The responses were taken from the organization’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People which made the following open-ended request to respondents (who were between the ages of 13 and 24): “We would love for you to share a message of advice or encouragement to other young people in the LGBTQ community.”
“I walk around my city, and I see businesses that have gay pride flags and pride flags in their windows,” one gay man said.
One respondent wrote, “Finding a sense of community helps so much, whether it’s online or in person. Just find a place where you can ask questions and read about other people’s experiences.”
Another stressed the importance of envisioning a better future and doing what one can to cultivate community support now.
“Find your group and work towards where you wanna be in life and you’ll make it there,” one wrote, as other offered encouraging words like, “Keep pushing,” “Keep going for another day,” “Just keep going, please,” and “Please keep strong.”
Another urged resilience and perseverance. “Be yourself always,” they wrote. “You may lose connections along the way but trust, there’s someone out there who will love you.” Another respondent agreed, writing, “Just look for the people who love you no matter what.”
Others urged self-compassion and patience as young people figure out their identities. One such message said, “Don’t rush finding your identity. Take your time to explore, and don’t be afraid to take up labels if they feel right at the time.”
Some respondents suggested repeating self-affirmations like the following:
I love you.
I believe in you.
You got this.
You are so strong and you are deserving of love always.
“Wake up everyday, and tell yourself you love yourself — until, one day, you believe it,” one young person wrote.
Other respondents acknowledged the adversity faced by young LGBTQ+ people, whether in politics or unaccepting homes.
“[It’s] very easy to think that the entire world [despises] you for who you are when your home environment conveys that,” one wrote. “You might not feel safe and happy now,” another wrote, “but hopefully, there will come a day when you find your home.”
“Don’t let the people around you tell you that you can’t love who you want and feel what you want to feel,” one respondent wrote.
Another added, “I know things look down right now and it’s hard to see past the hate that’s being spread but it always helps to remember that most people don’t hate us and that there are tons of us out there that are willing to help.”
“We’ve always been here. And we always will be,” another wrote. “They cannot erase us.”
Other respondents advised doing things to lessen negativity.
“Ignore the Idiots and cut people off if [you] have too [sic]. Life is too short to care what people think about you and they don’t even have to live your life and experience the things you do.”
In the same vein, another respondent replied, “Don’t let the people around you tell you that you can’t love who you want and feel what you want to feel.”
“Peer support is associated with lower levels of emotional and behavioral distress among LGBTQ+ young people,” the Trevor Project wrote. “However, not all LGBTQ+ young people have consistent access to peer support, especially LGBTQ+ young people who hold multiple marginalized identities.”
As such “hearing words of encouragement and advice from fellow LGBTQ+ young people has never been more needed,” the group added.
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I was simply reading this, then saw a bit about Supt. Walters. The news, as humorously presented as Wonkette does, is still sickening as to RWNJ logic, and none of us needs that. However. I did promise to update regarding Walters. So, here’s the link to the article, with the snippet about Walters. -A.
If We Can’t Blame Teachers Unions For Terrorism (Yes, Really!), Then The Terrorists Will Win by Rebecca Schoenkopf
(snip) “For his part, Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma schools chief who has been trying to Jesusify the state’s entire public school system, was pretty sure that these men committed these acts because the US school system taught them to hate America — to hate America so much that, again, they both joined the Army. Like big America-haters often do.
“Walters said:”
‘What a terrible day when we see terrorist attacks on American soil. It’s absolutely tragic and we’ve got to look as a country on how these things happen. We absolutely have to shut down the border, we can’t allow terrorists to come across the border. We also have to take a look at how are these terrorists coming from people that live in America?
‘You have schools that are teaching kids to hate their country, that this country is evil, you have the teachers unions pushing this on our kids, the radical Left wants people to hate this country. They’ve completely destroyed the integrity of the FBI by making them more concerned about DEI than about protecting Americans. It’s a major part of this.
‘And look, this is a real uncomfortable truth, and I know the Left is going to lose their mind, but listen: We cannot allow our schools to be terrorist training camps. We cannot allow our schools to teach our kids to hate this country. We cannot allow our kids to be taught that this is an evil country.
‘That’s why we’re getting back to the basics in Oklahoma, to make sure that our kids love this country, understand American values, understand the role that the Constitution, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence played in American history. Because we want patriots, and that’s going to be the focus of our schools.
