Anti-trans organizations have floated raising the age limit for care to 25 for years, and GOP architects of youth care bans have been explicit: the real goal is to eliminate gender-affirming care entirely. Donald Trump himself has vowed in the past to target trans healthcare âat any age.â Now, with a new letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) circulating to clinics nationwide, the first formal warning shots have been fired. Transgender adults should take noticeâand prepare. The infrastructure to strip their care is already being built.
According to a recent CMS letter, clinics across the country are being warned against providing gender-affirming care to individuals under the age of 21. âFederal financial participation (FFP) is strictly limited for procedures, treatments, or operations for the purpose of rendering an individual permanently incapable of reproducing and, under 42 C.F.R. 441.253(a), is specifically prohibited for such procedures performed on a person under age 21,â the letter reads, citing a 1978 regulation restricting federal funding for sterilization. But gender-affirming care for adults rarely meets that definition. Many transgender men and women retain the ability to have children after temporarily stopping hormone therapy, and fertility counseling is routinely offered. When sterilization does occur, it is not the goal of the careâit is an incidental outcome of treatment meant to alleviate gender dysphoria.
More troubling is the use of this decades-old regulation to pressure health care centers into dropping transgender care for adults. The expansion of restrictions to include people up to the age of 21 follows a recent Trump executive order barring gender-affirming care for anyone under 19âa category that includes legal adults. Although that order has been blocked in multiple courts, hospitals have still used it to justify halting care for this population. Now, the CMS letter is having a similar chilling effect: Planned Parenthood of Arizona has âpausedâ gender-affirming care for all adult patients. This is a deeply alarming development, especially considering that Planned Parenthood is the largestâand often the onlyâprovider of transgender adult healthcare in many parts of the country.
Linkage
Things Katy is reading.
The Trump Administration Threat To Transgender Adult Care Is Growing At Lightning Speed
in Erin in the MorningSolving the supermarket: why Coles just hired US defence contractor Palantir
in The ConversationFirst, by inking this deal, Coles frames itself as future-forward and logistically driven. Groceries and grocery-store labour become more data, just like the hedge funds, healthcare, or immigrants that other Palantir clients coordinate.
Supermarkets have been under fire over the past year for increasing profit margins through a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, and accused of underpaying workers.
The Palantir deal continues this extractive trajectory. Rather than paying workers more or passing savings onto customers, Coles has chosen to invest millions in technology that will âaddress workforce-related spendâ as part of a larger effort to cut costs by a billion dollars over the next four years. Food (and the labour needed to grow, pack and ship it) is transformed from a human need to an optimisation problem.
Second, dependence. As my own research found, Palantir clients tend to enjoy the all-encompassing data and new features but also become dependent on them. Data mounts up; new servers are needed; licensing fees are high but must be paid.
Much like Apple or Amazon, Palantirâs services excel at creating âvendor lock-inâ, a perfect walled garden which clients find hard to leave. This pattern suggests that, over the next three years, Coles will increasingly depend on Silicon Valley technology to understand and manage its own business. A company that sells a quarter of Australiaâs groceries may become operationally reliant on a US tech titan.
The Worst Housing Minister in Australia | Harriet Shing
for YouTubeVictoria is in its worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis is the direct result of respective governments neglecting housing despite being entirely aware of the sectors proliferating state of disrepair. Current housing minister Harriot Shing is not only complicit in this crisis, but actively an enabler, allowing her friends in big financial and real estate firms to profit from the suffering of the rest of the city.
Across Europe, the financial sector has pushed up house prices. Itâs a political timebomb
in The GuardianCouldn't have put it better myself:
Powerful financial actors have done a great job at framing themselves as the solution to, rather than the cause of, the prevailing crisis. They have incessantly pushed the now-dominant narrative that more real estate investment is a good thing because it will increase the supply of much-needed homes. Blackstone, for example, claims to play a âpositive role in addressing the chronic undersupply of housing across the continentâ. But the evidence suggests that greater involvement of financial markets has not increased aggregate home ownership or housing supply, but instead inflated house prices and rents.
The thing is, institutional investors arenât really into producing housing. It is directly against their interests to significantly increase supply. As one asset manager concedes, housing undersupply is bad for residents but âsupportive for cashflowsâ. Blackstoneâs president famously admitted that âthe big warning signs in real estate are capital and cranesâ. In other words, they need shortages to keep prices high.
Where corporate capital does produce new homes, they will of course be maximally profitable. Cities such as Manchester, Brussels and Warsaw have experienced a proliferation of high-margins housing products such as micro-apartments, build-to-rent and co-living. Designed with the explicit intention of optimising cashflows, these are both unaffordable and unsuitable for most households. Common Wealth, a thinktank focusing on ownership, found that the private equity-backed build-to-rent sector, which accounts for 30% of new homes in London, caters predominantly to high-earning single people. Families represent just 5% of build-to-rent tenants compared with a quarter of the private rental sector more broadly. These overpriced corporate appendages are a stark reminder of the marketâs inability to deliver homes that fit the needs and incomes of most people.
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In recent decades we have been living through an ever-intensifying social experiment. Can housing, a fundamental need for all human beings, be successfully delivered under the machinations of finance capitalism? The evidence now seems overwhelming: no.
As investors have come to dominate, so the power of residents has been systematically undermined. We are left with a crisis of inconceivable proportions. While we can, and should, point the finger at corporate greed, we must remember that this is the system working precisely as it is set up to do. When profit is the prevailing force, housing provision invariably fails to align with social need â to generate the types of homes within the price ranges most desperately required. In the coming years, housing will occupy centre stage in European politics. Now is the time for fundamental structural changes that reclaim homes from the jaws of finance, re-empower residents and reinstate housing as a core priority for public provision.
