#BREAKING: On the eve of the state's flag ban, @slcmayor is proposing the @slcCouncil adopt three new city flags – each in Pride, transgender, and Juneteenth colors with the city's Sego Lily. They're expected to be adopted at their meeting tonight. @abc4utahpic.twitter.com/zAWlJaOPm4
Mayor @slcmayor says this is the way the city can "abide" by the law, and that the flags are meant to include, not divide. She says retribution is always possible and she laughed when I asked whether this was the "ultimate troll" of the Utah legislature. pic.twitter.com/dKo6kkB4Mi
Yes the flag ban bill was performative culture war nonsense. Doesn’t mean Salt Lake City was going to take it lying down. Private buildings across downtown raised their own flags today – including mine. pic.twitter.com/rNNrGuIuYD
Our new official flags. These flags are allowed by the law, that our state leaders spent hours debating. Thank you for allowing us to make those official city flags that can be flown at anytime highlighting the contributions of many. These flags won’t be kept in any closet! pic.twitter.com/YhdiR4uGAF
FYI, Salt Lake City isn't alone in doing adopting special flags to circumvent the new state law. The Boise City Council did the same thing last night. From @fox13news.bsky.social's sister-station in Boise: http://www.kivitv.com/downtown-boi… #utpol #Utah
Trigger warnings for starving and abused kids / people. Sadly this is what the US government is supporting and keeping other world leaders from stopping. This was because Biden was an old person who remembered being part of Israels founding and thought they were so important that it excused everything they did. tRump doesn’t care about the human cost, he wants the value of the land or as much of the share he can get. This is sickening. Personal note. I was so lacking nutrition in my childhood that my childhood doctors were concerned enough to tell my adopting mother if I did not get more food I would never see five feet in height. I ended up in a child ICU rushed to the hospital by my grandfather and I had clinical death. Hugs
WELKER: Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree?TRUMP: I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know.WELKER: Don't you need to uphold the Constitution?TRUMP: I don't know
In November, Dhillon appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to recount “all the crimes committed by Kamala Harris.”
The DOJ is quietly gutting its voting rights department. They are reassigning top staff, dropping active cases, and have rewritten their mission to focus on “voter fraud” instead of voter suppression.https://t.co/D218kQRPg0
Trump’s tariffs aren’t just wrecking the economy and fueling inflation—they’re also failing at their one supposed goal: helping American manufacturing. pic.twitter.com/GgrkzXWKv9
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) May 6, 2025
A system-wide outage last Monday caused air traffic controllers to lose the ability to see, hear or talk to all arriving and departing aircraft for 60 to 90 seconds at Newark Liberty Airport. @MattRiversABC reports. https://t.co/UWI0blu3tYpic.twitter.com/W2KpuEMfMX
BREAKING: The Supreme Court halts a district court injunction that had blocked Trump's ban on transgender military service. SCOTUS is clearing the way for Trump to enforce his purge of transgender troops. All three liberals dissent. http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25…
BREAKING: Another $70 million F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet from the USS Harry S. Truman has been lost in the Red Sea—the second jet from the carrier lost in just over a week. -CNN pic.twitter.com/s5QrPYPo7O
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) May 7, 2025
Another Navy fighter jet sank to the bottom of the Red Sea on Tuesday following the second such mishap aboard the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in just over a week, a U.S. official told ABC News.
Hageman: I think another reason we should change the name to The Gulf of America is for over 40 years, Mexico has been dumping raw sewage in the area near San Diego… That’s another reason we need to retake and claim ownership of this area pic.twitter.com/7VKXsYBHVH
NEW: The U.S. is ramping up its intelligence-gathering efforts in Greenland, deploying its spy apparatus to support Donald Trump’s campaign to take control of the island. -WSJ
The final years of Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership were dominated by debate around the passing of her gender recognition legislation. Photograph: Stuart Wallace/Rex/Shutterstock
The lives of transgender people in the UK are at risk of being made “unliveable”, Nicola Sturgeon has said in her first public comments about the supreme court ruling on the legal definition of a woman, which was prompted by legislation she oversaw in the Scottish parliament.
The UK supreme court ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act referred only to a biological woman and to biological sex. This was the conclusion of a long-running court action by the gender critical campaign group For Women Scotland, who objected to a law passed at Holyrood aimed at improving women’s representation on public boards being extended to transgender women.