“I suppose it’s possible that these men simply forgot that they hated America for several decades and then went on to commit terrorist attacks against the United States after remembering that they learned that Columbus committed genocide and that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves in school — but it does seem a tad unlikely.” (snip)
This is good news and shows why so many are moving into California and out of places like Florida. Students should feel free from fear while learning. They also should feel free to be their authentic self in a supportive atmosphere. School is a time to learn about the world, other people, subjects, and about one’s self. And not all kids have safe supportive homes. Hugs.
———————————————————————————————————–
Miguel Gutierrez Jr.
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CalMatters
Supporters of transgender rights gathered at the Capitol during a press conference on March 17, 2022.
Amid a flurry of recent school board policies aimed at the rights of transgender students, California passed a new law in July that prevents schools from requiring staff to notify parents if a student identifies as LGBTQ.
“Teachers can still talk to their parents,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference on Monday in which he touted a new plan to improve career opportunities for adults. “What they can’t do is fire a teacher for not being a snitch. I don’t think teachers should be gender police.”
LGBTQ advocates said that “forced outing” policies, such as those adopted in Chino, Temecula and a dozen other districts, infringe on students’ privacy and could potentially harm students whose parents disapprove of their identity.
The state sued to stop Chino’s policy, and most districts either scrapped their policies, tweaked the language or put them on hold.
This act “could not be more timely or necessary, and LGBTQ+ students across California can breathe a sigh of relief,” Tony Hoang, executive director of Equality California, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, wrote. “LGBTQ+ youth can now have these important family conversations when they are ready and in ways that strengthen the relationship between parent and child, not as a result of extremist politicians intruding into the parent-child relationship.”
‘The battle continues’
Opponents of the new law said that parental notification policies actually strengthen ties between students and parents, and schools should not withhold information on such important matters. Even though a parental notification measure that would have applied to all schools failed to qualify for the ballot, opponents vowed to keep fighting.
“This (law) doesn’t clarify anything. And nothing prevents individual teachers from bringing the issue up with parents,” said Roseville school board member Jonathan Zachreson, an organizer of the failed ballot measure and whose district was among those that passed parental notification policies. “So the battle continues.”
The new law also requires the state Department of Education to update its LGBTQ resources and encourage school districts to offer counseling, support groups, clubs, anti-bullying policies and other measures to support LGBTQ students and their families. Schools would have to pay for those services with their existing funding.
“I don’t think teachers should be gender police.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom
LGBTQ young people are particularly vulnerable on school campuses. In a recent survey of 18,000 LGBTQ young people nationwide, nearly half said they had been bullied in the past year, and 10% said they had attempted suicide. Those whose schools supported LGBTQ rights were less likely to suffer from mental health challenges.
Even if the new law sparks a backlash in more conservative areas of the state, California was right to move forward with it, especially as some states push ahead with their own parental notification policies, said USC education professor Morgan Polikoff.
“Will everyone like this law? Certainly not. Will it lead to conflict? There is no doubt,” Polikoff said. “But I am hopeful this will be good for the queer kids in California’s schools and will point the way toward similar efforts in other states.”
CalMatters’ Adam Echelman contributed to this story.
A Tulsa Judge denied a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit against Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters on Tuesday.
Bixby Public Schools Superintendent Rob Miller filed a defamation lawsuit against State Superintendent Ryan Walters after Walters called Miller a liar and a clown in July in response to Miller’s concerns over Title I funding.
Walters had asked the judge to dismiss it, saying it would set a bad precedent going forward. However, the judge ruled that because of the claims Walters was making he needed to show evidence to support them. The case could still be dismissed at a later date if proper evidence is provided.
A date for further action on the case has not been set.
(snip-MORE with background on the page linked above)
Nice Time: MacKenzie Scott Pissing Off Elon Musk With The Billions For The DEIs And Abortions by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Making right-wing chuds real mad is icing on the cake! Read on Substack
Billionaires are mostly despicable Montgomery-Burns type people. But then there’s MacKenzie Scott, one of the few ultra-rich who doesn’t deserve to get tarred and feathered in the coming revolution! She’s the third-wealthiest woman in the United States, 38th in the world, and has now given away $19.25 billion (with a B!) in 2,524 charitable gifts, with a focus on racial equality, LGBTQ+ equality, democracy, and climate change.
She and her small team seek out nonprofits operating in communities facing high food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital. And then she gives away the money with no strings attached. Which is unusual in philanthropy! Also unusual, she’s pretty quiet about it. She has a web site that shows what she has donated to, but there’s no MacKenzie Scott ribbon cuttings, or buildings with her name on them when she drops a check. She donates, then she dips. And she plans to “keep at it until the safe is empty.”
Scott’s given to community centers, the ACLU, historically Black colleges and universities, food banks, Planned Parenthood, YMCAs, dance theaters, Native American groups, legal aid centers, to paying off medical debt, legal funds for transgender people. It is truly an inspiring list!
