Some of us try to parse the transphobia, see an underlying logic or rationality--attacking trans people is a way to undermine feminism, or to prop up a masculinity that the economy no longer does. But sometimes it's just batshit crazy.

Some of us try to parse the transphobia, see an underlying logic or rationality--attacking trans is a way to undermine feminism, or to prop up a masculinity that the economy no longer does. But sometimes it's just batshit crazy.

When the real news is so much more nuts than The Onion.

Glad to see that Texas Tech's Draconian censoring of what can be taught about race and gender has now been challenged.

Every outlet in our news tracker covered the recent trans sports ban decision at SCOTUS, but when I looked at the coverage I found one clear outlier - the New York Times had the most stories (5 in all) but not one included a quote from a trans person or representative of a trans rights organization.

“The Times stands out as the only news outlet to run more than three stories on the court decision without quoting a person identified in the copy as transgender or as the representative of a transgender rights organization.”🧵

Justice Thomas: “Sex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic…To use language to obscure reality—to show ‘indifference regarding truth’—is to lie to the public.” By Thomas's logic—not mine—I should still play on women's teams, have an ID with an F on it, use the women's room. Who's lying?

Breaking: Supreme Court issues decision in transgender student athlete case.  Thanks to our partner @gladlaw.bsky.social.

Clarence Thomas citing MIT philosopher Alex Byrne to support his ultra-transphobic opinion. I hope all the analytic philosophers who defended Byrne as a serious, apolitical scholar see this and learn something, but I'm not hopeful.

See, people always want to make this just about "sports," but the real upshot here is that, 6-3, trans women can't make a claim under the Equal Protection Clause. And if they can't do that, it's hard to see how they have constitutional rights.

Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in the trans sports ban case in West Virginia contains some of the ugliest transphobic stuff I have ever seen in a legal opinion. Straight-up gleeful. Vile man. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court upholds West Virginia and Idaho's laws banning trans girls and women from women's sports. Justice Kavanaugh has the opinion for the court, holding that states "may" make sports eligibility based on "biological sex." www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Tomorrow is Lou Sullivan's birthday and we all need some inspiration in this time of anti-trans insanity. This quote never fails to inspire me. Here he is at 13, writing in his diary. (Sullivan grew up to be a gay trans man & a pioneer of FTM community organizing, dying died of AIDS in 1991.

He didn’t need to go here to make his point. But he did. You can make a case for Platner without relying on this tired misogyny. (Picture from his Substack.)

Read this. www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-t...

Trying to get Claude to help me understand the geometry of edging a kayak in wind. Didn’t go well.

Had a lively conversation about Trump, sex classification, and the administrative state on @laurieessig.bsky.social's podcast, Feminism, Fascism, and the Future. sites.middlebury.edu/feminismfasc...

A new crop of state laws are “leveraging criminalization as a tactic against trans people,” Kae Petrin reports. At least 10 states have imposed new misdemeanor or felony penalties since 2022—a stark increase in the use of criminal law to target trans people & their support networks.

1. In a stunning example of restricting students from talking about LGBTQ+ people, Pensacola State College as violated decades of Supreme Court precedent and blocked a student journalism magazine from publishing 3 stories because they included LGBTQ+ topics. Subscribe to support our journalism.

no better study of these restrictions than the PEN America report from Jan 2026, which reveals how 50% of all students in america lived in a state with laws that censored or directly undermined academic freedom,coauthored by the incredible Dr Amy Reid, former chair of WGS at New College Florida

@thegraduatecenter.bsky.social Join us on Thursday, April 30th, to find out how the "War on DEI" is reshaping the contemporary university and what is at stake for higher education as a site of knowledge production, professional training, and democratic engagement.

This is exactly why I no longer use the platforms my college provides for distributing my course content.

More than 125,000 U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs are now publicly available through the @archive.org. The collection contains official records from the lower court, briefs and opinions.

Okay…this is a piece of good news. A guy whose intellect has been powering the LGBTQ movement for decades, but who thinks social media is only for cat pictures, gets the recognition he deserves.

The authors of the HHS report on trans youth health care were chosen by the Manhattan Institute's Leor Sapir. Now, a rule based on the controversial report could wipe out this care at hospitals. Parents are begging the administration not to go through with it. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

NYT today: Magyar won because he distanced himself from pesky LGBTQ community. 2025: Budapest Pride turned into a major pro-democracy event after Orban banned it, over a hundred thousand show up in support, not just LGBTQ people. NYT eds should read their own paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/o...