Sturgeon said the supreme court’s ruling – “by very definition … the law of the land” – could not be questioned but expressed profound concerns about interim advice published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission amounting to a blanket ban on trans people using toilets and other services of the gender they identify as.
“The question for me, and I think for a lot of people, is how that is now translated into practice; can that be done in a way that, of course, protects women, but also allows trans people to live their lives with dignity and in a safe and accepted way.
“I would be very concerned if that interim guidance became the final guidance and I hope that is not the case because I think that potentially makes the lives of trans people almost unliveable.
“It certainly doesn’t make a single woman any safer to do that because the threat to women comes from predatory and abusive men.”
The former first minister and SNP leader added that it was not inevitable that the judgment would make the lives of transgender people “impossibly difficult”, but there was a danger that certain interpretations could put transgender rights at risk.
“If that is the case, then yes, it would be my view that the law as it stands needs to be looked at,” she told reporters at the Scottish parliament on Tuesday.
Sturgeon has been a staunch advocate of transgender rights, and the final years of her premiership were dominated by the increasingly toxic and polarised debate around the passing of her flagship gender recognition reforms in late 2022.
The bill, which was passed with cross-party support at Holyrood, made it easier and less intrusive for individuals to legally change their gender, extending the new system of self-identification to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time. But it was immediately blocked by the Rishi Sunak’s UK government as cutting across the UK-wide Equality Act.
After this unprecedented veto, Sturgeon accused some opponents of the bill of using women’s rights as a “cloak of acceptability to cover up what is transphobia”, telling the NewsAgents podcast that some critics of the legislation were also “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”.
On Tuesday Sturgeon rejected the suggestion made by many of her critics that she owed them an apology after the ruling.
“I fundamentally, and respectfully, disagree,” she said. “I recognise the different views on this, I’ve always recognised the different views on this, but I think its important that respect runs in both directions.”
But co-director of For Women Scotland, Susan Smith, said Sturgeon’s claim that life would be made “unliveable” was “frankly wrong and quite disturbing”. Smith told BBC Scotland News that single-sex spaces were needed to provide women with “privacy, dignity, safety at time when they’re vulnerable”.
May 7, 1954 The battle at Vietnam’s Dien Bien Phu ended after 55 days with Viet Minh insurgents overrunning French colonial forces, and forcing their surrender. An agreement for complete French withdrawal was negotiated within two months in Geneva, Switzerland. The battle began in March, when a force of 40,000 Vietnamese troops armed with heavy artillery surrounded 15,000 French soldiers holding the French position under siege. The Viet Minh guerrillas had been fighting a long and bloody war against French colonial control of Vietnam since 1946. French prisoners being marched by Viet Minh out of Dien Bien Phu, May 7, 1954
May 7, 1955 The Reverend George Lee, one of the first black people registered to vote in Humphreys County, Mississippi, and who used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote, was murdered in his hometown of Belzoni. Rev George Lee The county sheriff had initially refused to accept Reverend Lee’s poll tax (a tax collected before someone was allowed to vote, which became unconstitutional in 1964), but he was later allowed to vote after contacting federal authorities. That, and the subsequent registration of 92 other negro citizens he helped register, angered some white residents of the county. His assailants were never caught, and Reverend Lee is considered the first martyr of the civil rights movement. More on Reverend Lee
May 7, 1984 American veterans of the Vietnam War reached a $180-million out-of-court settlement with seven chemical companies in a class-action suit relating to use of the herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam. The veterans charged they had suffered injury and illness from exposure to the defoliant used widely in the war to eliminate jungle cover for Vietnamese forces opposing the U.S. military presence. Book review about the ongoing effects of Agent Orange
May 7, 1996 15,000 protesters demonstrated against the import of French nuclear waste to Gorleben, Germany. Water cannons were used to disperse the crowd.
When books burn, humans follow – a warning we cannot afford to ignore Read on Substack
When I tell you that fascists don’t start with violence—they start with books—I’m not speaking in fucking hypotheticals. On May 6th, 1933, while the ink was barely dry on Hitler’s chancellorship, young Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexual Research. They ransacked the place that night, and then four days later, they took more than 20,000 books from the Institute’s library to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square and burned them.
They didn’t just burn paper. They burned hope. They burned sanctuary. They burned the world’s first transgender clinic and decades of groundbreaking research that might have spared generations of queer people unimaginable suffering.