You may be wondering how she got there! Then-MacKenzie Tuttle went to Princeton and studied under Toni Morrison, then got a job working at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. Where, in 1993, she met Jeff Bezos, a 30-year-old with thinning hair. But she liked his laugh, and he liked that she was resourceful. “The number-one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison,” he once said.
And even though she was just 23, MacKenzie was that kind of can-do woman! They married, and there would be no Amazon without her. They moved to Seattle, where she helped Jeff get the company off the ground from their garage. She wrote Amazon’s business plan, did the company’s accounting and toted its early orders to the UPS Store in their minivan, while also raising their four kids, and writing novels. She won an American Book Award for her first one, The Testing of Luther Albright, which she wrote in the bathroom for 10 years in between everything else she was doing.
All seemed happy in the Bezos marriage for 25 years, until 2019, when the National Enquirer tracked Jeff and his (also married) ladyfriend Lauren Sánchez “across five states and 40,000 miles, tailed them in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways, intimate dinner dates and ‘quality time’ in hidden love nests.” They even somehow got his personal texts and shirtless bathroom photos, which seems potentially not legal. And then, according to Jeff, AMI content officer Dylan Howard tried to blackmail and extort him. (You may remember that creep from the Trump trial, as the broker of catching and killing tales of Trump’s affairs, or from catch/killing stories about Harvey Weinstein.)
And Jeff refused to play ball with the Enquirer. The story came out, and MacKenzie and Jeff announced their separation, as did Sánchez and her husband, Patrick Whitesell. And MacKenzie got 400 million Amazon shares in the divorce, which she has been selling and donating to charities ever since. But don’t worry, she’s still got about $32 billion left to make do with!
Anyway, now Bezos and Sánchez are reportedly getting married this weekend in Aspen. Mazel tov! Bezos been living flashy, with a $500 million yacht, buoyant fiancee, and apparently imposing his Trump-sympathies onto his newspaper.
And MacKenzie’s been living more quietly! She changed her last name to Scott, and married one of her children’s teachers (though they have since divorced). Otherwise, she’s been laying low, though she’s been known to sometimes gal-pal around with Melinda French Gates, Bill’s ex, who has pledged $1 billion over the next two years to US nonprofits working in women’s health. I’ll bet those two have a lot of fun!
All of this lady-giving mightily pisses off Elon Musk, who has a charitable foundation with zero employees, that for three years has failed to distribute even the 5 percent minimum required to be eligible for a tax deduction, putting him potentially in hot water with the IRS, OOPS.
Musk bitched in March that “super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse” could contribute to the decline of Western civilization, and more recently Xitted that Scott’s contributions were “concerning.” Which rather just draws more attention to those ladies’ good works, in contrast to what a shit person Elon is, unable to donate a wooden nickel unless it might benefit himself, somehow, and fucking over his exes in whatever way possible.
We call this “divorced dad energy” and he is rich in it for sure.
After his snotty comment, MacKenzie Scott gave away another $600 million, the end.
If you only watch one of these please watch this one. He talks about the cost of marginalizing those minorities who have less, giving hate to those groups that are different based on your own egos such as the LGBTQ+. He explains why that was never the plan Jesus had for those who claimed to be his followers. I do not share his belief in a deity, but I sure do endorse him message of inclusion and love. Oh and I am about to peel 9 hard boiled eggs so Ron can make deviled eggs which I love warm, he has the new chicken supreme sauce recipe in the oven along with a large ham, only there is no chicken in the chicken supreme. Instead it has lots of potatoes and large sliced mushrooms. We both love the gravy the sauce makes and so thought why not do it with other things. Hope your meals will be as grand as ours. I am so happy right now, the most happy I have been in two months. Hugs.
This is another important one about Christian nationalism and how seeking power ends up losing god. Love it. Hugs
The innocent question that changed Ryan Metzger’s life came the summer his son turned six. That’s when Owen asked about the ever-expanding bag of old batteries in the junk drawer.
“What’s going to happen to them, Dad?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do with them? We’re learning about recycling in school. Where do these get recycled?”
“Um,” Metzger said. “I don’t know.”
He knew where to get batteries, of course. And there were always instructions on correctly using them. But instructions on what to do when they died? Not so much. That’s why he fell into the habit of stuffing dead batteries into a drawer filled with all the other small, disused stuff that the family wasn’t sure what to do with.
“It’s heavy, Dad.” Owen waved the bag of batteries around.
