After banning trans girls from their organization, Girlguiding has set up a task force to figure out just what they can possibly do to support trans girls.
TWIBS brought to you by @alyssaur.bsky.social
At 1:30 Central/2:30 Eastern, my colleague @harperseldin.bsky.social will be in state court in Kansas asking a judge to block the new law that invalidated the driver's licenses of trans people across the state. You can tune into the hearing here
@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Mar 6 PinkNews
A court has ruled the repeated delays on approval to launch for a new non-profit that will protect trans South Koreans from transphobia--caused by a conservative member on an oversight board--was illegal and the organization can go ahead as planned.
@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Mar 6 Advocate
The insanity of what it's like being a trans teacher under FL Don't Say Gay/Trans law where you can't use your correct name or pronouns with students or otherwise indicate that you're female while in school.
"I do not need to point out the parallels. I *do* need you to help us ensure that this history is *not* allowed to repeat itself. LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND." amazing work by @piperbomb.bsky.social for @assignedmedia.org
First reported by @decaturish.bsky.social, GA State Sen. Elena Parent will not seek reelection.
In 2025, Parent, who represents one of the most progressive districts in the South, east of Atlanta, dared a trans parent to find someone to challenge her for reelection in a recorded anti-trans screed:
Will Indiana be the next state to invalidate drivers licenses and IDs for trans residents?
@transitics.substack.com spoke with government employees from various states about the capabilities of their bureaucracy. She identified Indiana as the most likely state to follow Kansas. Worth a read.
A 2026 review looks at the real life impacts that anti-trans policies have on trans youth in school. @veraeikon.bsky.social takes a look at this review in this month's Journal Club.
We have until the end of March to fund a really important, hopeful project: Help almost a hundred kids who were in occupation prisons get urgent mental health support !!
Six days of workshops and more. We need help for supplies & facilitation! Plug in: chuffed.org/project/hmg
@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Mar 5
IN school district settles for $650k after 8 yrs w/ teacher who refused to use trans students names/pronouns, claiming it violated his religious beliefs. School had repeatedly won in fed court until a district court flipped after recent Supreme Ct decisions.
DO NOT COMPLY.
DO NOT OUT PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY VULNERABLE CHILDREN
Kansas is invalidating trans residents' licenses even if they HAVEN'T changed their gender markers, according to this reporting from @natezuke.bsky.social @assignedmedia.org:
www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...
Furthering the right's attacks on trans kids, the Supreme Court has issued a new 'emergency' ruling overturning a California law protecting trans students from forced outing.
Read @alyssaur.bsky.social's latest piece here.
This story, from @natezuke.bsky.social, is absolutely wild. A trans woman who never changed her gender marker was issued a letter invalidating her license. At the DMV they cut up her license, which had an "M" marker.
www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...
@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Mar 4
USA Rugby bowing to admin. pressure, announces it will ban transgender women from competing in its women’s division, upending trans-friendly eligibility policies in place since 2022.
Anyway, for the newsletter - reading the poll where voters oppose GAC for youth, but support it if doctors and parents agree it's necessary.
I spent 2022 and 2023 and much of 2024 trying to fight the lie that something was wrong with youth trans care. The lie won, now it's the dominant narrative.
We are getting closer and closer to the new web site, and unfortunately that transition is going to cancel all memberships (bc Squarespace is screwing us).
New and current members, please watch us closely to find our how to ensure your membership won't lapse.
Thinking about newsletter topics - I think I'm going to write about loss again, or more specifically about the we find ourselves in right now, where we fought so hard against disinformation on youth gender affirming care, but the disinformation won, and what you do with that/where you go from there.
(Image description: A man in a GI's helmet and a shepherd girl dress directs an artillery battery to fire upon a target off in the distance. Two other men, also in frilly frocks, push the barrel of the battery around to face the target.) Christmastime, 1940. All's quiet on the shore--until the sirens go off and a flurry of men run to the Mk. VII mounted on the battery. As photojournalist John Topham would later write, "‘Jerry’, like Time, waits for no one". Thing was, whichever Jerry would have been on the scope for the Nazis must have been mighty confused that day....because, as sure the devil was the fascist's witness, he must have sworn he was looking down the glass at a squad of shepherd girls in bonnets aiming the turret in the seconds before the shrapnel pierced his skull.
The 1940s were not a good time to be gay, and an even less stellar time to be trans. But we were there; on variety show stages, on the front lines, and strapped into the cockpit of the bombers.
Read this month's Clippings by @piperbomb.bsky.social
I'm so sorry.