I’m not being dramatic when I say this is one of the most gut-wrenching episodes in queer history. The visceral image of Magnus Hirschfeld—a gay Jewish doctor and pioneering advocate for gay and transgender rights—watching on television as his life’s work went up in flames should haunt us all. Because make no mistake: these weren’t military operations. These were everyday people, your neighbors, your classmates, who decided certain knowledge was too dangerous to exist.
A Haven of Revolutionary Care
The Institute for Sexual Research wasn’t just ahead of its time—it was blazing the trail for a future we’re still fighting to reach nearly a century later. Opened in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, this non-profit institution provided care that modern transphobes claim is “experimental” today, despite the fact that Hirschfeld was performing these procedures over a hundred years ago.
Initially hesitant about gender-affirming surgeries, Hirschfeld changed his mind when he recognized a simple truth: this was life-saving care that prevented suicide. Think about that—while most of the world was still living in willful ignorance, this man understood that people would rather die than live in bodies that betrayed them. The Institute provided facial feminization and masculinization surgeries, hair removal, and complex gender reassignment procedures when most doctors wouldn’t even recognize trans people as human.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around just how revolutionary this place was. Hirschfeld recognized that gender identity and sexual orientation were entirely separate entities—a concept some people still struggle with a century later. He coined the terms “transsexual” and “transvestite,” creating language for experiences that had been silenced for millennia. The Institute was staffed with every specialist imaginable—psychologists, gynecologists, radiologists, lawyers, general practitioners—providing low-cost or free care to those whom society had abandoned.
History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Does Rhyme
My friend (and my Editor-in-Chief) thepoetmiranda saw the dark echoes of history when one of Trump’s first orders was for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control to start scrubbing medical literature related to healthcare for transgender Americans from government databases (an erasure policy that has spread beyond healthcare to all historical references of transgender people—even on the Stonewall National Memorial website). She wrote the poem linked below, which is a fucking must read:
Hirschfeld’s clinic wasn’t just a clinic. It was a fucking sanctuary. Hirschfeld and his partner Karl Giese lived in the building, creating a warm, plush space filled with life. They hosted costume parties where queer people could express themselves freely. They recommended local bars and venues where LGBTQ+ folks could find community instead of isolation.
When trans women struggled to find employment after transitioning, Hirschfeld hired five of his own patients to work at the clinic. He fought for the repeal of Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality, and even secured legal identification passes for his trans female patients with a “transvestite” gender marker to prevent them from being arrested for crossdressing.
Instead of the torturous conversion therapy that was common practice, the Institute taught “adaptation therapy,” instructing queer people how to navigate a hostile world while staying true to themselves. Their motto was “Through science to justice”—a radical notion that education and understanding were the path to equality.
The Day Knowledge Became Dangerous
When the Nazi youth and the German Student Union piled the contents of the Institute in the square on May 10th, 1933, they topped it with Hirschfeld’s bust before setting it ablaze. This wasn’t random destruction—it was a deliberate erasure of knowledge they deemed threatening. This happened just three months after Hitler was named Chancellor. It wasn’t soldiers who did this; it was civilians, ordinary Germans who had been convinced that minorities were the root cause of inflation and social problems.
Anyone who wasn’t white, cisgender, and Christian was deemed immoral and dangerous to German youth and the “traditional family.” Sound familiar? It should, because we’re hearing the same bullshit rhetoric recycled today by people who would burn books all over again if given half a chance.
Hirschfeld, who was out of the country, watched the destruction on television. He never returned to Germany and died of a stroke in 1935, his life’s work reduced to ashes. The loss was immeasurable—not just papers and books, but decades of research that could have advanced trans healthcare by generations.
The Brutal Reality of Lost Knowledge
We lost so much ancestral knowledge about our community in this one raid. The world’s first transgender clinic—gone. Groundbreaking research on gender identity—gone. Records of successful gender-affirming surgeries—gone. Resources for queer people to find community—gone. All of it, up in smoke because knowledge in the wrong hands threatened the status quo.
The memorial for this event bears the quote, “Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn humans, too”—a line from Hirschfeld’s own library that would prove prophetic. The Nazis began with books but ended with concentration camps where thousands of queer people wore pink triangles to their deaths.
