Photo: ShutterstockA non-binary Texas high schooler is rallying fellow students and community members to oppose their school district’s ban on LGBTQ websites, which includes suicide prevention websites.
Cameron Samuels, a senior in the Katy Independent School District (KISD) of southeast Texas, says the district does little to address anti-LGBTQ bullying and slurs. The district also has an internet filter that blocks content related to “Human Sexuality” from school computers.
Related: Majority of Americans support talking about LGBTQ people in schools
KISD said the filter was implemented to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, a federal law meant to protect children from online predators. But the filter specifically blocks access to LGBTQ resources, including The Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBTQ youth.
District officials told Samuels that KISD blocked the Trevor Project because of the “chat capabilities” on the organization’s website. However, the district’s web filter still allows students to access social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Both websites have chat capabilities that have been used by online sex traffickers to exploit children.
“The assumption that people communicating on the Trevor Project are predatory is bigoted and homophobic,” Samuels wrote for The Los Angeles Blade.
School officials also told him that students can still access non-LGBTQ suicide prevention resources. However, Samuels doesn’t understand why the district wouldn’t want its students to have complete access to any resources that might help save lives.
The web filter allows access to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, to websites covering heterosexual marriage, as well as to Alex Jones’s rabidly anti-LGBTQ disinformation website InfoWars.
However, the filter blocks access to LGBTQ news websites, the Human Rights Campaign and LGBTQ community resource centers.
Students struggling with their LGBTQ identities may rely on private, free computer access provided by schools to safely search for queer-affirming resources away from their families, Samuels added. By denying students access, the district prevents students from supporting their emotional and mental well-being, they said.
“School officials have said sites with LGBTQ+ content are not part of the educational curriculum or common classroom activities,” Samuels continued. “Yet they won’t explain how People magazine, ESPN, Gun Show Trader, or Breitbart meet this same standard.”
For almost a year now, Samuels and their classmates have asked district and school board officials to un-block the resources. The officials have promised to do so, but have yet to follow through on their promises.
So the students have launched a petition calling for the unblocking of LGBTQ sites and the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identities in KISD’s publicly available non-discrimination statements. The school districts of Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio have all included them in their statements.
Category: LGBTQ+ / Gay / Trans / Gender
Texas Democratic candidate compares gay opponent’s HIV status to gambling & drug addiction
Bigotry and putting religious ideas before real science is not limited to Republicans. It seems to be getting worse in the US as more people use their fake morals from 2-4 thousand years ago to dictate what they understand or accept. This is a throwback to the 1980’s. It is more deserving that a Republicans would say this than a Democrat. Hugs
The queer community is firing back at the Democrat’s shameful remarks and they’re not mincing words. Two LGBTQ political organizations have condemned homophobic and transphobic comments made by a Democratic candidate for the Texas House.
The Stonewall Democrats of Dallas and the LGBTQ Victory Fund have both condemned Sandra Crenshaw, a former Dallas City Council member who is running against gay candidate Venton Jones for the Democratic nomination in the 100th Texas House district race.
Related: Anti-LGBTQ Madison Cawthorn loses GOP primary as out lesbian candidate gets Democratic nod
In her May 17 comments to the Dallas County Commissioners Court, Crenshaw said, “What I find deceptive is the fact that my opponent Venton Jones announced to The Dallas Morning News that he wants to be the first Black gay legislator living with HIV. We have officials who are both drug addicts, alcoholics, gambling disorders, but HIV does not have to be disclosed unless you want it to be.”
“Gay activist Vincent Jones did not use this race as a platform to educate Black people about HIV,” she continued. “Jones did not once in his plethora of literature, not one time did he mention that he’s openly gay living with HIV, not one time, okay?”
At the end of her three-minute testimony period, Jones said that Black voters “deserve transparency.”
She then added this transphobic anecdote: “The ACLU in another state says that transgender men is unconstitutional in the jail cells, and so they put them in a cell with another woman, and they ended up impregnating two of those women. So when are you going to protect straight men from injustices?”
Crenshaw was referencing April reports of two cisgender female inmates in a New Jersey prison who became pregnant after having sex with two pre-surgical transgender female inmates. The New Jersey State Department of Corrections stated that the sex was “consensual.” The state has required trans women to be housed with cis women since June 2021.
In her March 4 primary race against Jones, Crenshaw won 34.2 percent of the vote and Jones won 25.6 percent. The two are now competitors in a runoff election to fill the seat of Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat who is seeking a seat in the U.S. Congress.
Jones is endorsed by the Dallas chapter of the Stonewall Democrats, and the organization criticized Crenshaw for her comments against him, The Dallas Voice reported.
