By Ann Rostow—
Vive La France
I’ve been on a lovely vacation in France, dear readers. I didn’t follow any news. I watched no TV. I followed zero gay, lesbian, and transgender developments. I did not go online. I did not check email or keep in touch with American politics. I had no idea what Trump was up to, cared little for the financial markets, and put my sports mania on hold. Well, to be honest, my wife and I followed Kansas versus Arizona State on our phone without video one night. We just had a display of a little football on a field, which was updated every few minutes with a new play. It was fun! We drank wine on the deck overlooking the Mediterranean Sea as darkness fell and checked every now and then. Sadly, Kansas lost, but I digress.
So, two weeks went by, and my first search on Google for “LGBT news” gave me six headlines about the antigay crackdown in Turkey, which sharp readers will recall we covered in our last issue. Or at least we mentioned it.
Antigay crackdowns in Eastern Europe are not unexpected. In Poland, we have had towns declare themselves gay-free zones, although those designations were for show and were gradually reversed.
In Hungary, we had pride festivals banned and LGBT organizations hassled, only to see Viktor Orbán lose reelection and a new government restore rights and dignity. (We also saw the largest gay rights celebrations in Hungarian history held in Budapest last year in defiance of Orbán’s ban, followed by a huge festival this year under the auspices of the new Prime Minister, Péter Magyar.) We can’t even list the outrageous censorships and raids in Russia. And Turkey under Erdoğan has been consistently malicious.
Given this context, I gave short shrift in my last column to the recent offenses, describing the new government policy, titled “My Family Is Safe,” in all of two sentences. But I came home to find that Turkey’s systematic assault on our community has drawn widespread protests and condemnation. According to The Washington Post, representatives of six countries have called on Turkey to abide by the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits LGBT bias across the EU (which includes Turkey). Over a hundred people have been detained for no reason, the Post reports, including 44 civil rights advocates, and over 180 LGBT websites and pages have been blocked or restricted. We have also seen protests outside Turkish embassies and consulates, including at the Turkish embassy in D.C.
At the U.N. General Assembly, I learned that Erdoğan recently denounced “global gender-neutralization policies,” whatever that means exactly, as a threat to families and children. An opinion piece in the conservative Washington Examiner asked why our community and our allies are so quick to criticize Israel, a very gay-friendly nation, while turning something of a blind eye toward Turkey and various Muslim and conservative countries that carry death penalties for some gay acts.
Aside from the fact that the militaristic Netanyahu government is arguably engaged in a form of genocide, which is a different issue, the essay makes a legitimate point. Sharia law has zero tolerance for homosexuality, and many countries throughout the Middle East and Africa have draconian penalties for LGBT people and groups. And Russia! My God, they are horrific. Advocating for gay rights is labeled extremism and harshly punished, and yet I’m not seeing protests on college campuses, nor do I hear younger activists targeting the oppression that hides behind religious doctrine. Faith, whether Muslim or conservative Christian, is not a justification for violent hostility against sexual minorities. And, as the Examiner writer, Israeli-American activist Yuval David, concludes, the situation in Turkey is more than a local human rights crisis: “It is a test for the American LGBT movement. No religion, ideology, government, or political movement deserves a human rights exemption.”
Do Not Try This at Home
Can I just say that, while I was searching for something I filed in my saved emails, I encountered a link for “the canned soup that turns baked potatoes into an unforgettable meal”? We planned for months and got great deals on our French vacation, so don’t think of me as some rich snob fresh off a filet of dorade and a glass of Bandol, but mushroom soup and a potato? Really? “Just start with a large baked potato, split it open, and fluff up the middle before adding the soup,” instructs the chef, warning readers to “warm the cream of mushroom separately rather than pouring it on cold.”
My wife and I sometimes have a baked potato for dinner, cooked in the oven for an hour or so and covered in butter, salt, and a bit of sour cream. That can be a perfect dish if you’re in the mood, but the idea of dumping a can of mushroom soup into the mix is a little appalling, and I can see why it might be categorized as an “unforgettable meal.”
Some of the recipes I stumble over in Facebook videos are equally unpalatable—five sticks of butter, a chicken breast, and half a cup of ketchup, stewed for twenty minutes and tossed with shredded cheese and a raw onion. I’m making that up, but it’s significant that you wouldn’t know for sure I was making it up if I wasn’t telling you now because you’ve seen some of these atrocities yourself.
God Help Us
The article I was seeking was from The Christian Post, discussing how the family of C. S. Lewis was distressed that Meryl Streep will voice the character of Aslan from the Narnia books in a new Netflix film. Aslan, as many of you know, is a lion representing Christ in Lewis’s fantasy novels. But apparently the notion of a female voice taking on this character is considered heresy by some of the famed author’s descendants. “Because God the Father, and Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and, of course, the whole process leads toward The Last Battle, and The Last Battle represents Jesus in Heaven,” said a friend of Lewis’s 80-year-old stepson (the Post’s main source here), “if God is a Father, he is not Meryl Streep pretending to be a father. He’s not trans. He’s the Father; he’s our Father. He loves us; He adopts us.”