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Despite the Nazi's crushing defeat, their hatred lived on. The Allies' own censorship and anti-gay laws helped erase the queer dead from the record and kept the living hiding or imprisoned To quote the Auschwitz Memorial's own website, "embarrassment is the reason that scholars remain silent about Nazism's homosexual victims". In the decades since, many queer stories from the era have been unearthed, and many read as losses upon losses. John Topham's photographs of the battery in drag were banned from publication in the UK. Queer men like Alan Turing were subjected to chemical castration. Christine and Roberta both spent their lives as outcasts, hounded by the press and, in Christine's case, dened her own marriage due to the court ruling her a man and her union sodomy. I do not need to point out the parallels. I *do* need you to help us ensure that this history is not allowed to repeat itself. LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND. --piper
(Image description: the gates of Auschwitz, with two train tracks leading towards the ominous looking building and a road on the side for trucks.) But for the handful of trans women we know survived the war and went on to complete their transition in a brave new world, hundreds if not thousands more were murdered in the camps...and many were kept there jailed long after the camps were liberated. When the Allies took Germany, they forced the broken-up German states to repeal nearly all of the Nazi-era laws. They did not, however, require them to revise or repeal Paragraph 175 of the criminal code--the one which criminalized male-on-male sexual acts, and which many self-desribed transvestites found themselves running afoul of. As a result, gay and trans folk were often simply moved from the camps to another jail cell, and as researcher Wolfgang Röll puts it, left to be "deliberately suppressed and forgotten in both postwar German societies".
(Image description: A portrait of Roberta Cowell -- a strong-faced woman with very curly hair and a headband wearing a checkered blouse top and pearls -- and Christine Jorgensen -- a very dainty and well-dressed woman with an off-the-shoulder dress and flower earrings, with well-permed hair) Statisically speaking, there were very likely trans folk affected by these policies, some of whom likely participated in those drag shows. The trans folk we *do* know about from this era, though, only came out in the years after WWII, if they survived at all. Christine Jorgenson, for instance, left her job at RKO Pictures and served in a clerical capacity during the war before recieving her landmark sex reassignment surgery, and the UK's Roberta Cowell served as a pilot in the No. 4 Squadron of the Royal Air Force before returning home and beginning her own gender transition.
This doesn't mean that the military, or the public at large, were anywhere near A-OK with queerness outside of the stage revue. Aggressive screening and discharge policies were commonplace, and as Allan Bérubé put it in _Coming Out Under Fire_, "In combat, gay GIs pointed their guns at enemy soldiers. But some gay servicemen also found American guns pointed at them". Dishonorable discharge was, for many queer soldiers, the most lenient punishment they could hope for if they were discovered, or if they made the mistake of asking for help. Discussing their situation with military psychiatrists hoping for guidance often ended up with them being reported to their CO, with some being "interrogated about their sex lives, locked up, physically abused, and subjected to systematic humiliations in front of other soldiers."
(Image description: several GIs in shepherd girl dresses dance a goofy ragtime dance on stage.) Those weren't shepherd girls by any means; John Topham just happened to be working on a project to document the rehersal of that particular troop's concert party revue. The men were rehersing a drag number when the siren sounded, and had no time to change into something less fabulous. Revue shows like this were quite common in both the UK and the US during the first two world wars, providing the men with laughs on the front lines and an escape from the despair and dreariness of war. Despite homosexuality and cross-dressing being outlawed to various degrees in both countries, the shows were popular enough to get the silver screen treatment even after the war, with films like _This Is The Army_ and _Splinters_ both portraying men in uniform donning dresses to entertain and delight.
(Image description: A man in a GI's helmet and a shepherd girl dress directs an artillery battery to fire upon a target off in the distance. Two other men, also in frilly frocks, push the barrel of the battery around to face the target.) Christmastime, 1940. All's quiet on the shore--until the sirens go off and a flurry of men run to the Mk. VII mounted on the battery. As photojournalist John Topham would later write, "‘Jerry’, like Time, waits for no one". Thing was, whichever Jerry would have been on the scope for the Nazis must have been mighty confused that day....because, as sure the devil was the fascist's witness, he must have sworn he was looking down the glass at a squad of shepherd girls in bonnets aiming the turret in the seconds before the shrapnel pierced his skull.
The 1940s were not a good time to be gay, and an even less stellar time to be trans. But we were there; on variety show stages, on the front lines, and strapped into the cockpit of the bombers.
Read this month's Clippings by @piperbomb.bsky.social
This is terrible, it *sounds* like a mistake made at the local level, but one the folks behind the law will love, and that was caused by the way they rushed the law through and into effect outside of the normal process.
Kansas lawmakers are shitty.
(She does have a temporary license for now)
What we are seeing is a deliberate, well-funded campaign to make transgender Americans second-class citizens—without legal protections and vulnerable to state violence.
There's genuinely no reason to think there's a national database. A DMV worker may have flagged this incorrectly or Kansas may keep tabs on name changes.