Practical Tools for Preserving Our History
Document and digitize queer history in multiple locations and formats
Support LGBTQ+ archives financially and through volunteer work
Learn and share the stories of pioneers like Magnus Hirschfeld
Recognize warning signs when marginalized communities are blamed for societal problems
Protect trans healthcare by understanding its long history and scientific basis
Community Connection
The story of the Institute’s destruction isn’t ancient history—it’s a warning. When you hear politicians targeting trans healthcare, when you see books about queer experiences being banned from libraries, when you witness the demonization of drag performances, remember the Institute. Remember what happens when fear and ignorance are weaponized against knowledge.
Today, organizations like the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation continue his legacy, but the threat remains. Every time a state bans gender-affirming care, every time a library removes LGBTQ+ books, every time a transgender person is denied basic dignity, we’re watching echoes of that burning pile in Berlin.
Conclusion
Knowledge is a form of rebellion, and the facts and history you carry in your mind can never be taken away from you. Education and queer joy are our greatest protections right now, just as they were in Hirschfeld’s time.
When we learn about the Institute for Sexual Research, we’re not just studying history—we’re resurrecting knowledge that fascists tried to erase. When we speak the names of Magnus Hirschfeld and his patients, we’re undoing their work of erasure. Every time we share these stories, we’re rebuilding what they tried to destroy.
The memorial’s warning echoes across time: “Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn humans, too.” We must never forget this. We must never allow it to happen again.
Because our history isn’t just about the past—it’s about fucking surviving the present and building a future where institutes like Hirschfeld’s aren’t revolutionary; they’re just how we treat each other.
References:
Hirschfield, M. 1912 “Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb”
Hirschfield, M. 1920 “Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes”
Hirschfield, M. 2017 (Reprint) “Berlin’s Third Sex”
I think the tide is turning and the superexpressive attacks on the LGBTQ+ people, both adults and kids is not working well for republicans. I think they will see at local levels people are not buying it and are working to stop efforts to wipe all mention of LGBTQ+ people from society. Hugs
‘This is more than a policy victory,’ Equality Florida said.
LGBTQ advocates are celebrating several bills — including one that could have banned Pride flags flown at government buildings — stalling out this Session.
“Once again, we’ve done what many thought was impossible: not one anti-LGBTQ bill passed this session,” Equality Florida’s Executive Director Nadine Smith said in a statement Saturday.
The Legislative Session ended Friday although lawmakers failed to pass a balanced budget.
Some of the dead bills including HB 75/SB 100 that would have banned government buildings, schools and universities, from flying flags that represented a “political viewpoint.”
The proposal was sponsored by outgoing state Sen. Randy Fine before he left for Washington, D.C.
“How would we feel if the city of Palm Bay or the city of Ormond Beach flew the Make America Great Again flag from City Hall? How would we feel if a teacher hung that in their classroom?” Fine said during a March committee hearing. “The idea is whether it’s political viewpoints that we agree with or we disagree with, let’s keep that stuff out of government buildings.”
Equity Florida lobbied against the bill with its public policy director Jon Harris Maurer calling the flag ban “unnecessary, unclear, unconstitutional and dangerous.”
“It does not help Floridians struggling with insurance and housing affordability,” he said. “Instead, it is a made-up solution to a culture war for political purposes, but it will have real harms.”
Ultimately, Fine’s bill was withdrawn, failing to reach the Senate floor.
Equity Florida also heralded the defeat of other bills, including HB 1495/SB 440 to prevent governments from using the preferred pronouns for people who are transgender and other bills targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI.)
The organization pointed to its grassroots campaign this Session with 400 LGBTQ activists lobbying during “our largest largest advocacy week ever,” 16,000 emails sent to lawmakers and about 325 in-person meetings with legislators.
“It’s students and seniors, faith leaders and frontline workers, parents and teachers, standing together and making sure lawmakers hear us loud and clear: we will not back down,” Smith said in a statement.
Gabrielle Russon
Gabrielle Russon is an award-winning journalist based in Orlando. She covered the business of theme parks for the Orlando Sentinel. Her previous newspaper stops include the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Toledo Blade, Kalamazoo Gazette and Elkhart Truth as well as an internship covering the nation’s capital for the Chicago Tribune. For fun, she runs marathons. She gets her training from chasing a toddler around. Contact her at gabriellerusson@gmail.com or on Twitter @GabrielleRusson
Students are shown at Carl Wunsche Sr. High School, 900 Wunsche Loop, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, in Spring.