This bizarre outrage reminds me of the brouhaha over Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico’s 2021 comment that God is “non-binary,” which has been used against him in his campaign. Talarico is a lay preacher, but it doesn’t take a theological background to understand that God is not bound by human characteristics, but represents transcendence itself. “God” is a symbol for God, as Paul Tillich wrote, or as St. Anselm expressed it: “a being greater than which cannot be conceived.” In other words, we use words like “God,” we say “Him” and “Father,” because we are trying to convey concepts that are beyond human understanding. Someone who insists that “God” is male has no idea what divinity means, and no awareness that religions are vehicles to help us deal with the mysteries of our existence even as they remain outside our grasp.
Faith is a challenge, not a moralistic list of dos and don’ts dictated by a remote male overseer. All the texts, signs, rituals, and codes of organized religion are attempts to point to these unfathomable concepts. But many people are not looking at where their religion points them, instead making a full stop at concrete human notions of supernatural beings and specific rules of life that literally—to continue my allusion—miss the whole point. The notion that these small ideas are used to justify dehumanizing others is rarely called into question. Instead—and I’m looking at you, Supreme Court—they are given respectful leeway at the expense of secular law and at the expense of all the rest of us who approach life differently from a spiritual level. Rant over.
SCOTUS to Rule on Trans Prisoners Shortly
There are a number of news stories I would normally have read and digested before writing to you. The Justice Department, for example, has asked the Supreme Court to reverse a hold that the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit maintained on Trump’s attack on transgender inmates in federal prisons. If given free rein, the administration would like to halt hormone treatment for transgender prisoners, forbid them from presenting themselves as trans men or women, and restrict them to birth-sex populations. If I’m not mistaken, many if not most transgender inmates are already assigned to birth-sex prisons, but the major federal case at issue involves trans women who have been allowed to reside with other women. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth twice halted the Trump policy, and a 2–1 appellate majority upheld his block on September 18, 2026.
Now, the Trump administration has again returned to the High Court, where we’ve seen obsequious “shadow docket” rulings indulging presidential power grabs in seeming violation of the very constitutional law the justices are supposed to protect and define. Unlike the lengthy process of briefing and arguing the merits of legal disputes before the justices, asking the High Court to stop or issue an injunction is quick and opaque. The Court can rule within days without explanation beyond a paragraph, if that. Concerned justices can issue dissents, and sadly those justices are normally the threesome that we know and love from our side of these debates.
Some 1,000 transgender men and women are currently held in federal prisons, of which about 600 rely on hormone treatment, according to Chris Geidner’s Law Dork Substack reporting. Can you imagine being forced to “taper” off hormones after years of depending on them to maintain your health and identity? I don’t even know the medical implications of dropping these treatments, but I assume the physical and psychological damage would be deeply traumatic.
And why? It’s one thing to use anti-transgender sentiments as a political tool, much as marriage equality was weaponized against Democrats not so long ago. But this administration seems to fear and hate transgender Americans, aiming to injure these our fellow citizens in every way. No treatment, no bathrooms, no military service, no counseling, no nothing. Where does this come from? And when will average Americans, who reflexively reject gender bending, start to pay attention and learn a little something about their transgender neighbors, who represent less than one percent of our population and therefore make easy targets in an indifferent society?
The Beat Goes On
Several more hospitals have caved to Trump’s attempts to tie federal funding to transgender health services for youth. I haven’t read the stories closely this week, but like New York’s Mount Sinai in our last column, these institutions are choosing to avoid lengthy litigation and potential financial distress by pledging to stop treating young transgender patients. As you recall, the Justice Department is attempting to access the medical records of transgender youth from various clinics and hospitals through subpoena power, even as the courts have stepped in to prevent such intrusions. Mount Sinai said recently that, the only way it could protect those records was to stop serving gender patients, since even though lower courts had kept the Trumpies at bay, there was still the chance that the High Court would reverse the injunctions.
It’s Whac-A-Mole, much like the rest of Trump’s tyrannical reign, where each day brings an infuriating new affront to American norms. Remember on The West Wing when Josh has to stand outside the White House gates in the freezing cold to make a political call to a family in New Hampshire just before the primary? He didn’t want to violate the Hatch Act, which created a wall between government service and politics—a wall that has now been demolished like the East Wing with hardly a whimper from a country exhausted and overwhelmed with nonstop contempt for constitutional limits, statutes that were passed by Congress, and now even appropriations that Trump technically does not control. He just took a billion away from some program that was funded by Congress. But that was yesterday, and tomorrow he’ll do something just as offensive and we’ll all have to turn our eyes to whatever that might be.
What was it the Chinese proverb said? May you live in interesting times? I’m ready for dull ones.
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on October 8, 2026
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