The Girl Scouts Support Trans Girls, Even When It Costs

A $50,000 donation is cause for celebration at the Queen Anne offices of the Girl Scouts of Western Washington. “We have these little clapper thingies, and the clappers go mad when we get that kind of gift,” says the council’s CEO, Megan Ferland. So when Ferland came back to the office earlier this spring and announced that she’d just landed a $100,000 donation, the place went mad. Not only did it represent nearly a quarter of the council’s annual fundraising goal, it would pay to send 500 girls to camp. “We were thrilled,” Ferland says.

Except there was a catch. In late May, as news of Caitlyn Jenner’s transition was blowing up your Facebook news feed, she received a letter from the donor with a brief request: Please guarantee that our gift will not be used to support transgender girls. If you can’t, please return the money.

Ferland chooses her words carefully when discussing the donor, whose identity she won’t reveal out of respect for their privacy. “The relationship is complex,” is all she’ll say. But she does admit to being “very sad” upon receiving the letter. Shortly after that, though, she made up her mind about how to respond: In a short letter, she informed the donor that she would, in fact, be returning the money.  Read more

Uganda: Filmmaker comes out as a gay man to local Ugandans.

The Yes Men's Andy Bichlbaum comes out as gay in "Kill the Gays Bill" Uganda - and makes another stunning revelation as well. 

Japan’s bridal industry starts accepting LGBT couples

The bridal industry in Japan has started accepting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) couples as understanding of sexual minorities increases in society.

Hotel Greges in the city of Munakata, Fukuoka Prefecture, which offers bridal services as part of its operations, has been conducting a training program for its staffers, inviting as a lecturer a transgender man who will marry this autumn.

In a survey of 70,000 people ages 20 to 59 conducted by the ad agency Dentsu in April, 1 in 13, or 7.6 percent, said they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.  Read More

A Canadian history of AIDS activism

Thirty years ago, a dramatic movement erupted on the Canadian scene as people with AIDS demanded treatment, an end to stigma and a host of revolutionary innovations, many of which we take for granted today.

That period of AIDS activism is now the subject of a major historical investigation that is plumbing the memories of those who were involved at the time. The AIDS Activist History Project, headed by Carleton University sociologist Alexis Shotwell, has begun interviewing AIDS activists across Canada and collecting documentary materials. Her research partner is Gary Kinsman, retired Laurentian University sociologist and one of Canada’s leading scholars on LGBT history. Read more

Sweden: National all-LGBT handball team

Known for its revolutionary attitude on LGBT issues, Sweden has yet another breakthrough to report – for the first time in history, a national federation will sponsor an entirely LGBT team in the sport of handball. 

On June 10, the “Stockholm Snipers” were declared to be an official team by the country.
Led by team founder Andreas Carlsson, the organization will make their first public appearance on August 5-9, competing in the EuroGames Stockholm 2015.

Carlsson’s reasoning behind establishing the sports group was to provide LGBT athletes with an outlet, where they would be accepted for their sexualities and skills on the court. He also intended to set an example for the younger generation of players, encouraging them to be content in coming out. Read More

Get To Know The Badass Queer Women In The 2015 World Cup

The Women’s World Cup is well underway, with the quarter finals occurring this week. There were many footballers out and proud in the women's 2015 World Cup, including Abby Wambach who celebrated the US 5-2 victory over Japan in the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup final, running to the sidelines to share a kiss with her wife. Read more

Nigeria: Football team Falcons openly discuss faith, but not sexuality

For Nigeria's women's national soccer team, the word "inclusive" has different meanings. Nigeria is a deeply faithful team, praying in small groups on the field before beginning warm-ups for each match and dropping to their knees to do the same following goals they score, including both Muslim and Christian faiths. Yet, a source says that at least two players who would be on the team for the 2015 World Cup are not because they are thought to be gay.

"If a player comes out and says, 'I'm gay,' then the trouble doesn't just start and end with the player," the source tells Wahl. "It goes all the way back to the family: parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, everything. One person just sparks off a chain reaction. That's why it's so tough."

Asked about the topic in a press conference on Monday, Okon said he does not address sexuality within the team. "I don't know what you mean by 'homosexual,' he said. "I don't deal with personal lives. I think of the game proper. I only think of what they do on the pitch. That is what concerns me."  Read More

Op-ed: Trans, Intersex Visibility and the Myth of Scarcity

The recent media focus on Caitlyn Jenner’s coming-out as a trans woman seems to celebrate her conformity to binary gender standards. But that media spotlight has illuminated some existing tensions among and between trans and intersex communities. As transgender civil rights have progressed and positive media attention increased in the past year, so have concerns about scarcity of coverage for the differing issues of each community. Inflamed tensions between the trans and intersex communities are even more deeply rooted in the common misconceptions that intersex and trans people often have about each other.

Specifically, the celebration of a particular type of gender-affirming surgery as liberating, brave, and beautiful can be triggering and even offensive to many intersex people. In many cases, intersex advocates are fighting for the right to not be involuntarily subjected to surgeries many trans people find medically necessary to live authentically. Opposing involuntary gender-assignment surgeries is central to the intersex awareness and advocacy movement.

By contrast, the common but mistaken assumption that all transgender people actively seek out similar surgeries as gender-affirming treatment has been promoted to oppose “transgenderism,” as if it were a choice or a social movement. Read More

US: History of the US government’s cruel, malicious campaign against gay Americans

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the dismissal of every single gay person working for the federal government. For the next several decades, the FBI’s sex deviate program investigated all employees suspected of being gay, collecting evidence on their sex lives and turning it over to the Civil Service Commission—which promptly fired them. Gay men were routinely entrapped by police officers, and politicians used knowledge of their enemies’ sexuality for blackmail.

This horrible history has largely been swept under the rug. But Michael Isikoff’s new documentary Uniquely Nasty unearths some of the government’s worst abuses against gay people, including blackmail that led to a senator’s suicide. Read More

Germany: Museum launches show on 150 years of gay history

Germany's main national history museum on Wednesday launched an exhibition tracing 150 years of gay history in the country, including the first uses of the term "homosexual," the brutal Nazi-era repression of gays and gradual moves toward legal equality starting in the 1960s.

The exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, which is staging it together with the capital's privately run Gay Museum, has been four years in the planning but is opening amid a new debate in Germany over whether to allow full-fledged marriage for same-sex couples. Read More

Transgender Children’s Books Fill a Void and Break a Taboo

Sam Martin was browsing in a Boston record store 23 years ago when an unusual photography book caught his eye. Mr. Martin flipped through its pages, which featured portraits and interviews with women who had become men, and started to cry.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not the only one,’ ” said Mr. Martin, 43, who started transitioning to male from female after he bought the book. “When I was growing up, I never saw people like me in movies or books.”

Mr. Martin is now on a mission to change that. He belongs to a small group of emerging authors who are writing children’s literature that centers on transgender characters, hoping to fill the void they felt as young readers. Read More