Tag: Lies About LGBTQ+ People

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

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel testifies before the House Judiciary Committee wearing a grey suit.

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

By Abby Monteil

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

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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.”

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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

Politicians demonizing LGBTQ+ people for electoral success is a global phenomenon

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/09/politicians-demonizing-lgbtq-people-for-electoral-success-is-a-global-phenomenon/

LGBTQ+ people were scapegoated in elections in 51 countries last year.

Photo of the author

John Russell (He/Him)September 11, 2025, 2:00 pm EDT
Hispanic young man is seen intently casting his vote in a U.S. election. The voting booth is adorned with an American flag and the word Shutterstock

Politicians across the globe used anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in their campaigns last year, according to a new report from LGBTQ+ rights NGO Outright International.

The organization’s just-released report “Queering Democracy: The Global Elections in 2024 and How LGBTIQ People Fared” examines “how LGBTIQ people navigated, participated in, and shaped electoral processes” in 60 countries and the European Union last year. Among its key findings, the report says that anti-LGBTQ+ hate became a widespread campaign strategy around the world even as queer and trans people made gains in some of the same countries.

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Outright International describes 2024 as a “super election year” in which more than 1.5 billion people in 73 countries voted. But, they say, “this historic moment also came at a time of democratic backsliding, when LGBTIQ communities and other marginalized groups were among the first to feel the impacts of shrinking freedoms.” The organization describes LGBTQ+ communities as “canaries in the coal mine — among the first targets when democratic norms erode.”

According to Outright International, “In at least 51 of the 61 jurisdictions studied, political candidates weaponized anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric for electoral gain.” Politicians, the organization found, “demonized ‘gender ideology,’ labeled LGBTIQ people as ‘foreign agents,’ and scapegoated sexual and gender minorities to deflect from policy failures. In some countries, elections devolved into what one observer called ‘a competition of who was the most homophobic.’”

The report cites leaders in Jordan, Czechia, Portugal, and Namibia among those who scapegoated LGBTQ+ people in an attempt to distract voters from their own governance failures. Uruguay, Panama, Australia, Moldova, and the United Kingdom were among 27 countries in which politicians explicitly used the specter of so-called “gender ideology,” “gender madness,” and “indoctrination” to demonize LGBTQ+ people and particularly transgender people.

And leaders across Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East stoked both xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment by describing gender and sexual diversity as the result of malign foreign influence. According to the report, anti-LGBTQ+ political rhetoric led to social media harassment and calls for violence as well as real-world crackdowns on the LGBTQ+ communities in Tunisia and Romania.

“You talk with a politician from Peru… or Hungary or the UK, you start to see common trends and you realize that it’s a global, coordinated and increasingly well-funded effort to diminish LGBTIQ people,” Outright International’s Alberto de Belaúnde told The Guardian.

Even ostensibly pro-LGBTQ+ parties and politicians in some countries appeared to turn on the community. As the report notes, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis claimed his New Democracy party “certainly suffered political damage” for supporting marriage equality. And in the U.S., some Democrats “blamed the party’s crushing defeat on the party’s perceived support for trans people’s rights, despite surveys showing that these issues were not a primary concern for voters.”

The report also includes a four-page case study on Republicans’ anti-trans messaging and misinformation during the 2024 U.S. election cycle, including the GOP candidate’s campaign’s $17 million investment in anti-trans ads. It concludes that the 2024 election cycle “highlights the vulnerability of marginalized communities to targeted misinformation, underscoring an urgent need for ongoing vigilance and robust advocacy to protect human rights amid escalating political adversity.”

The report also found that, while there was no evidence of laws explicitly denying LGBTQ+ people the right to vote, the community nonetheless faces significant barriers to participating in the democratic process around the world — fear of violence, political disillusionment, and lack of legal gender recognition among them.

Despite those barriers, Outright International says that LGBTQ+ communities consistently came out to defend democracy in the face of authoritarian movements in their home countries, most notably in Bangladesh, Türkiye, and Georgia.

Alongside its dire warnings about what de Belaúnde called a “weaponization” of anti-LGBTQ+ hate, the Queering Democracy report also highlighted significant political gains for LGBTQ+ people around the world. LGBTQ+ candidates ran for office in 36 countries last year, including for the first time in Botswana, Namibia, and Romania. It also notes trailblazing transgender candidates in Venezuela, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the U.S., where Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) became the first openly trans member of Congress.

The report includes a long list of recommendations for electoral management bodies, election monitoring organizations, political leaders, and candidates on how to combat anti-LGBTQ+ tactics. These include holding political parties and candidates accountable for hate speech, engaging with LGBTQ+ communities in developing political platforms, and supporting queer candidates.

