Sat beneath a shifting sun and a canopy teeming with chittering cicadas, Madison Turner and I ran the gamut. I first heard of her while I was covering the local music scene for a VCU student publication, and her angsty, self-critical, maniacally upbeat tunes spoke to...
Sen. Ghazala Hashmi's bill to expand hate crimes to include crimes based on perception -- which would have had the effect of protecting gender expression, not covered under current hate crime statutes -- failed in the Virginia state Senate after backlash from both parties. Legislators attempted to pass a bill that would expand the definition of a...
This court decision pushes Alabama one step closer to the modern age, whether they like it or not. (Sure enough, the state's attorney general plans to appeal.) Alabama is one of the eight remaining U.S. states that require transgender people to undergo gender-affirmation surgery before they can get a state-issued identification that lists their...
Who led the original push for the now-repealed transgender military ban? Suspects include a Congressman, a Vice President, the head of a hate group, and the wife of a Supreme Court justice. It was July 26, 2017. Three and a half years ago, almost to the day, when President Donald Trump shocked the nation with a series of tweets that seemed to...
The Biden Executive Order allows "all qualified persons to serve in the military." President Joe Biden has just signed an executive order reversing President Trump’s total ban on transgender service members. The order “sets the policy that all Americans who are qualified to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States should be able to serve....
President Joe Biden has nominated Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine to become the Assistant Secretary of Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, which will make her the first openly trans presidential cabinet official in United States history. Incoming President Joe Biden will officially nominate Pennsylvania Secretary...
Just in case you didn't already know what kind of people the "straight pride parade" organizers were, it's now come out that they chartered multiple buses to bring hundreds of people to last week's riot at the Capitol. A Massachusetts woman who is a director of the anti-LGBTQ Super Happy Fun America, known for its “Straight Pride” march in...
In this month's Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch explains that the right-wing insurrection we're dealing with now in the United States is nothing new. Oh, hell, what can I say at a time like this? Did we think they’d simply go away? When angry white criminals occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon back on January 2, 2016 and the seven...
At the end of a long, extremely difficult year, Lee Lynch tries to find the silver linings to the many clouds that hung over us all in 2020. The year 2020 wasn’t a total bust, except for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who should not have died or have been permanently harmed by COVID-19. In the U.S., many lay those deaths and disablements...
For many QTPOC and BIPOC folks, there hasn’t been a space that genuinely meets their needs and priorities. The Collab Spot, a social justice-focused Black-centric community hub is opening its doors at the beginning of next year, hoping to change that. The Collab Spot, a coworking space run by and dedicated to queer Black individuals, is expected...
