Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Washington will be casting their ballots on issues like athletic participation, healthcare access and invasive sex tests.

We’re 10 days out from the midterm elections in the U.S., and attacks on trans rights have taken center stage. Repeating a strategy championedby Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024, supporters of the Republican Party have been flooding the internet and airwaves with ads targeting trans people. Some Democrats have also joined in, campaigning on promises to “keep transgender ideology out of our schools” and stop “biological men playing women’s sports.”

The Trump administration has once again all but erased trans**gender people from reports about sexual violence in prisons and jails across the country — except to report data about trans people as perpetrators of violence. The same reports mention transgender victims behind labels such as “other.”

The two Bureau of Justice Statistics reports, based on the results of the anonymous National Inmate Survey conducted in 2023 and 2024, that were released last week, glaringly obscure data about trans people as victims of violence behind bars.

Prosecutors allege that 25-year-old Tremon Hill lured Dejanay Stantoninto an alley in Chicago's Bronzeville neighbourhood before shooting her in the head in August 2018 because he did not want others to know he had been involved with a trans woman. Hill denies the charge. 

Opening the case this week, Assistant State's Attorney Jennifer Cooperdescribed Stanton as a woman who was "living her life on her own terms" and "living her life as the person she wanted to be".

Exclusive | TL;DR: The Ministry of Justice's new transgender staff policy, part of a wider roll out of guidance for trans staff across the civil service, sets they "must tell" managers of their trans identity if they search prisoners. Trans+ civil service, prison and probation staff members have also been told they "must not use single-sex facilities designated for your affirmed gender."

She then went on to fully defend transgender people, calling the attacks on trans people an attempt to demolish Title IX: “So this administration, in focusing and trying to gin up hatred against trans Americans, the Trump administration, while everyone was focused on that, quietly defunded the civil rights division of enforcement in the administration on Title IX. And so understand that when they attack trans girls in sports, they’re also attacking all women’s ability to stand up against their abusers, their rapists, and their assaulters on campuses across America. And that’s why I think it’s very important for all of us to understand and to feel and to know that our fight is united. It really is united.”

The email, reviewed by Westword, is addressed from Rich Guggenheim to State Rep. Brianna Titone on Oct. 7, 2026. The message begins by calling Titone her deadname, then says: “Whats up trnny? OR do you prefer tron? I’ve got all kinds of slurs, and as long as you keep using the slur ‘cis’, I will keep using them on you, sir.”

Guggenheim was a lead proponent of what became Proposition 134, an initiative to prohibit trans students from playing on K-12 and college sports teams that don’t align with their sex assigned at birth. He was one of two designated representatives behind the original proposal, Initiative 70. Erin Lee replaced Guggenheim when the proposal was amended and reintroduced as Initiative 109 to make technical corrections. In the email to Titone, Guggenheim slams the House member out of Jefferson County for opposing the ballot measure, accusing her of “misogyny and homophobia” because Guggenheim is gay.

“What the email clearly shows is the animus toward the trans community behind these initiatives,” Titone says. “I can passionately disagree with someone without using slurs, but the choice was made to go there. Again and again, we see animus and vitriol used against the trans community, which they have realized they can profit from. It’s truly telling what their motivations are from this email.”

After saying she and her husband briefly contemplated committing arson against their local school district, Protect Kids Colorado Executive Director Erin Lee ultimately concluded, “ continue to burn things down, we're just doing it in a different way, through lawsuits, through exposure, through forcing the change of laws on these school districts. It's not as immediately gratifying, but I do think in the long run it's more effective.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds faced criticism after repeatedly calling a transgender woman “sir,” including after she corrected him.

Political content creator Jessica Kelly shared a video on Facebook, captioned “Byron Disrespects a Trans Veteran Woman.” Amid a statewide bus tour, Donalds had a tense exchange with the unidentified activist, who pressed the candidate about a recent anti-trans political mailer.

Doctors and nurses in Washington warn that an anti-transgender sports initiative would subject girls to invasive sex-verification requirements to participate in school athletics.

Initiative 638 would bar transgender girls from girls’ school sports teams and require students competing in girls’ sports to provide verification of their sex from a healthcare provider. Under the measure’s text, that verification would have to rely on reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or naturally produced testosterone levels.

The Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic announcement, made on Instagram, specified that filming would begin in 2027. A poster design floated the title Jean for the project. “For years people have asked me about playing [Basquiat] in a film,” Kid Cudi wrote in the post. “But no project actually came to be. This year, I finally said f**k it, ima write it myself.”

The Democratic incumbent for Florida’s 14th Congressional District, Rep. Kathy Castor, was all smiles last week as she threw transgender Americans under the bus.

