By Ann Rostow—
They Showed Her the Money
According to a late July report from the Eternal Word Television Network, which I hadn’t encountered before just now, the University of Michigan Health-West system will shell out $400,000 to a physician’s assistant who refused to recognize transgender pronouns or make referrals for transgender health services. Valerie Kloosterman was fired in 2021, and filed suit in 2022, so it’s not clear why this settlement hit the news years after the fact. Oh, and the money goes to Valerie “and her lawyers,” so I suppose she only gets a part of the cash. Whatever. The health group has also adopted a new policy to accommodate religious beliefs, also known as blatant prejudice operating under the guise of some self-proclaimed devotional imperative.
As I’ve written before, ad nauseam, Christian faith does not dictate disgust for GLBT people, as witnessed by the many Christian offshoots who welcome and celebrate diversity of all kinds. Indeed, it demands tolerance for all; “thou shalt not judge,” as Matthew wrote, and as Jesus preached. If someone announced that his or her “Christian faith” required race-based discrimination, they would run headlong into strict civil rights laws, yet gay and trans bias still gets a respectful pass.
Fear Tactics From HRC
Moving on, before I found the Eternal Word, I was going to begin this column with an irritating pitch from the Human Rights Campaign, which warned that “we’ve fought too hard to give up marriage equality!”
Really, HRC? We’ve been under sustained attack since MAGA dominated our national politics, but one thing we don’t have to worry about is marriage equality. Even our arch-nemesis, Sam Alito, just made remarks to the effect that the High Court’s marriage equality ruling is settled law and here to stay. Speaking to CBS, Alito said he “did not think that there was any realistic prospect that [Obergefell] would be overruled because of the passage of time and the developments of the country since that point.” No one hates the Obergefell ruling more than Alito, so if he’s not gunning for it, no one is. (Except Thomas.)
And yet, if you believe our top civil rights lobbyists, the fight to save marriage is on! “HRC is the LGBTQ+ organization taking on the fight to defend marriage equality, because we led the charge to make it the law of the land 11 years ago,” they write. “Since then, millions of you have gotten married, started families and fully embraced this basic civil right. Overturning marriage equality would mean upending lives—and we can’t let that happen!”
First of all, HRC did not lead the charge to win marriage rights; for that, we can thank Lambda Legal, the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (now the National Center for LGBTQ Rights), and Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders in equal measure. And second, why not turn our attention to the dozens of real-life dilemmas facing our community instead of posting up straw men to scare people?
Speaking of Alito, our least favorite justice told Bloomberg News that he was not planning on retiring anytime soon and would serve at least through the session that just began this month. Interesting! Many people (as Trump would say) thought the 76-year-old jurist would drop off the court as the last session ended in June, allowing Trump and his Republican Senate majority to name a successor. Alito still may resign during Trump’s term, but if Democrats win the Senate, we have a chance to weigh in on his replacement. Just a slight bit of hope here. Oh, and Thomas is 78, not that advancing age has always stopped aging justices from hanging on.
But the Victim Was Transgender!
Here’s an odd one. In Tennessee, a man who shot and killed his transgender lover has been given a new trial by a state appellate court because the original judge did not allow the victim’s transgender status to be revealed to the jury. The killer, Samuel Ward, shot Paris Lee six times in self-defense, claiming that she pulled a gun on him and he fired while falling down the stairs. The two had been seeing each other for a couple of years, so there was no question of some kind of genital surprise, not that this would be an excuse for taking someone’s life. But because the victim was born male and was a large gal, nearly six feet tall and topping 200 pounds, the appellate court thought these details would have enhanced Mr. Ward’s self-defense argument.
As I understand from the record, Lee’s gun wasn’t working. But if she aimed it at Ward with the safety off, he has a case for self-defense. That said, he left her for dead and drove thirty minutes to another girlfriend’s house. Plus, all six of his shots hit Lee, which is fairly impressive if he was falling down the stairs. And, finally, what did Lee’s size or transgender status have to do with anything? This was a gunfight, not a brawl. Ward got a six-year sentence last year, which seems pretty light for killing someone. And now, he’ll get another trial, where he can make use of any hostility toward transgender people that might factor into the next jury’s deliberation. The original judge ruled that the gender issue was prejudicial and had no impact on the specifics of the case.
Lay Off Our Toss-Up Candidates
How should red-state Democrats deal with anti-trans campaign attacks as the Senate hangs in the balance and Republicans grasp at straws to energize conservative voters? In Texas, candidate James Talarico is shuffling around the subject while being bombarded with ads about gender and sexuality. As a state representative, he has voted against every attack on our community and come out forcefully in favor of the Equality Act and other GLBT priorities. Now, faced with a tied race, he’s hedged on trans girls in sports (calling for fairness and safety) and dodged questions about the Equality Act in a questionnaire from The Washington Post. Recently, however, his campaign reiterated that Talarico “stands by” his support for the stalled legislation that would codify GLBT civil rights, and I have no doubt he would not just vote for the Equality Act, but he’d fight for it.