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John Russell is a writer and editor based in New York City. In addition to covering politics and entertainment for LGBTQ Nation, he has written for Vanity Fair, Slate, People, Billboard, and Out. He also writes about film, TV, and pop culture in his free newsletter Johnny Writes…

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Google Sends Parents of LGBTQ Kids to Conversion Therapy Websites. Why?

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/google-sends-parents-of-lgbtq-kids

We asked Americans to Google five queries looking for resources for LGBTQ people who are struggling. Far-right religious groups dominated the results.

Sam Donndelinger
Aug 30, 2025

Google Sends Parents of LGBTQ Kids to Conversion Therapy Websites. Why?

We asked Americans to Google five queries looking for resources for LGBTQ people who are struggling. Far-right religious groups dominated the results.

Sam Donndelinger
Aug 30, 2025

Design by Sam Donndelinger. Google logo is a trademark of Google LLC and this image is not endorsed by or affiliated with Google in any way.

Google is the most powerful search engine in the world, commanding nearly 90% of the global search engine market and generating over $348 billion in revenue last year. Over half of Americans say they trust Google more than their formal education.

But how does Google’s algorithm decide which results show up? And how do these results influence LGBTQ kids, their parents and Americans at large who are searching for help?

Uncloseted Media asked five Americans from around the country to Google five common queries related to LGBTQ identity, religion and parenting.

The results were alarming and raised an urgent question: With nearly 40% of LGBTQ youth seriously considering suicide just last year, what happens when a queer teen or the parent of a gay kid in crisis turns to Google?

Photos courtesy of participants Mark Just, Genna and Melanie Brown, April Samberg, Tommy O’Neil. Photo of Genna and Melanie by Kaoly Gutteriez.

“I’m Christian, my daughter is a lesbian,” Melanie Brown, a Southern Baptist from High Point, North Carolina, types into Google.

When Brown presses enter, Bible Bulletin Board comes up as the third result, with the suggestion of “offering hope for change,” and “lead[ing] the way to the alternative to homosexuality.” It goes on to explain that “homosexuality is contrary to God’s Word. It is sin and as always results in sin’s destructive effects on the individual and on those close to them.”

In the living room, Brown’s 15-year-old daughter Genna, with her dog on her lap, Googles “accurate information on gay kids and what to do.”

 

Focus on the Family (FOTF) is the first result. She clicks the link and lands on the platform of a hyper-religious organization known for promoting conversion therapy and labeling her sexuality as sinful.

The site, which presents itself as a reputable religious source, features a tab titled “Understanding Homosexuality” and a section under their resources for “Homosexuality.” It states: “[FOTF] is committed to upholding God’s design for the expression of human sexuality: a husband and wife in a marriage.”

It offers suggested reading on “redemption” from a gay lifestyle, along with 11 counseling resources aimed at changing sexual orientation, including The Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, which guarantees “professional assistance … for persons who experience unwanted homosexual attractions.”

The language is intentionally padded, which means Genna and her mom—and many of the other millions of Christian parents of queer kids—may never know that Google led them to a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group. FOTF is known for its long-standing opposition to LGBTQ rights, for spreading anti-LGBTQ disinformation and for framing homosexuality and transgender identity as sinful and disordered.

Screenshot courtesy of Genna Brown. Photo by Kaoly Gutierrez.

In South Boston, Virginia, Tommy O’Neil Googles, “My daughter just came out as trans and I’m a Christian.” As a father of two, he wants what’s best for his kids. According to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Google’s second result, O’Neil should recognize that God doesn’t make mistakes when assigning sex and give sympathy for those who are indoctrinated in the “transgender cult.”

What O’Neil might not know is that this seminary made the list of Worst Campuses for LGBTQ students. And in 2016, it was granted an exemption to Title IX, allowing it to discriminate against LGBTQ students for religious reasons.

Thousands of miles away in Anchorage, Alaska, 38-year-old bisexual woman April Samberg Googles, “I am bisexual and have a husband who is Christian, am I going to hell?”

The third result is once again an article by FOTF that tells April that “same-sex-attracted strugglers” and “transgender and homosexual lust and behavior are wrong.”

In Cincinnati, 44-year-old Mark Just Googles, “accurate information on homosexual kids and what to do.” FOTF is the top search result.

“I don’t feel good about it,” Just told Uncloseted Media. “It’s disturbing because if there are people out there who want to accept and understand their children or loved ones, this is what they’re being pointed to.”

