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SALT LAKE CITY — When Utah Republicans passed a ban on gender-affirming health care for children and teens in 2023, they argued it was needed to protect vulnerable kids from treatments that could cause long-term harm.

Years later, the results of a study commissioned under the same law contradict that claim, and the Republican-led Legislature is facing pressure to reconsider the restrictions.

Utah's Department of Health and Human Services and experts from the state's leading health organizations concluded from a study of thousands of transgender people that gender-affirming care generated "positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes."

Policies that prevent access to hormone therapy for minors cannot be justified based on scientific findings or concerns about potential regret in the future, the report states.

The agency is not taking a position on whether lawmakers should lift the statewide ban on hormone therapy and surgeries for minors. But it reminded lawmakers that they had intended for the prohibition to be temporary until the state could conduct its own research

Utah is among 27 states that have adopted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, who Republican politicians have made a political lightning rod. Federal judges have struck down bans in Arkansas, Florida and Montana as unconstitutional, though a federal appeals court has stayed the Florida ruling. The law in Kansas is not yet being enforced.

Some Utah Republicans said they were open to considering the findings of the study, while others were quick to dismiss it.

In a joint statement, the House sponsor of the 2023 law banning gender-affirming care and the chair of the Legislature's interim health committee said they "intend to keep the moratorium in place."

"Young kids and teenagers should not be making life-altering medical decisions based on weak evidence," said Republican Reps. Katy Hall and Bridger Bolinder. "Simply put, the science isn't there, the risks are real, and the public is with us."

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Marie Louise was a lifelong New Orleanian who died of malnutrition. Hiram Malone came to Louisiana from Alabama, hospitalized at 21 with a fatal case of pneumonia. Samuel Prince was a 40-year-old cook, who succumbed to tuberculosis.

They were among 19 Black patients who died at one New Orleans hospital in the 1870s, and whose heads were removed by a doctor to be sent to Germany. There, the crania were studied as "specimens" in what was then a proliferating pseudoscience of phrenology. It purported connections between someone's intellect or morality and the size or shape of their skull, with some doctors theorizing superiority of one race over another.

The skulls of those 19 patients have now been repatriated to Louisiana after more than a century abroad. On Saturday, they were honored in a multi-faith memorial and laid to rest in a jazz funeral rooted in New Orleans tradition.

"We can't be sure exactly where they came from. And so here, we have them. And what are we to make of what happened to them?" Eva Baham, a historian from Dillard University who led the cultural repatriation committee, said during Saturday's service. "You can be angry. You could be upset, rightly so. But we can't stay there."

The remains were returned by the University of Leipzig, which in 2023 contacted the city archeologist in New Orleans, acknowledging the skulls had been acquired in a "colonial context and unethically." The two-year return process involved city, state and academic institutions. It culminated in a notable international restitution, a return of African American remains from Europe — with many remains still lingering in archival collections across the U.S. and abroad, at museums and universities.

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It was two years later, in early December 2022, when police broke the news: Morgan had been murdered.

Between March and May of that year, a serial killer had systematically targeted vulnerable Indigenous women experiencing homelessness and addiction, luring them to his Winnipeg apartment with offers of food, shelter, or substances before murdering, dismembering, and disposing of them in rubbish bins.

Morgan Harris was his second victim. She was 39 years old.

Winnipeg police were first alerted to the then 35-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist on May 16, 2022, when the partial remains of Rebecca Contois were found in a rubbish bin. Skibicki was charged two days later, and the following month, police began searching the Brady Road Landfill, a municipal landfill on the outskirts of the city, where they found more of her remains.

Morgan and Marcedes’s families were told that their relatives' remains were likely in the privately operated Prairie Green Landfill, a sprawling waste disposal site north of Winnipeg.

To their dismay, police refused to search the landfill, believing they had enough evidence to convict Skibicki without the remains of his victims.

"It was like losing her all over again," says Elle of the moment she learned the police wouldn’t search for her mother’s remains. "They called us into a room and just told us - no warning, no asking how we felt about it. They said, 'We're not going to look for your mom,' like she was just garbage to be thrown away."

The provincial government of Manitoba, of which Winnipeg is the capital, declared a search of the Prairie Green landfill "unfeasible", stating that the 10,000 truckloads of waste deposited in the seven months since the women were murdered, combined with the compacting and decomposition that had occurred, made recovery nearly impossible.

But Elle and the other relatives refused to accept that.

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The socialist fraternal kiss

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From Inside The New People’s Army ( Part 1)

“The best fighters were gay!” - Jose Maria Sison

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A "movement" that only exists online

Hello my nerds, hope you all have a good week

Remember no crackers

Starting this month you can throw bricks at chuds

The rainbow flag or pride flag is a symbol of LGBT pride and LGBT social movements. The colors reflect the diversity of the LGBT community and the spectrum of human sexuality and gender. Using a rainbow flag as a symbol of LGBT pride began in San Francisco, California, but eventually became common at LGBT rights events worldwide.

Originally devised by the artists Gilbert Baker, Lynn Segerblom, James McNamara and other activists, the design underwent several revisions after its debut in 1978, and continues to inspire variations. Although Baker's original rainbow flag had eight colors, from 1979 to the present day the most common variant consists of six stripes: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The flag is typically displayed horizontally, with the red stripe on top, as it would be in a natural rainbow.

LGBT people and allies currently use rainbow flags and many rainbow-themed items and color schemes as an outward symbol of their identity or support. There are derivations of the rainbow flag that are used to focus attention on specific causes or groups within the community (e.g. transgender people, fighting the AIDS epidemic, inclusion of LGBT people of color). In addition to the rainbow, many other flags and symbols are used to communicate specific identities within the LGBT community.

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

As images of burned children, starving families, and bombed hospitals in Gaza become the constant soundtrack of daily life, the Palestinian communities that survived the Nakba and stayed in the lands that were occupied by Israel in 1948 (hence called “’48 Palestinians”), are filled with anger, frustration, and a sense of hollowness and disempowerment. Against the general paralysis, Umm al-Fahm, the main Palestinian city in “the Northern Triangle region,” stands out.

Palestinian activists in the town, united around the local “popular committee,” keep trying to break the barriers of repression and fear that have taken hold in their community since October 7. The last attempt was on Saturday, May 24.

The popular committee in Umm al-Fahm called for a national demonstration backed by the Higher Follow-Up Committee of the Arab Public — the united leadership of ’48 Palestinian communities — alongside the Committee for Solidarity with the Administrative Detainee Raja Eghbarieh.

The invitation for the demonstration came under three slogans: “We stand with our people! No to ethnic cleansing and genocide! Freedom to the teacher Raja and all other detainees!”

Even as the demonstration was licensed, the police did not let it end peacefully. As we gathered in Dawar al-‘Uyun, plainclothed “detectives” started to attack demonstrators and tear down some banners that they did not like. I noticed specifically that they objected to such banners as “No to Genocide” and “No to Ethnic Cleansing.”

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