood the media at the first sign of violence yet never correct the misinformation when they are found to be wrong. The goal is to make the US a straight cis only society. They will be coming for the rest of the LGBTQ+ community as soon as they feel they win erasing the trans people. Remember they have made the pride flag political and forbidden to be displayed but the southern confederate battle flag is still allowed. Hugs

Investigative journalist, Ken Klippenstein joins the show to discuss the Trump administration’s manipulation of recent shootings to bolster their war on trans people. Live-streamed on September 25, 2025

What Think You?

Keynote Address: Unscripted — Introducing Intergender Dynamics and Reframing Gender-Type Prejudice by Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA

Read on Substack

🇨🇦 Richard Hogan PhD (Mathematics) · MD (Neuroscience) · PhD (Ethics) · DBA (HRD) Architect of IGD & IBT | Rewriting the language of gender justice Essays, theory, and verse from the post-binary frontier

Keynote Address: Unscripted—Introducing Intergender Dynamics and and Reframing Gender-Type Prejudice

Good morning.

It is an honor to stand before you today—not to echo what has already been said, but to challenge what we’ve long accepted. To offer not just a critique, but a new vocabulary. A new lens. A new way forward. I hope you are ‘not toned deaf’.

For decades, we have used the term misogyny to name and confront systemic prejudice against women. It has served us well in many ways. But today, I ask you—academics, legal scholars, educators, and clinicians—to consider this: What if the language we use to fight injustice is now limiting our ability to understand it?

We are living in a post-binary world. Gender is no longer a fixed category—it is a spectrum, a performance, a negotiation. And yet, our frameworks remain tethered to binary logic. Misogyny is one such tether. It is gender-specific. Directionally fixed. It presumes a hierarchy that no longer reflects the lived realities of our students, our patients, our communities.

So today, I introduce a new term: Intergender Dynamics , or IGD .

IGD refers to the patterned, reciprocal, and often asymmetrical interactions between individuals and groups across the gender spectrum. It is not just about identity—it is about relationship . It is about how we perform, police, and punish gender roles in our daily lives. It is about the emotional labor we assign, the authority we grant, the empathy we withhold.

And this is not just a sociological insight—it is a medical one.

Recent research in gender-affirming care has shown that transgender and gender-diverse individuals face significant barriers in accessing health services, often due to systemic bias and relational discomfort within clinical settings. Studies have also revealed that patients with dynamic or evolving gender identities experience distress not only from institutional exclusion, but from interpersonal dynamics—how they are spoken to, validated, or dismissed by providers.

In pediatric and adolescent medicine, clinicians are now trained to recognize how gender-role expectations affect mental health, emotional development, and access to care. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health and The Endocrine Society have emphasized the importance of relational sensitivity—not just diagnostic accuracy—in improving outcomes.

What does this tell us?

It tells us that IGD is not just a theoretical tool—it is a clinical imperative . If we want to reduce disparities, improve mental health, and foster trust in care, we must understand how gender prejudice operates not only in policy, but in conversation. In tone. In silence.

To complement IGD, I also propose Intergender Bias Theory (IBT) —a framework for analyzing the structural architecture of gender-type prejudice. IBT examines how laws, curricula, and institutional norms enforce rigid roles and marginalize deviation. Together, IGD and IBT offer a dual lens: one that captures both the macro-level scaffolding of bias and the micro-level choreography of interaction.

Let me be clear: retiring the term misogyny is not an act of denial. It is an act of evolution. It is a recognition that our language must grow with our understanding. That our frameworks must reflect the complexity of the world we now inhabit.

So I call on you:

Academics , to revise your syllabi, your research, your theories.
Legal scholars , to expand your statutes, your protections, your definitions.
Educators , to teach emotional literacy, role deconstruction, and relational justice.
Clinicians , to recognize IGD in patient care and to train for relational sensitivity.

Let us move from naming contempt to understanding connection. Let us shift from binary blame to systemic insight. Let us unscript ourselves—and write a new language of liberation.

This is not the end of a conversation. It is the beginning of a movement.

Thank you.

(snip-To read in Latin, French, Spanish, or Arab, click through to the Substack)

A Story From Imani Gandy:

Trump’s Second Term Hits Different Now That I’m Out—Opinion

Sep 24, 2025, 9:00am Imani Gandy

The target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.

Brown hands making a heart shape with the colors of the Pride flag filling the heart. The hands are placed over top of a red background with a gavel, Project 2025 papers, the U.S. Capitol, and hearts sketched into it. Queer people don’t have the luxury of treating Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ actions as a simple policy debate. Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group

I often joke about being a Meredith Baxter gay. You may remember her as Meredith Baxter Birney, the woman who played Elyse Keaton on Family Ties. She came out as a lesbian in 2009, when she was 62. I don’t know why Baxter is stuck in my mind as the quintessential “coming out later in life” queen. Plenty of people have come out late in life, but I’m firmly Gen X, so somehow she became my northstar of late-stage queerness.

When I finally came out at 50 in 2024, it wasn’t particularly dramatic. It was quiet and overdue. Something inside me had been waiting for years, tapping its foot, wondering when I’d finally be ready to stop pretending. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this column—to elicit a reaction that’s more dramatic than “no shit, Imani.”

Coming out later in life means you’ve probably already got bad knees and sciatica. I certainly do. I can’t drop it low anymore unless there’s a paramedic nearby to hoist me up. I missed the whole glamorous L Word era because, even though I knew I was at least a little gay around the edges, I had no idea what to do about it. I was even living in Los Angeles when The L Word was on the air. I knew all the places I could go if I wanted to spread my gay wings.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just kept plodding on and trying to date men. I even considered marrying two different men in my 20s and 30s. And I bless the rains down in Africa that I didn’t, because both marriages would have ended up in disaster.

