Last year, 76 Americans claimed asylum in the Netherlands, according to the Dutch asylum and immigration ministry, up from nine in 2024. Photograph: Judith Jockel/The Guardian
“It is epistemic vandalism. It is the refusal to consider any knowledge base or testimony or advocacy or opinion that is insufficiently transphobic as valid at all. It is the active and malicious exclusion of even the credible and authoritative if their judgment of us is deemed to be insufficiently harmful. It is the mandating and requirement that only that which actively denies, displaces, and dismisses us is acceptable as knowledge, and everything else is ‘opinion’ or ‘activism’ or, bluntly, hysteria. It is, in short, the collective global and societal gaslighting of an entire category of person, because to consider us as anything less than a tumor to excise or a blight to cure is in and of itself disqualifying. It is a reversal of reality, an inversion of who victim and oppressor are to justify a level of violence and stigmatization and exclusion as to be tantamount to genocide.”
“Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages” is a small but potent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annex of medieval art, the Cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park on the north end of Manhattan. The curators use art from the 13th to the 16th centuries to muster a set of corollary questions: If God made man and woman, didn’t he/she/it also make angels, who have no gender? What do we make of these celestial androgynes? And if God made woman from man, extracting the feminine Eve from the rib of masculine Adam, what gender were they before the twain were separated?
The video “Speaking to the Soul” from A Gender Fluid Life is a brief personal reflection on gender fluidity. The creator explains that simply having their femme self acknowledged by others brings genuine joy. They emphasize that they don’t always need to present outwardly as their femme persona, Anja; what matters most is when friends and people around them recognize and affirm who they truly are.
MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) is an American novelist, philanthropist, and early contributor to Amazon.
This is not the first time MacKenzie Scott, one of the richest women in the US, has given money to LGBTQ organizations.
In 2020, Borealis Philanthropy’s Fund for Trans Generations announced it received a $2 million gift from MacKenzie Scott (described as its largest one-time gift at the time).
Outright International published a report presenting Scott’s support as a major “game changer” investment in the global queer and transgender movement, noting gifts to multiple LGBTIQ organizations.
MAP’s announcement of a Scott gift discusses the rise of anti-LGBTQ attacks and mentions laws targeting families “simply for supporting their transgender child.”
The U.S. Supreme Court is stepping into one of the most politically charged corners of LGBTQ+ rights: whether states can bar transgender girls and women from participating on girls’ and women’s school sports teams.
On January 13, 2026, the justices are scheduled to hear two cases together – West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox – challenging statewide bans in West Virginia and Idaho.
