Transgender School

Six years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled that you cannot be fired for being transgender. In Bostock v. Clayton County, a 6 to 3 majority found that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already barred it, because you cannot punish someone for being trans without taking their s*x into account. The opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative.

One of the three cases was brought for Aimee Stephens, a trans woman fired from a funeral home after she came out; she died about a month before the decision. The win was real, and it was narrow. Bostock protects your job, not your housing, your school, or your clinic, and the current administration’s EEOC has said it will not enforce parts of it for trans workers.

Nancy Mace spent a year turning one colleague’s need to use the bathroom into a national crusade. This month, the deep-red voters she was performing for handed her fifth place in her own governor’s primary. Funny how that works.

That’s the closer for this week’s roundup, but most of it is about the stuff that didn’t earn as many headlines: a new federal rule telling HIV clinics not to fund gender-affirming care, or even acknowledge a trans patient at all; a youth crisis line that may come back without the part that actually serves trans kids; and a billionaire-funded ballot scheme in Maine that fell apart under its own forged signatures.

It wasn’t all bad, though. Broadway crowned its first openly trans Tony winner, the country’s HIV doctors are suing to stop the gag rule, and the courts kept saying no to the crackdown. The whole rundown, every story and every source, is free on Substack now. Paid members get my take on Mace’s very bad week. Link in bio, or head to transgenderschool.substack.com.

ACT UP did not ask politely. Founded in 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power decided grief was not enough and politeness was getting people killed.

Its members shut down the FDA, chained themselves inside the New York Stock Exchange, and staged die-ins in the street, demanding faster drug approvals and an end to a death sentence the government treated as a low priority.

It worked. The process for approving and testing new drugs in the U.S. still carries ACT UP’s fingerprints, and tens of thousands of people are alive because of it.

House Republicans hauled in school leaders from Chicago, San Francisco, and other districts, then treated basic trans inclusion like a scandal.

By the mid-1990s, AIDS had killed more San Franciscans than the 1906 earthquake and fire. The Castro became a neighborhood of memorial services. But while the federal government looked away, San Francisco built something the rest of the country would copy: Ward 86, the first dedicated AIDS clinic in the nation, and a web of community groups that treated the whole person, not just the disease.

Hundreds of people detained at Delaney Hall signed an open letter describing abusive conditions. The ACLU says after people inside started a hunger strike, ICE responded with retaliation.

Jose Trujillo spent years attending legislative hearings, speaking publicly, fighting for his trans son Daniel. By the end of The Dads, his family had left the United States.

The Cleveland Clinic just agreed to fund detransition services and stop providing most gender-affirming care to minors for the next 20 years.

Ten years ago today, a gunman walked into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, on Latin night, and killed forty-nine people. Fifty-three more were wounded. It was the deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in American history.

On May 21, 1979, a San Francisco jury decided that killing Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone was not murder. Dan White, who shot them both, was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to seven years. That night, thousands marched from the Castro to City Hall in fury.