These sad people find woke too cringe. Guess no one told them that cringe is cringe. They can rest easy now that the anti-woke is now the rule of law, and it’s open season on trans people. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/o...

This has just been published in “Theory & Society” (formerly) considered THE top #sociology /theory journal, after Springer Nature redid the board, installing Steven Pinker among them. Shame shame shame

The right: trans people don’t exist. Also the right: we must develop systems to identify them.

The right: trans people don’t exist. Also the right: we must develop systems to identify them.

In a new @latimes.com Op-Ed, I discuss how Kansas’s recent law invalidating 1,700 transgender individuals’ driver’s licenses raises significant questions about proportionality and administrative purpose. It criminalizes trans folks for no benefit to anyone. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Madeline Pape on sports and sex is worth a listen. Behind the rhetoric—what the science actually says. I bet you can’t guess (well, my followers probably can) which side of the research is more rigorous.

Kansas invalidated the driver's licenses of hundreds of trans people, made it a crime to drive to the DMV to "correct" them, & started keeping a list of everyone who did so. @isaacsederbaum.bsky.social & I on trans people in the state's surveillance architecture for @donmoyn.bsky.social's substack.

This is it exactly. As @isaacsederbaum.bsky.social and I wrote in a piece out today--even as these states deny the existence of trans identity, they build administrative systems to track us-- an expanding architecture of surveillance and control. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/when-compl...

It's all in how questions are worded and issues are framed. For example, 64% of respondents hold contradictory opinions on transgender policy. This is why Democrats should lead with a vision, not pander to the Fox News manosphere.

True story—Years ago on Twitter, before Jamelle Bouie joined the Times, I assumed he was trans because I thought (wrongly it turned out) that a cis journalist wouldn’t be posting so much stuff about transphobia.

Yesterday the Supreme Court blocked California policies protecting trans students BUT NY Attorney General Tish James told NYU that its decision to stop trans care for youth may violate the law, so continue doing it. States rights!

NEW: SCOTUS partially grants the request in Mirabelli v. Bonta, relating to California policies protecting against forced outing of trans students by teachers to parents, over the dissent of the Democratic appointees. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Hard-hitting reporting from the Brooklyn College student paper, with firsthand interviews from students & staff on NYU Langone’s latest decision to stop gender-affirming care for minors.https://vanguard.blog.brooklyn.edu/2026/02/nyu-langone-ceases-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-for-a-second-time/

Trump's anti-trans agenda moving along. Yesterday, the EEOC said that a federal employer can ban trans women from women's bathrooms, trans men from men's bathrooms. The Court's decision in the good 2020 Bostock hadn't addressed bathrooms. shorturl.at/IiWuE

A reminder to those who love their daily wordle but not the Times, there’s always Queerdle queerdle.com

@adamconover.net has a terrific podcast, and I don't say that just because I'm on it this week. Adam is the polymath of comedians. It's a pleasure to talk to him about trans issues. He's so well informed, one doesn't have to retread the usual talking points, so the conversation goes further.

1. Numerous transgender people in Kansas are reporting that the state has sent them a letter demanding the immediate surrender of drivers licenses. Those driving could be arrested, charged, and see privileges revoked. Subscribe to support our journalism. www.erininthemorning.com/p/kansas-sen...

I always enjoy talking to @adamconover.net, the polymath of comedians. headgum.com/factually-wi...

@judith-levine.bsky.social watched Melania so we don't have to. Techbros, Fuentes, Epstein and Musk: On women in Trumpland. www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

in addition to evoking the "deceiver" trope (he "fell prey" to trans/LGBTQ+ ppl), Newsom is the LEAST CULTURALLY NORMAL prominent Dem politician right now. he owns a winery. he married Kimberly Guilfoyle. when they split up he dated 19-year-old (when he was 38). he podcasts w/Steve Bannon, etc.

There seem to be 2 paths here: (1) Class becomes a conversation between LLMs (2) Digital tools are removed from the classroom altogether

What's more shocking than ICE's plan to cram as many 8,500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses? Seeing the actual DHS floor plan that echoes slavery ships and history's worst gulags with no rec space but a gun range for guards My new column on the camps www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

With the SAVE act, Republicans want to make it more difficult for married women who have changed their name to vote—and that is more likely to be Republican women. Seems counterintuitive but not if the long term goal is repealing the 19th A. By Pamela Herd. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

Maybe I’ll just keep posting this every time we learn of another violation of our 1st amendment rights (from our actual government) to remind us of the 152 prominent writers who were so bothered by “cancel culture” (post #metoo and #blm that they wrote an open letter about it back in 2020.