At a candidate forum at the Tampa Tiger Bay Club—a nonpartisan organization that hosts political programming such as this—the group’s Republican treasurer, Art Wood, took aim at trans people with the very first question of the event.

“What is your position on men, biological men, in women’s sports?” he asked, invoking a common pejorative used to describe transgender women and girls. “Are you for it or against it?”

“The answer is no,” Castor said, grinning and laughing. She did not elaborate.

The development comes as questions continue to swirl around who sent the flyers that began appearing in mailboxes across Texas this week.

On Oct. 15, 2026, Silver Rail Elementary in Oregon became the latest site of a mass school shooting. Though by the time this is published, it’s entirely possible another school will take the title of “latest,” bumping Silver Rail to the title of “recent,” then to “past,” then to the dumpster that houses this country’s collective memory.

Statistically, school shootings in the U.S. are a rare occurrence (though compared to other countries, we’re No. 1). Most U.S. students will never be in a school while people are being shot at and killed, let alone be shot and left to bleed to death in a hallway or under a desk.

But some will. And as a country we’ve chosen to accept this even though it should be completely unacceptable. We chalk it up to the cost of freedom to bear arms. As a country we’ve chosen, over and over, to protect guns over kids.

“I’m in Texas, and it seems like every commercial break has 4–6 political ads, most of them attacking James Talarico,” the post starts, before lamenting, “My kids didn’t even know what transgender meant until these ads started airing. Now they’re hearing about it constantly, and not because they went looking for it. The anti-Talarico ads seem to talk about these issues more than anyone else does. It irritates me especially when I don’t want to explain what they’re talking about to my children.”

The woman, identified as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, updated her birth certificate in Illinois in June but was denied when she attempted to make the same change to her Tennessee driver’s license. DMV officials cited SB1440, a law signed by Gov. Bill Lee (R) in 2023 that requires state-issued identification documents to reflect a person’s sex assigned at birth rather than their gender identity.

“June 2026, [Doe] changed her Illinois birth certificate to reflect her sex,” reads the complaint, as reported by WVLT. “[Doe] attended the Knox County Department of Motor Vehicles to change her driver’s license… she was told due to [a Tennessee law] that she would be unable to have her driver’s license reflect her sex.”

Because if the mere act of adding gender-neutral language, like the word “parent”, to breastfeeding policies in parliament sets off an attack against gender-inclusivity, what else will? And if conservatives continue to reduce womanhood to reproductive functions, what Handmaid’s Tale-esque dystopian future awaits us?

As attacks on transgender rights have accelerated under the Trump administration, four states have placed measures on the November ballot to further erode those protections, with a focus on banning trans teens from participating in school sports. (Similar restrictions have already been implemented in 27 states.) Though LGBTQ+ groups have long fought against anti-trans policies, the proposal in Washington has drawn broad opposition from adults who work with queer and trans teens, including many healthcare providers, teachers and counselors.

This story originally appeared on Them.Oscar winner and famously gender-bending performer Tilda Swinton is set to reprise her role as a cross-dressing character named Ella/Max in an off-Broadway production of Manfred Karge’s Man to Man at New York City’s Lucille Lortel Theatre in February 2027.As De...

The report, dated September 21, 2026, shares that, from January 1 to July 31, 2026, a total of 416 hate crimes were documented across all groups in all bureaus of Los Angeles, compared to the 408 that occurred throughout the same time period in 2025, representing only a near 2% increase. But when looking specifically at crimes broken down by identity, three of four LAPD bureaus (South, Valley, and West), show that the percentages of hate crimes against both gay men and transgender people increased from 2025 to 2026.

Dunne: And so this law passed, and so I imagine it was there was some enforcement that that that that was a penalty if insurance companies didn't do this, but so it passed. But what's going on now? Talk about the bulk of your story because it isn't necessarily being enforced like the law said it would.

Thomas: The law split up enforcement responsibilities between the Oregon Health Authority, which is in charge of the Oregon Health Plan, which is the state's version of Medicaid, and then it gave commercial insurance to the Department of Consumer and Business Services. And to be really clear, the law is being enforced, so that the Department of Consumer Business Services is enforcing the law. So, if an insurance plan that's subject to the law is not covering gender affirming care as specified by the law. There will be enforcement. That's what the department told me. But the big thing that's not happening right now is the is the Department of Consumer Business Services. They were supposed to do an examination of all commercial carriers that were subject to HB 2002 to make sure that they're actually following the law that they're they were in fact offering this care without throwing up the bureaucratic hurdles that that's happened in the past and they were also supposed to deliver a report to legislators by about the end of the year about the implementation of HB 2002, that's not happening. Meanwhile, the Oregon Health Authority, which is in charge of Medicaid again, they are they were supposed to do an analysis of Medicaid insurers to see how many of their members needed gender affirming care and to see if there was enough providers.