Personally, I want Talarico to do and say whatever the hell will get him elected. Ditto for our guys in Maine, Ohio, Michigan, and Kansas. Hedge, shuffle, distract, change the subject. Do what you’ve got to do. Just don’t throw us directly under the bus. As for the GLBT groups that demand an aggressive pro-GLBT posture from the candidates on the edge, pipe down, guys!
That said, if I were running for something in red territory, I’d ask why my opponents were obsessed with gratuitously bashing a tiny minority of fellow Americans while the fundamentals of competent governance are being abandoned. I’d stand up for civil rights across the board, if necessary in vague terms that transcend specifics. I would not get into a tit-for-tat. Having watched these political commercials along with many of you, there’s no low the other side won’t sink to, and arguing with them is like the old saw about wrestling with the pig—you both get covered in mud, and the pig likes it.
Into the Shadows
In transgender sports news, a cisgender wrestler from Washington state, known as KMK in court records, has asked the High Court to issue an injunction against a state policy that allows transgender girls to compete in women’s sports. KMK lost to a transgender wrestler last December and sued the state athletic association to no avail. Both the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said it would be too cumbersome to create special loopholes that would allow KMK to avoid transgender competitors. Now, the matter heads to the Supreme Court’s nefarious shadow docket, so hold your breath.
I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t the Supreme Court rule on this very question last year? Why are we still debating? But the Court only determined that states have a right to limit women’s sports to cisgender females if they like. They did not address those states, like Washington, which feature trans-friendly rules.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, as you know, has carried out a relentless attack on trans rights, beginning with Trump’s executive order defining gender as sex at birth as a matter of law. Since executive orders can’t upend the Constitution or statutes like Title IX, Trump has been hitting the courts to defend his limited view. On August 31, a federal district judge in Los Angeles dismissed a major Trump case against the California Interscholastic Federation, stating that Title IX requires equal treatment between the sexes in schools, but does not reach the definitions of sex and gender.
And now, here come KMK and her parents, who also claim KMK’s health is jeopardized by the possibility of facing a trans girl on the mat. As you know, the shadow docket, where the justices issue quick decisions on injunctions and the like, can basically give a green light to seemingly unconstitutional practices without extensive briefing or arguments. In this case, the justices asked Washington to brief their position by October 13, and presumably we’ll see a result shortly. If they slap an injunction on the state, they will effectively be ruling that trans-friendly state laws can no longer be enforced.
Party Like It’s 2021
What else is new, you ask? Senegal is the latest country to crack down on GLBT rights, but I can’t bring myself to delve into the details. And according to the Centers for Disease Control, I see that fewer kids are calling themselves bisexual these days, presumably an understandable example of the general decline in support for our community we’ve seen in the last two years. For some time, conservatives have been alarmed at the rise in kids defining themselves as GLBTQ, etc., but most of that rise has come from kids choosing “bisexual” off the list of options on whatever surveys they’re filling out. In actuality, the percentage of minors who say they are “gay” or “lesbian” has been pretty steady, and I always thought the extra bisexuals were mainly those who thought “heterosexual” sounded boring. I suppose we’re not cool anymore, but maybe we’ll come back into fashion down the road.
While I’m thinking of these categories, what exactly is “pansexual”? According to Google’s AI bot, “pansexual individuals can be attracted to people across the entire gender spectrum, including men, women, transgender, non-binary, agender, and intersex individuals.” Fine, but this seems to define bisexual as well, since no one thinks a bisexual person can’t be attracted to a transgender or non-binary person. I didn’t know what an agender person was, although I see from my bot that it’s someone with no gender identity whatsoever (which I thought was non-binary). Anyway, pansexuals have their own flag: three horizontal stripes for women (pink), men (blue), and everyone else (yellow).
Finally, there’s a big hoo-hah about a lesbian bar in Massachusetts, which decided that those Covid-era masks would not be required on Saturdays. Reread that sentence if you like, because, yes, it seems this bar has been forcing everyone to wear masks every night up until now. Say what? I always wore my mask during Covid, and I see many people wearing them in airports and planes. But Covid (as a pandemic) has been over for years, and you can’t drink or talk or kiss in a mask.
The bar, which was apparently losing money hand over fist, was bombarded online by pissed-off lesbians, for example: “I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ableists [sic].” I guess they had to have a public Zoom meeting to discuss the change and I really haven’t followed the full details, but guys? Are you off your rockers?
I often read that younger generations are sad that the lesbian bars of days past have gone by the wayside, but I can tell you they were not politically correct spaces. They were riotous—our favorite (The Duchess in NYC) was run by the mafia—and we went to them, not just because they were exciting, but because we were social outcasts. Believe me, ladies, you do not want to return to that status. And those of you who long for fun lesbian gatherings should probably find a bar that does not enforce bizarre, buzz-killing rules and regulations. No wonder the place was losing money!
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on October 22, 2026
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