Annise Parker, the lesbian former Houston mayor who is president & CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, also criticized Crenshaw for her comments.
“Crenshaw’s uninformed remarks — rooted in her own ignorance and homophobia — reveal a candidate shamefully unaware of priorities in this district and clearly unfit for the challenges of the office,” Parker said in a statement.
“She, astonishingly, attacks Venton Jones for not revealing his sexual orientation and HIV status by referencing his remarks in The Dallas Morning News discussing exactly those things,” Parker added. “Thinly veiled anti-gay and transphobic insults reveal the character of this perennial candidate.”
“Politicizing someone’s sexual orientation and HIV status is unacceptable, particularly from a person who wants to be a public official. Crenshaw should immediately apologize,” she concluded.
The runoff election between Crenshaw and Jones officially occurs on May 24, though early voting for the seat will run from May 16 to May 20.
MUST Watch – Allison Gill on Roe v Wade, Freedom from Republicans & More
I listen to three podcasts Allison Gill does. She is smart, funny, and has a great grasp of politics and the law. But her story here in this short interview shows the incredible harm of the Republicans taking away the right of full body autonomy for healthcare and abortion from women. She was drugged and raped as a young service member. She became pregnant with the rapist child. Her command told her if she reported the rape by a married man, she would be the one charged and punished, not him. There was no plan B or pills to end the pregnancy back then. She was looking at being a single woman in the military trying to carry a rapist baby to term and give birth, how could she do her job, would she be discharged? Thankfully, she was in a place where there was a Planned Parenthood, and she could get an abortion. She doesn’t complain about this but I damn sure will, she had to pay for it herself. Drugged, raped, unwanted pregnancy, and still she had to come up with the money to have the abortion while the married rapist faced no penalty for his actions. Damn it people this is the world the Republicans, at the urging of the hyper religious, are dragging us back to. Where men can force themselves on women, make them pregnant, leave them with the life destroying problem, and walk away happy to have used a woman’s body to have sex and cum in. I have been raped. As a child repeatedly. As an adult three times. The only saving grace is that I cannot get pregnant. I never faced that issue. This beyond me how any decent people can be OK with this. I said before these anti-abortion rights people have an image in their minds of a year old bouncing baby or a toddler that is being aborted. But it is not. In most cases it is a clump of cells, it is something smaller than a gold ball. No matter what trimester it has no consciousness, never drew a breath, never had a dream of its future, never desired anything in life, never experienced anything, yet Republicans and the rabid right want to make that thing more important than a woman that has done all of those. I just don’t understand. Hugs
Parent brings THE HOUSE DOWN after board member tries to justify bigotry using religion
New Study Shows Trans Youth Are Extremely Unlikely to Detransition
https://www.them.us/story/trans-youth-desistance-rare-study-pediatrics
Conservatives and assorted anti-trans reactionaries like to claim that trans kids don’t understand their own identities, and that almost all young trans people will eventually end up identifying with their birth gender. But a new study is blowing that assertion out of the water.
Published this month in the medical journal Pediatrics, it reveals the findings of a five-year longitudinal study of trans youth conducted by Princeton University’s Trans Youth Project. Out of more than 300 young trans-identifying people aged 3-12, only 2.5% identified as cisgender at the end of the five-year period, with 94% identifying as trans girls or boys and 3.5% identifying as nonbinary.
This stands in sharp contrast to inflated figures cited by anti-trans pundits, who often claim that a majority of trans youth will “detransition” and experience significant psychological distress as they return to presenting and living as their birth gender. (The Princeton team uses the term “retransition” in place of the more loaded term “detransition,” which other researchers have noted has “become associated with politically motivated attempts to impede access to gender-affirming care.”)
“These results suggest that retransitions are infrequent,” the Princeton study authors concluded. “More commonly, transgender youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way.”
This doesn’t mean the researchers believe retransition is so rare as not to be worth studying; to the contrary, they argue that “understanding retransitions is crucial for clinicians and families to help make them as smooth as possible for youth.”
And this study did uncover some early data about children who retransition. “Later cisgender identities were more common amongst youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6,” the study noted, with most of those children retransitioning to a cisgender identity before age 10.
This new data blows previous datasets out of the water, particularly the thoroughly debunked (but still widely cited) studies which claim as many as 80% of trans-identified young people will eventually “desist” from their gender identity. Those statistics have been used to stoke fears that prepubescent children are undergoing “irreversible” medical procedures that most of them will regret, as seen in the language of anti-trans bills like South Carolina’s S1259 and journalist Abigail Shrier’s infamous book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
The legislation aims to protect families of trans youth who have fled their home states.Contrary to such hyperbolic claims, hundreds of thousands of lives are not in the process of being ruined as we speak. “I think the critical piece is that we’re seeing the retransitioning happening before the ages at which kids were beginning medical transition,” said Kristina Olsen, the study’s lead author, in comments to NBC News.
