The 85-year-old self-described conservative had been invited by his grandson to a public hearing on a Republican-authored bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state. He decided to make the short drive from his home in Milwaukee.
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For hours, Jones listened to the stories of kids who wanted to transition and said it seemed like âtheir brain was tearing them apart.â He now believes the decision to receive gender-affirming care should involve a child, a qualified doctor and a parent â not lawmakers. He likened the issue to lawmakers banning doctors from providing abortions.
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Jones said a 14-year-old transgender teen â one of the youngest speakers who advocated for their right to go on hormones â helped to change his perspective at the hearing. In their testimony, they shared that they had recently contemplated suicide.
âI started to listen to this kid, and it wasnât some kind of whim or something like that. This kid was actually suffering,â Jones said. âAnd I thought to myself, nobody has to do that. Youâre only a kid.â
The GOP-controlled committee voted to advance the bill. Republican lawmakers in the Assembly passed it last week.
âChildren are not allowed to get tattoos, sign contracts, get married, or smoke â so why would we allow them to physically change their gender?â Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said in a statement.
Jones had a different take.
âAll of these kids, they deserve a chance to see where they belong,â he said.
United States (US)
âJust plain old Larryâ: A Wisconsin manâs testimony about gender-affirming care went viral. Hereâs his story.
Meet the anti-progressive think tank pushing Democrats towards Trumpism
in Daily KosIn the wake of the Democratic Partyâs disappointing 2024 election losses, a quiet but seismic shift is underway within its ranks. At the center of this transformation is Third Way, a self-proclaimed âcentristâ think tank that has long positioned itself as the voice of moderation in Democratic politics. But a closer look at its agenda, funding, and recent maneuvers reveals a far more troubling reality: Third Way is spearheading a Project 2025-style assault on progressivism, steering the party toward a conservative, even far-right alignment that echoes the Trumpist playbook.
The latest evidence of this shift came in a five-page memo leaked from a recent Third Way retreat with Democratic staffers and consultants. The document, obtained by journalist Donald Shaw, urges the party to abandon its reliance on small-dollar donors, arguing that their preferences âmay not align with the broader electorate.â While the memo stops short of explicitly naming alternative funding sources, the implication is clear: Democrats should pivot toward the deep pockets of wealthy elites and corporate donors.
TransWorldExpress
Every fascist movement needs a group of people to blame all the bad things in the world on. Obviously, this is a highly dangerous situation to said people, and they might need to flee the country. This is a small project trying to help them within the bounds of what we can do.
Project 2025 Tracker
Project 2025 Tracker began as a humble spreadsheet created by /u/rusticgorilla, combined with /u/mollynaquafina's vision for making this information accessible to everyone through a dedicated website.
What started as a passion project by two Redditors has grown into a community-driven resource, powered by people like you who believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis.
LGBTQ Federal Workers Brace for a McCarthyist Purge
in Mother JonesSeventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy eraâwhen federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communistsâa related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing âsexual perversionâ as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the countryâs enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.
âMore people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,â says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, âaccompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.â Itâs taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhowerâs executive order formally rescinded.
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Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michaelâs have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.
âWeâve gone dark,â a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. âWe have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.â
âIâm scared for the people Iâve been trying to help,â says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. âPeople came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, weâre all just this big target.â
Marco Rubio May Have Just Banned Trans Foreigners Seeking Visas From US Entry
The document, titled âGuidance for Visa Adjudicators on Executive Order 14201: âKeeping Men Out of Womenâs Sports,ââ is ostensibly focused on preventing transgender athletes from traveling to the U.S. However, one section appears to apply far more broadly, targeting all transgender visa applicantsânot just athletes. It mandates that âall visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birthâ and grants officials the authority to deny visas based on âreasonable suspicionâ of a personâs transgender identity.