“[I feel] fear for the queer kids with Christian parents who will be seeing that and thinking it’s good advice, and sorrow for the kids with parents who already have,” says Genna Brown, who was a “self-loathing, suicidal kid” who thought God would punish her for being gay before she came out to her now accepting parents. “It’s pretty awful that this is what’s being pushed for advice. This has no doubt harmed people.”

Uncloseted Media also asked folks in Taiwan, Lebanon, China, Hong Kong, Canada and India to Google similar queries. All of them had FOTF turn up as a top search result.

Why Does Google Allow This?

Google, like other search engines, compiles information and directs users to various websites by referencing the titles of web pages that it judges to be most reflective of what was searched.

“Google’s algorithm is notoriously a black box,” says Jesse Ringer, founder of Method and Metric, a search engine optimization (SEO) growth company. “That’s intentional to keep their competitive advantage.”

What we do know is that Google ranks search results by first crawling the web with an automated program called “spiders” to follow links from page to page and collect data.

It uses text matching to identify documents that it thinks are relevant to a query and then ranks them based on a combination of popularity, freshness, location and previous links clicked.

But for people searching for reliable information, its process can be problematic.

“Google doesn’t rank based on accuracy, but on popularity and query matching,” says Dirk Lewandowski, professor of information research and retrieval at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. “This is based on clicks and a network of how many other links are directed to this website. … Of course, users click what is shown in the first position. So we have kind of a rich get richer.”

How to Get a High Ranking

As websites with the highest rankings continue to receive more clicks, websites like FOTF can also employ other tactics to keep their prominent placement.

Backlinking—the process of having other web pages hyperlink back to your site—is one of the ways to maintain your high ranking.

“Backlinks are a big part of popularity. So the relationship between other websites linking to this source is a big part of Google’s algorithm,” says Ringer. “There are SEO businesses that build link farms so that the content of their clients can go higher. They create a network effect and they link to each other. It is not unreasonable to think that [FOTF] has hired either an SEO person or they’ve hired an external agency to contribute to that.”

According to Francesca Tripodi, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, ranking can also be gamed by matching keywords to content. Tripodi looked at the metadata of progressive and conservative companies and found that conservative content creators “are much better at doing this.”

“They are savvy at creating new sets of words and tagging their content with them,” she says. “That’s not something I’m seeing with progressive content creators.”

Tripodi says that not only does conservatism thrive online, it might be the only perspective returned.

“They are well-funded companies with large production budgets and effective digital marketing teams,” she wrote in a 2019 testimony about conservatism and Google searches. “This is why when you search for liberal phrases like ‘gender identity’ or ‘social justice’ the top returns … are conservative content creators.”

Google declined to speak on record with Uncloseted Media for this story.

In an email, a spokesperson said: “Like any search engine, Google indexes the content that’s available on the open web, relying on systems like keyword matching to surface relevant results. We are largely guided by local law when it comes to removing pages from search results.”

What If It’s Harmful or Illegal?

The United States notoriously protects harmful or misleading content—including anti-LGBTQ hate speech—under the First Amendment.

“The situation in [other countries] is a bit different than in America,” Lewandowski says. “For instance, Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. So Google bans these sites, but they don’t ban them in the U.S.”

Section 230 of the U.S. law protects Americans’ freedom of expression online by implying that we should all be responsible for our own actions and statements on the internet. This law largely takes legal pressure off of Google.

And in 2003, an Oklahoma court ruled that Google’s rankings are subjective opinions and thus constitutionally protected.

Google’s policies for tamping down on harmful content “don’t apply to web results.” Thus, there is little moderation on the web pages that pop up for Americans who use the search engine.

The spokesperson for Google says that “[they] hold themselves to a high standard when it comes to legal requirements to remove pages from Google search results” and that “they don’t remove web results except for child sexual abuse, highly personal information, spam, site owner requests, and valid legal requests.”

But according to the company, “determining whether content is illegal is not always a determination that Google is equipped to make.”

Tripodi says this might be why groups like FOTF are still showing up, even though conversion therapy is illegal in 23 states. She says these groups may have found a loophole in Google’s policy by “tricking” the search engine into thinking they are providing “resources” and not simply a recommendation for conversion therapy.

What Can Google Do to Fix This?

“Google has a responsibility for what is coming up in their results because people trust [them],” says Lewandowski. “They think something is correct or accurate because it is number one in Google.”

Fifteen-year-old Genna Brown is one of the 85% of Americans who feel this way, according to a 2025 study.