Sometimes I grieve for the queer Imani who could have been tearing it up in Los Angeles in 2002. But I can’t go back; I can only move forward. And I’m moving forward with an additional identity that colors the way I move through the world.

And on top of that, I’m moving through that world under Trump 2.0.

As a Black woman, I never needed Donald Trump to show me who he was. I clocked him from the jump. Racist, misogynist, wannabe strongman—it was all right there. His first term was terrifying. Not in the politics is messy way, but in the this man will torch democracy if doing so makes him feel powerful way.

But this time hits different. Because now I’m out.

Project 2025’s ‘dark plan’ for LGBTQ+ rights

When Trump was in office the first time, I wasn’t living openly as a queer woman. I fought his administration on reproductive rights, voting rights, immigration, and racial justice in part by highlighting the misinformation and half-truths that are the core features of the conservative effort to impose Christian theocracy on queer people, immigrants, people of color—on basically anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their straight, white, Christian box.

That’s because I’m a person who deeply believes in justice. Hell, I’ve dedicated my life to reproductive justice even though I’ve never been pregnant. Never had an abortion. (My girlfriend says it’s because I’m extremely empathetic and I hate injustice.)

But I didn’t feel the daily, stomach-clenching fear of watching a government try to erase LGBTQ+ rights while knowing my own life was on the line.

Now I do.

(Imani’s new podcast drops on Sept. 25, 2025. Subscribe to Boom! Lawyered to be the first to hear it.)

Trump’s first term was hardly neutral on queer people. He banned trans people from serving in the military. He rescinded guidance telling schools to protect trans students. His Department of Justice claimed in court that businesses should be able to fire workers just for being gay. He proposed gutting nondiscrimination protections in health care so doctors could refuse to treat trans patients. He appointed judges who seem to pride themselves on being hostile to LGBTQ+ rights.

Now, we’ve got Trump 2.0—and the plan is even darker. His allies wrote it all down in Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for turning the country into a Christian nationalist theocracy. Project 2025 is about reframing queer identity and sexual expression as obscenity, criminalizing it, and pushing LGBTQ+ people out of public life.

The Supreme Court is already helping this project along, as I wrote back in July. This past term, the Court handed Christian conservatives two major wins: Mahmoud v. Taylor and Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.

In Mahmoud, religious parents in Maryland didn’t want their kids reading age-appropriate LGBTQ+-inclusive books like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, Prince & Knight, Pride Puppy! These children’s books don’t contain anything graphic or explicit; they just acknowledge that queer families exist.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the parents. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said parents should get a heads-up and the chance to opt out of any lessons with LGBTQ+ content “until all appellate review in this case is completed”—a process that could take years.

Alito gussied up his argument as “religious liberty,” arguing that requiring parents to submit their children to instruction that contradicts their religious beliefs constitutes a burden on religious exercise. But let’s be real: It’s a green light for parents to purge classrooms of queer content. Schools under pressure won’t build complex opt-out systems for kids whose parents object to these texts. They’ll just pull the books from classrooms.

Then there’s the Free Speech Coalition case. The Supreme Court upheld a law Texas passed in 2023 requiring age verification to access “sexually explicit” content online. Sounds like it’s about porn, right? But Project 2025 calls for a ban on pornography not just in the good, old-fashioned sense of the word. It expands the definition of porn in a way that can easily be interpreted to cover materials commonly found in a high school library, like books on sexual health, puberty, and information on sexual orientation and identity for LGBTQ+ youth.

To the architects of Project 2025, a book on puberty or a novel with queer characters is basically Hustler magazine.

Put Mahmoud and Free Speech Coalition together, and you see the playbook: Queer identity equals obscenity. Queer books? Obscene. Queer websites? Obscene. Porn? Criminal. Once you collapse all of that into the same bucket, it’s open season on LGBTQ+ people and culture.

This is the blueprint Trump and his allies are running with. Not just another round of chaos, but a coordinated effort to erase queer life—through schools, libraries, the internet, and the courts.

That’s why this second term feels different

It’s not that I didn’t know Trump was dangerous before—I did. But because I’m out now, I feel these attacks land in a new place.

It’s my life. My love. My newly-formed family. My right to be visible without being treated like contraband or pretending that my girlfriend, Portia, is my sister.

Coming out didn’t make Trump more dangerous. It made the danger he presents impossible to intellectualize away.

Straight people can treat this as just another policy debate. Queer people don’t have that luxury. We know our lives and relationships are bargaining chips in a theocracy that Christian nationalists are trying to build one opt-out, one website ban, one court case at a time.

So yeah, Trump’s second term hits different because the target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.

And that’s the gut punch: Trump doesn’t just threaten democracy in the abstract now—he threatens the most personal parts of my life.

Reblog From Janet

Reblog from Katelyn Burns

Still Trying To Learn This, Myself-

Teach me by Jenny Lawson (thebloggess)
Read on Substack

Hello, friend.

This last week started badly with Hailey having another case of meningitis, but ended incredibly, with Hailey bouncing back and me finding absolute treasures at Shelley Duvall’s house. (Long story. It’s on my blog.) And it was sprinkled with little bits of insanity as internet rapture jokes (did you know it’s supposed to rapture?) made me laugh while also lightly triggering my past religious trauma. Ah, the complicated pleasures of being alive!

I’m trying to focus less on the loud bullshit in the world that I can’t control, and focus more on the quiet good in the world that inspires me to keep going and to do small things to make the world better. It is really hard though because I tend to hyper-focus on “SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG AND/OR MEAN” rather than “Someone on the internet is kind and calming and has a good plan to help others that I can support.” How long will this well-intentioned plan last? Probably 4-6 hours, with my record. But it’s worth a shot.

And that’s what this week’s doodle is about.