Why we need to abolish landlords | Nick Bano interview
for YouTubeHousing Lawyer and author Nick Bano came by JOE Towers to chat about his new book Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis which is out now. In this conversation we chat about Britain's housing setup, how is set up to create winners and losers and how to end the age of the landlord.
A New Kind of Corner Store
in Perspectives JournalAs food prices keep climbing and grocery chains rake in record profits amid slim margins, itâs time to seriously consider a public alternative to the supermarket giants and dĂ©panneurs: municipally owned grocery stores.
Itâs not as far-fetched as it sounds. In Madison, Wisconsin, a city-owned grocery store is in the works to serve an underserved neighbourhood after the last private grocer pulled out. Atlanta operates two public grocery outlets to tackle food deserts â where full grocers are distant and inaccessible for whole populations, typically due to community poverty and poor profit margins. Chicago is moving ahead with a city-run food market to help poorer residents afford groceries. These U.S. cities do not want to become supermarket empires, rather, they are responding to a market failure causing hunger and poverty. When concentrated corporate ownership meets declining margins and socioeconomic gaps, some neighbourhoods are left with no fresh food options at all.
In New York City, 2025 Democratic Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani is pushing for a public grocery store in every borough. It is a bold idea and campaign policy promise that has emerged in response to rising food insecurity among New Yorkers. The concept gained traction during Mamdaniâs Democratic Mayoral Primary campaign, where food justice became one of several economic rallying cries alongside other affordability measures like rent control and free public transit.
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So far, our food policy imagination has been largely confined to subsidies, zoning incentives, and casual price monitoring. We also tried the classic Canadian tactic of knocking on international doors and asking very, very nicely for prices to freeze or come down. Canadians can likely tell you whether they have felt the benefits of these current approaches. But what if we went further? What if we treated food access not just as a supply-chain challenge or a matter of affordability, but as infrastructure: as essential to community resilience as transit or libraries?
Who does Woolworthsâ tracking and timing of its workers serve? Itâs certainly not the customers
in The GuardianFears about losing jobs to automation have become commonplace, but according to United Workers Union (UWU) research and policy officer Lauren Kelly, who researches labour and supermarket automation, rather than manual work being eliminated, it is often augmented by automation technologies. This broadens the concern from one of job loss to more wide-ranging implications for the nature of work itself. That is, she says, ârather than replace human workers with robots, many are being forced to work like robotsâ.
In addition to the monitoring tactics used upon workers, supermarkets also direct their all-seeing eye towards customers through an array of surveillance measures: cameras track individuals through stores, âsmartâ exit gates remain closed until payment, overhead image recognition at self-serve checkouts assess whether youâre actually weighing brown onions, and so on. Woolworths even invests in a data-driven âcrime intelligence platformâ, which raises significant privacy concerns, shares data with police and claims that it can predict crime before it happens â not just the plot of Minority Report but also an offshoot of the deeply problematic concept of âpredictive policingâ. Modern supermarkets have become a testing ground for an array of potential rights-infringing technologies.
âStop all time wastingâ: Woolworths workers tracked and timed under new efficiency crackdown
in The GuardianLate last year, the company introduced a new framework to enforce an efficiency rate for picking of 100%. Workers who werenât meeting the standard would be put into a coaching program. Some were directed to âstop all time wasting and non-productive behaviorsâ, according to warning letters seen by Guardian Australia. Failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action and even loss of employment. One worker described it as a âbullyingâ tactic.
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A spokesperson for Primary Connect, Woolworthsâ supply chain arm, said its coaching framework helped âto ensure a fair approach to the standards is applied to any personal circumstances or abilitiesâ.
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But Guardian Australia spoke to a dozen current and former workers for Woolworths and Primary Connect, who claim the standards are unfair and putting their safety at risk. All requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.
As more people shop online, thereâs been growing attention to the treatment and tracking of workers in warehouses run by e-commerce conglomerates like Amazon. In June, the state of California fined the company for failing to properly disclose its productivity targets to workers â a decision the company is reportedly appealing. But Australian warehouse workers have long been subject to this style of control. Engineered standards were introduced by Australian supermarket chains in the late 1980s and 1990s and were the target of industrial action.
âItâs a fantasy of total efficiency,â Christopher OâNeill, a research fellow at Deakin University who studies workplace automation, said of engineered standards. âThe argument was: this was a âscientificâ way of rationalising work and eliminating wasted time,â he said.
âItâs basically a pseudoscientific veneer over this kind of fantasy of being able to control every second of every day.â
Australian Christian Lobby spread transphobia in election letter drop
in Q NewsThe Australian Christian Lobby has sent an election mail out in Victoria, spreading transphobia and trying to discredit The Greens.
Residents of the City of Yarra and Moreland City Councils contacted QNews after they received transphobic election material.
It arrived in their letterbox the day after Trans Day of Visibility.
The pamphlet from the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) was titled: âMale and Female Matterâ.
It states that the Greens are âexperimenting with biology at your expenseâ.
âMale and female matter, The Greens donât agree,â the pamphlet read.
Siting that âwhile you wait for urgent medical care, The Greens want to use your tax dollars for free gender transition surgeriesâ.
The pamphlet also says that the Greens wish to put more gender clinics in hospitals while emergency departments are in crisis.