It was pretty full, Metzger had to admit. Detritus from flashlights and old toys, smoke alarms and remote controls, with a crusty one that came out of an old toothbrush, these batteries were one of many types of problematic garbage. They had no obvious final resting place, much like garden chemicals, old phones, light bulbs, car parts, cooking grease … a ton of stuff, really, now that Metzger thought about it. You weren’t supposed to put any of that in the recycling bin. But you couldn’t put it with the landfill-bound trash, either, although that’s what many people ended up doing out of desperation or not caring or habit — or assuming (incorrectly) it would all somehow get properly sorted out by this impenetrable, mysterious entity called the waste management system.
“There’s got to be a place for old batteries,” Metzger assured his son. “Let’s find out.”
It took three phone calls to find a business near their Seattle home that would take their old batteries and ensure that they were actually recycled instead of just dumped somewhere.
Father and son decided to drive to this battery recycler so that Owen could make the delivery. On impulse, they asked a few neighbors if they had stashes of old batteries, too. Several did, so Ryan and Owen took those as well.
Owen was so delighted by this accomplishment that he and his father decided to make a regular project out of hauling one different type of problem trash every weekend to the right recycler, offering to do the same for neighbors in their Queen Anne section of Seattle. So they started gathering bent clothes hangers one weekend, burned-out light bulbs the next, and then plastic bags, wraps, pouches, bubble wrap, and Styrofoam, none of which plays well with community recycling programs. Demand kept expanding block by block as word got around about his little father-and-son project. Soon he had to create a subscriber email group to track it all, with a message going out each week on what sort of trash would be picked up next and when to leave it outside for pickup. They dubbed this “Owen’s List.”
Around this time, grateful subscribers to Owen’s List who had long felt guilty about their secret trashiness started offering the duo money. A few suggested they charge for the service. “I’d gladly give up a couple lattes a month in exchange for you taking care of this,” one neighbor said. “I bet a lot of people would.”
Could that be true? Could their father-and-son hobby become a business that would let him leave his tech job behind and do something to help save the world? Seattle residents took pride in living in one of America’s greenest cities, but would they really pay extra every month to change their trashy habits and help Owen’s List patch a gaping hole in the waste and recycling system?
Metzger renamed the service Ridwell, to better explain its mission at a glance, and then set out to find out. (snip-MORE)
Yesterday, 37 Democratic Senators voted to pass the anti-trans NDAA.Those same Dems refused to allow Senator Baldwin to advance an amendment to remove anti-trans provisions from the bill.EITM has released an easy to read list of Senators who voted for it.Subscribe to support our journalism.
This follows the Queensland and French reviews into care that found care to be safe and effective. The Cass Review was a political hatchet job. Guarantee the NYT and US media doesn't cover this.
In 2024, several New Hampshire Democrats, afraid that anti-trans attacks would work, voted in favor of a trans surgery ban and bathroom bill.They lost more seats than most other states. Now the R majority is ramping up targeting us.Capitulation didn't work.National Dems, take note.
There is no joy in taking health insurance coverage away from any of our constituents, including trans children of active duty service members here in Virginia.You can’t support our troops by making it harder for families to afford medically necessary health care prescribed by their doctors.
The result of puberty blocker bans means trans youth are just skipping to grey market hormones, not managed by a healthcare provider. So the result of bans is care that is not managed and worse for everyone involved. This is why gatekeeping doesn't work. People will get access anyways.
The only thing you do is make it less safe for trans people. Trans teens taking grey market hormones has been a thing for decades and had been declining until bans started kicking in. You'd think these idiots would learn that prohibitions never actually stops anything, you just make it less visible.
Rand Paul becomes the first to call for Elon Musk to replace Mike Johnson as Speaker. Which, if you listened to my podcast Uncovered yesterday, you already knew was going to happen before it just happened.
Mitch McConnell ran a playbook of total opposition after the 2008 election and it resulted in Republicans flipping 6 senate seats and 63 house seats two years after the biggest Dem victory since LBJwhat the fuck are you people doing
I don't think we're prepared for just how stupid things are about to get. The dumbest people on earth high on conspiracy theories will be making policy decisions like pandemic response based on disinformation from twitter.
"2025 Will Be the Year of Trump's Crackdown on Islam"What Trump’s hawkish anti-Muslim appointees mean for the Middle East – and beyond, writes @attackerman.bsky.social for @zeteo.com
Jeffries: That bipartisan agreement has now been detonated because House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt the very working-class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help
This is why police unions are not real unions and no one should view them as such. They exist to protect power and property. That's it. There's no solidarity to be found there.
Scottie's Playtime 