Melissa Phillip/Staff Photographer
A lawmaker pushing to ban non-human behavior in schools says he based his bill on a conversation with a school administrator, who has since denied so-called furries are a problem in her district.
During an at-times tense hearing Tuesday night, Republican state Rep. Stan Gerdes said he filed the bill after hearing “reports of the presence of a furry” in a Smithville school. He said he called the district superintendent in November, who told him “this is happening in districts across the state” and schools don’t have the ability to stop it.
“We just want to help them have the tools to get some of the distractions out of the classroom so we can get back to teaching time,” Gerdes told the House Public Education Committee.
But the Smithville school district issued a public statement last month disputing Gerdes’ claims. It said Superintendent Cheryl Burns told Gerdes there were no litter boxes on campus for use by students dressed as cats, but as a courtesy to the lawmaker, she “made the extra effort to walk the campus to confirm.”
“At this time, the District has no concerns related to students behaving as anything but typical children,” the statement said.
Still, Gerdes argued the legislation was needed to curb the “extremely concerning” trend while providing scant evidence furries are a problem, or even present, in Texas schools.
Both Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows have backed the “Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education (F.U.R.R.I.E.S) Act,” which would prohibit any “non-human behavior” by a student, including wearing animal ears or barking, meowing or hissing.
The bill includes exceptions for sports mascots or kids in school plays and would only apply to grades 6-12. Still, it includes a clause that would amend the family code to deem schools “allowing or encouraging” a child to “develop a dependence on or a belief that non-human behaviors are societally acceptable” as child abuse.
The furries trend has existed for years, at least among adults. Many like taking on animal personas, dressing up in costumes and attending gatherings. The annual Anthrocon convention in Pittsburgh draws thousands.
Rumors about classrooms adapting to child furries appeared to start online in 2022. School districts in Iowa, Michigan and Nebraska later debunked claims they were providing litter boxes in bathrooms, and the fact-checking team at PolitiFact could not find any credible news reports that supported the claim.
Under questioning from a Democrat on the panel, who cast the bill as part of a “smear campaign” against public schools, Gerdes could not point to a single example of a school providing litter boxes to students.
Gerdes, a two-term legislator and past aide to former Gov. Rick Perry, said his office has received “some reports of them.”
“Did I go to these school districts and visit and see it with my own eyes? No,” Gerdes said.
When Gerdes introduced the legislation last month, he said he fully expected members of the subculture he was targeting to show up at the Capitol “in full furry vengeance” when the bill was heard.
“Just to be clear — they won’t be getting any litter boxes in the Texas Capitol,” the Smithville Republican said in a press release announcing the bill.
But there were no so-called furries or litter boxes at the late-night hearing Tuesday. Instead, the four people who showed up to testify against the measure included a public school teacher and a Texan who worried the measure could affect students with disabilities.
State Rep. James Talarico, a Round Rock Democrat who grilled Gerdes on the legislation, called the bill a “joke,” but said it would have serious consequences for educators. Teachers and schools could face fines of $10,000 to $25,000 for allowing behavior prohibited by the bill.
Talarico questioned whether a student licking their fingers after eating Cheetos would be prohibited by language in the bill, which defines “non-human behavior” as “licking oneself or others for the purpose of grooming or maintenance.” He asked whether students reading “Animal Farm” would be flouting the law if they made sounds like the characters in the book.
Gerdes said neither would meet the intent of the bill, and said he would be open to working with Talarico on the language to make him more comfortable with the legislation.
“I’m not comfortable with any bill that’s going after a non-existent issue,” Talarico responded. He cast the bill as part of an effort by Republicans to undermine public schools.
“Governor Abbott has used this litter box rumor to paint our schools in the worst possible light,” Talarico said. “That’s because if you want to defund neighborhood schools across the state, you have to get Texans to turn against their public schools. So you call librarians groomers, you accuse teachers of indoctrination, and now you say that schools are providing litter boxes to students. That’s how all of this is tied together.”
Gerdes denied the accusation. Later in the hearing, state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican, defended Gerdes as a supporter of public schools and cast Talarico’s opposition to the legislation as part of an “obsession” with the governor.
“His hatred for Gov. Abbott and for private school vouchers or educational savings accounts has just gone too far,” Leach said. “You’re highly respected,” he told Gerdes, “and this bill doesn’t change that.”
The committee left the measure, House Bill 54, pending.
Gabrielle Russon
Scottie's Playtime 