âBoth immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications request that an applicant identify their sex as either male or female. Moreover, all visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birth,â the cable reads. When verifying an applicantâs sex assigned at birth, it states that the adjudicator can ârely on documents provided by the applicant,â but that âif other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicantâs sex, you should refuse the case under 221(g) and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.â
The memo goes on to state that applicants âmisrepresenting their purpose of travel or sexâ could be targeted for permanent ineligibility. It states that some common scenarios that would trigger this is if the misrepresentation is âmaterial,â which it states would be the case for transgender athletes entering for an athletic competition. However, even this section does not limit it to transgender athletes - many other reasons for entry may be considered âmaterialâ for transgender entrants⊠for instance, transgender activists, immigrants fleeing oppressive regimes, and more could be swept up under this provision.
"A woman is like a child": MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power
in SalonFor ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership.
But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all.
"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."
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Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments.
The Austerity Politics of White Supremacy
in Dissent MagazineWhile the opponents of Reconstruction were painting themselves as staid and respectable fiscal conservatives, they were simultaneously engaged in a radical plan to subvert democratic elections across the South. In principle, the Redeemersâ open campaign of voter suppression, political intimidation, and violence risked further federal intervention, but the North was losing the will to defend black political freedom. In fact, wealthy Northernersâeven those who had been strongly anti-slaveryâbegan doubting the logic of universal male suffrage as it empowered the immigrant working class in their cities. The political identity of the âtaxpayerâ was born in this reaction to black freedom and working-class political power, and it has existed ever since to oppose the specter of a multiracial working-class alliance.
Called together by the Charleston Chamber of Commerce and the Charleston Board of Trade, the Tax-Payersâ Convention of South Carolina met in Columbia in May 1871 and again in February 1874 to seek, âfor the holders of property and the payers of taxes, a voice and a representation in the councils of that State.â They had a duty to speak up, the Tax-Payers argued, because the state of South Carolina was suffering from âthe fearful and unnecessary increase of the public debtâ; âwild, reckless and profligateâ spending; and âexcessive taxation.â
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Emphatic color-blindness was, to say the least, a recent development in the public rhetoric of South Carolinaâs white elite. As recently as 1868, a number of Tax-Payers had signed a petition to the U.S. Congress, entitled a âRespectful Remonstrance on Behalf of the White People of South Carolina,â that opposed black male suffrage because âthe superior race is to be made subservient to the inferior.â Porter himself had argued that black people had âtraits, intellectual and moral,â and âcredulous naturesâ that left them with an âincapacityâ to rule.
At their Tax-Payersâ Conventions, however, these same men, despite sporadic remarks on the ânegro character,â no longer officially identified themselves as advocates on behalf of the white race; they were simply representatives of the âover-burthened tax-payers.â This self-appointed role was ironic: as slaveholders, the Southern elite had done everything in their power to cripple the tax capacity of both their states and the federal government. Now, the South Carolina Tax-Payers called into question the right of black people and poor whites to govern because they believed these voters did not pay a substantial amount of taxes. âThey who lay the taxes do not pay them, and that they who are to pay them have no voice in the laying of them,â Porter asserted, wondering if âa greater wrong or greater tyranny in republican governmentâ could be conceived.
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It is no coincidence that when the Jim Crow laws were finally dismantled, the reaction to the civil rights movement once again featured paeans to âthe taxpayerâ and a new wave of tax limitations. The rhetoric of the taxpayer is readymade to call into question the right of black and poor Americans to participate in or benefit from their government. The taxpayer was the foil to Reaganâs welfare queen, who he claimed had a âtax-free cash incomeâ of $150,000 a year. Reaganâs story was a fictionâheâd change the numbers from speech to speechâbut that hardly mattered. Talking about taxes allowed voters to put a dollar figure on their resentments, and to experience the poverty of others as persecution.
Defending Trans Lives In a Deep-Red State | "Seat 31" (Oscar Shortlisted)
in The New Yorker for YouTubeYou'll need a box of tissues or three.