“Isn’t the first result typically ranked most credible?” she says. “Because I typically trust the first result more.”

“It’s pretty concerning what comes up when you search for these things,” Ringer says. “There needs to be more done to educate the people who are doing the searches on understanding news and information.”

But vulnerable groups, like LGBTQ kids who are living in households where they are told they are going to hell and parents who are often confused and in crisis themselves, are being led by Google’s algorithm to believe that being queer is wrong.

“1000% yes, these results concern me,” says Genna Brown. “We’re talking about organizations that promote practices like conversion therapy, which is insane. … I wish there was some disclaimer. Like, ‘Google has determined this to be a subjective query. As such, we can’t verify the following results. Proceed with caution.’”

Tripodi says she thinks consumers are responsible for about 20% of the burden by researching and verifying the sources they learn from. But she agrees with Brown in that Google carries an ethical responsibility for the content it chooses to rank and promote.

“As a global corporation that gobbles up all other possibilities for information, Google has a responsibility to ensure that its content is accurate and not harmful,” Tripodi says. “[It’s their job] to ensure that the information that they surface is accurate and reliable because we know people trust that information.”

Uncloseted Media reached out to Focus on the Family, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Bible Bulletin Board. They did not respond to our request for comment.

Additional reporting by Sophie Holland and Spencer Macnaughton.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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Alabama Town Boots LGBTQ Group From Xmas Parade After Group Received Threats And Asked For Protection

Alabama Town Boots LGBTQ Group From Xmas Parade After Group Received Threats And Asked For Protection

Some more to the story.  Please notice the religious hate and bigotry along with the crazy idea the Christmas a country wide holiday belongs only to Christians due to their beliefs.  Notice the misinformation deliberately thrown out to confuse and mislead the public over what the Pride float was about.  Notice the attempt to make the LGBTQ+ in to degenerate perverts trying to corrupt and harm children.  Save the kids from a threat that doesn’t exist by banning the Pride float along with LGBTQ+ people.  It is the entire Russian playbook being enacted here by religious and maga gang thugs.  Hugs

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December 6, 2024 Christianists, Hate Groups

 

The Alabama Political Reporter reports:

An LGBTQ+ float has been denied participation in the Prattville Christmas parade, with Mayor Bill Gillespie citing safety concerns. “This morning, it was brought to the City’s attention from Prattville Pride that there are serious safety concerns regarding Prattville Pride’s participation in the Christmas parade,” Gillespie said in a statement Thursday morning.

Asked to clarify these safety concerns, Gillespie said the safety concerns were brought to the attention of the city by Prattville Pride itself in a Thursday morning email:

“Subsequent to the city council meeting held on Dec. 3, there have been some additional threats made against our organization referencing harmful actions to be taken against us and our float during the Prattville Christmas Parade. At this time, Prattville Pride is requesting Prattville police officers to specifically monitor us and our surroundings during staging, as well as assign two officers to walk near the crowd alongside our float.”

Courthouse News reports:

After a hearing for an emergency injunction Friday morning, an Alabama LGBTQ organization is waiting for a ruling from federal judge about whether it can participate in the city of Prattville’s annual Christmas parade, scheduled for Friday evening. Prattville Pride filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the city after it withdrew permission for the organization to march.

Caryl Lawson, vice president and co-founder of Pratville Pride, told the council the group had been subjected to “hateful pushback and rhetoric.” On social media forums, there have been suggestions the group will be clad in lingerie or will toss sex toys and LGBTQ literature to children along the parade route. There were also threats to vandalize the group’s float or toss objects including “rotten tomatoes” at members of the organization.

From my first report last month:

Prattville Pride was the very first organization to enter the City of Prattville’s annual Christmas parade this year. The group paid the fee like other organizations and says they plan to abide by the city’s rules. However, Clean Up Alabama, the group that originally formed to challenge LGBTQ+ titles in the Prattville library, is calling on the city to reverse course and deny Prattville Pride the opportunity to participate.

“The Christmas parade is a celebration of Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ the Messiah. It is NOT a time to celebrate someone’s sexual preferences. And it is certainly not a place for a drag show,” Clean Up Alabama said in an email pushing for the removal of Prattville Pride. The fervor started after a far-right website highlighted Prattville Pride’s participation in the event.

There’s much more at the first link above.

https://twitter.com/ALReporter/status/1864751986924548594
https://twitter.com/TabithaK/status/1864779575840100476
https://twitter.com/BakerCreek63/status/1865104975002542428
https://twitter.com/jgray78/status/1865141868037603692
https://twitter.com/MaraMiro93/status/1864787221850574890