Only one child in the cohort later identified as cisgender after being prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy, and the others who re-identified as cis did so “before blockers were even on the table,” Olsen added.
After two years of bewildering opposition to wearing masks during a pandemic, we won’t hold our breath for conservatives to listen to this science either. But the Trans Youth Project’s work — which Olsen says will continue for a total of twenty years — is giving doctors and health providers more data to work with, and shoring up what many trans people already know to be true: trans-affirming care works, and it can change countless lives for the better.
Homocon Is Sad That Leopards Are Eating His Face
Mediaite reports:
Dave Rubin finally commented on the backlash he received following the announcement that his husband, David Janet, and he are expecting two children via surrogate later this year. Speaking with Candace Owens on her show, Rubin was asked about how he handled all the naysayers. He replied, “There’s a lot of mean people and trolls and clickbait people and all of that stuff. 99% of what I got, especially from the public people that I’m associated with.”
“So are there gonna be some traditional religious conservatives that are not happy with same-sex marriage and same-sex couples having kids? Of course, there are, I believe in religious liberty. And, as long as your beliefs don’t impede on my life and my ability to have a family and all of that stuff, then I still think we can live in the same country. And I would hope that they can too. You’re allowed to believe what you want.”
From a March report by Forbes:
On Twitter, the responses to Rubin’s announcement proved striking, with his own fans expressing discomfort, or even disgust, at the thought of two gay men starting a family. Rubin, a gay man in a socially conservative space, has never been been fully accepted by a vocal segment of his audience, or even his peers and supposed “friends.”
Rubin’s family announcement, however, has driven the talk show host to a new low, as his recent interview with Glenn Beck seemed an attempt to win the approval of homophobes and bigots.
The humiliating interview sees Beck, in a twisted attempt to show compassion, comparing Rubin’s sexual orientation to alcoholism. Rubin silently accepts the comparison, and remarkably, attempts to blame “the left” for his own audience’s negative response.
The full Forbes piece is worth your time.
Paula • 4 days ago • edited
And, as long as your beliefs don’t impede on my life and my ability to have a family and all of that stuff, then I still think we can live in the same country.
You stupid shithead, that’s all any of us want. But it didn’t matter until they did it to you, right?
Reap what you have sown, asshole.
Snarkaholic Paula • 4 days ago
Note that he ONLY cares about beliefs impeding HIS family…
…instead of “as long as your beliefs don’t impede on the lives of OTHERS.”
Nic Peterson Paula • 4 days ago
He obviously never spoken to a religious conservative. They believe we should be dead. I’m really not seeing his middle ground fantasy. I hope he and his husband are able to keep their children safe from the nutters that they court as a business model, because they didn’t ask for that shit.
Paula Nic Peterson • 4 days ago
As long as his money is protected and he gets his tax cuts.
lattebud Nic Peterson • 4 days ago
My nephew’s wife called me and asked that I reach to family member whose few living close family members called him “a dirty little faggot” and said “We love you, but not your lifestyle.” This young man is devastated and feels he is not worth anything. This is the world they are creating in the name of a faith that preaches love. Fortunately, we are talking to him and he is coming to visit for a couple weeks to get away from this toxic space
Nic Peterson lattebud • 3 days ago
As I have often said, nobody in the world can rip a child’s will to live right out of them like a good christian. Many of us have survived similar circumstances and your nephew appears to have some complicated backstory which will complicate things but doesn’t change the fact that he has value and deserves to be loved. There is no forward until the family is permanently out of the picture, if they can’t have their way they will continue trying to destroy him because that’s the love of their god.
Nic Peterson Darreth • 3 days ago
The kids will be indoctrinated and likely live in a protective bubble. Much of that will depend on how successfully daddy can erase them from the conversation and then go on with his business model. If that Mercer vampire lady or one of the other oligarchs that are funding the mayonnaise rebellion crowd find him useful, the kids may find themselves sheltered long enough to make daddies little business model a family endeavor.
One hundred percent. What a stupid asshole. What he and other Log Cabinets don’t get is they’re just putting you in a roomier closet. Yeah, you can exist. No, you can’t get married and you can’t have kids. And no, I don’t want to hear about your yucky relationship.
JoeMyGodMod • 4 days ago
You may recall Rubin’s fawning 2019 interview with Milo. Well, here’s Milo after Rubin’s baby announcement.
Scottie's Playtime 