- All articles

All articles

- Dylan Mulvaney’s Broadway Debut Rattles Bigots

- Discussing Trans Sports at the Supreme Court

- From Play Dates to Protest: Rainbow Families Chart a Trans Evolution

- A Blue Wall Against Bias, a Red Attack on Academic Freedom

- Trans Victims Fight for Rohingya Justice in The Hague

- TWIBS: Bob Ferguson, Spin Victim

- News Stories Shape Public Perception of Trans Lives. We’re Keeping Score.

- Law and Ignorance: The Enemies of Empathy in Prison

JAN 21, 2026, 6:00 AM EST | ALYSSA STEINSIEK | SOURCE

Dylan Mulvaney’s Broadway Debut Rattles Bigots

Dylan Mulvaney has been cast as Anne Boleyn in the musical SIX for her Broadway debut next month, shocking hateful losers everywhere.

by Aly Gibbs

I regret to inform you all that Dylan Mulvaney is making headlines once more for, like before, the unforgivable crime of being transgender and existing. Please, if you need to take a moment to process her sins in your heart and mind, I understand… I’ll be waiting for you when you return.

Okay. All better? Let’s proceed.

SIX is a musical about the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives. If you’re unfamiliar, Henry was a brutish dweeb who embraced the Church of England because the pope wouldn’t let him divorce his wives for failing to provide for him a son who could inherit the throne, leading to a spate of annulments and two whole ass beheadings. Now, far be it from me to critique a foreign nation’s domestic policy, but I have to say that seems like an extreme punishment to me!

Well, if you aren’t sent into an apoplectic rage by the existence of Dylan Mulvaney, you’ll be excited to hear that she’s making her Broadway debut as Anne Boleyn in SIX. If you fall into the other camp of apoplectically enraged twerps, I have bad news for you… not only is Mulvaney scheduled to continue existing, she seems to be daring to thrive.

Mulvaney posted to TikTok about her new role on Monday, reviving her Days of Girlhood video blog series, which has followed the general arc that most trans women experience of ceaselessly yapping about their transition for a couple years then getting sick of it because everybody’s being a big fucking weirdo. She explains in this video that her debut will be in February, that estrogen has made her feet smaller, and that most people have been very kind about her taking the job.

There are, of course, the wolves. Mulvaney admits that, because some people have come around to be hateful losers, her impulse was to make a video defending her talent as a performer. “Then I realized, I shouldn’t waste my breath on that,” she says, “because this is a miracle. It’s a miracle for anyone to make it to Broadway … but being a trans person in 2026, when this world is working against us in what feels like every way, for me to be able to step out onto a Broadway stage as Anne Boleyn and perform an iconic historical character’s role in a show that is so rooted in celebrating femininity, I think that’s a miracle.”

It’s a beautiful, stirring message, but again… the wolves. Conservative internet trolls on X harassed the production’s social media account so doggedly that it had to go on lockdown for a period of time, and their Instagram post announcing Mulvaney’s casting had its comments disabled to prevent a deluge of hateful chumps from flooding the announcement with bigotry. Mulvaney is no stranger to online controversy; you’ll probably recall the backlash against Bud Light, bread in a can that impairs your judgment, for gifting her a custom sixer. This debacle led to Kid “Bawitdaba” Rock, writer of such inspired lyrics as, “My name is Kid Rock,” mowing down a case of Bud with an assault rifle, a normal and measured response to nothing important happening.

Listen, I’m not a musical nerd or theater kid. I went a different direction when I was in school (to my detriment, I suspect), and as an adult I’ve only fallen in love with a handful of productions.

My favorite musical is probably Elisabeth, a story sung in a language I don’t even speak, if that tells you anything about me. That said, I agree with Mulvaney when she says this sort of thing is a miracle, and I’m so happy for her and proud of her. She has every right to pursue her joy, and so do all trans people, despite what the powers that be want us to believe. To that end, I’ll leave you with her parting words from the TikTok announcement, a sentiment I have long held and will always echo:

“If there are any queer or trans kids watching, I just want you to know that you can literally do anything. Maybe that’s theater, maybe it’s something different, but do not let anyone take away what brings you joy. You might have to fight really hard for it or go around the long way, but it is so worth it. It might not feel like it, but there are so many people cheering you on, and I am one of them.”

Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/mulvaney-on-broadway at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

JAN 20, 2026, 9:41 AM EST | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

Discussing Trans Sports at the Supreme Court

Two trans experts Assigned spoke with expect a narrower ruling from a court whose appetite for harming trans people may have ebbed.

by Riki Wilchins

Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a challenge to laws banning trans girls and women from playing women’s sports. Observers have mostly agreed the court is likely to uphold these bans. Riki Wilchins spoke with two trans legal experts about the case and what the silver linings might be for trans rights.

Assigned Media: So, what was your first impression?

Naomi Schoenbaum: It’s a little tangential, but that there's been extremely little media coverage and almost no opinion pieces. I guess I read it more negatively because I think it's because the left-leaning media has shifted on these issues and feels differently on athletics.

Ezra Ishmael Young: It felt nothing like the Bostock decision [which struck down LGBTQ+ employment discrimination in 2020] or Gavin Grimm's case [when he was forced to use the girls’ restroom in 2018]. Which is good, because if you're in the crosshairs of the Supreme Court like trans people are right now, you kind of don't want people talking it up and making it seem like a bigger issue than it is.

AM: Coney Barrett seemed to echo one of your core concerns, Naomi, that once the Court starts carving out exceptions to sex non-discrimination laws by arguing that one sex has more or less physical ability, they’re inevitably going to start carving exceptions into women's rights laws. So there seemed to be every indication that this is going to be a narrow ruling on the facts rather than setting a broad Constitutional precedent.

Ezra: It's going to be narrow, narrow, narrow. I counted. All of the Justices, including Thomas and Alito, were all like narrow, narrow, narrow, specific.

Naomi: The statute has specific text that says you can't discriminate on the basis of sex. But there are also regulations that the Department of Education has adopted which say you can discriminate based on sex in certain sports. So, there was a lot of discussion of the meaning of these regulations.

Ezra: I was heartened by a lot of the oral argument. It was definitely a different tone. I think the media strategy of the left has not been bad here. Don't sensationalize this. Don't make this seem like a darling issue of the left. We don't even need to call it a civil rights issue, even though it is. This is just a legal challenge. Judges use your basic tools in your toolbox to assess whether any of this makes sense. So, I think you were right, Riki, about Justice Barrett.

Naomi: There were repeated questions from justices on both the left and right to the effect of, How would we cabin this? What would this mean for chess or math class and so on?

AM: In other words, How could this ruling be limited so it isn’t broadly applied to everything kids of both sexes compete in at school? I was particularly struck by a quote from Gorsuch that was one of many that referenced what might be called the Slippery Slope of Sex, to the effect that once you allow individualized carve outs that could, “undermine the justification for the separation itself” so that once courts require exceptions, the entire edifice for having separate boys and girls teams could begin to unravel. Something that struck me was the justices and attorneys did not have a good working definition of sex. I think seeing Becky Pepper-Jackson forces you to rethink if sex is just chromosome and the gamete production but also hormones, morphology, etc. I see Ezra's not agreeing…

Ezra: I wouldn't take them literally. All justices feign ignorance to try to solicit more information from you. Gorsuch's big contribution during Bostock was that we don’t need to define sex to know there's discrimination on the basis of sex.

Naomi: This is where I'm going to come in add I'm not cleanly pro the plaintiffs’ approach. It’s one of the complications of challenging a law as applied; These state laws say that they may or must discriminate on the basis of sex in sports. That is not at issue here. All they’re saying is that Lindsay and Becky were put in the wrong group: I am a trans girl and I should be able to play on the girls team. It’s not the law but it’s application.

AM: As I understand it, courts like these as applied challenges, since they tend to result in narrow rulings that avoid striking down entire laws wholesale or setting broad precedents.

Naomi: To me, these laws are absurd in a variety of respects, which did come up in the argument and I was very happy about that. For example, Idaho’s applies as young as possible, I think even Justice Barrett brought up that you could segregate kindergartners by their sex and it also applies to any level of competition, including club sports where there are no stakes. So Kavanaugh is talking about how this is a zero sum game and that people really care about that, but these laws also apply to things where nobody cares.

AM: And then you have cases like trans man Mack Beggs, who was forced to compete on girls teams in Texas and won the state championship. I didn’t think there was a lot of focus on that.

Ezra: The answer was that the specific laws challenged here only force trans girls to play on boys’ teams. They're not specific to trans boys.

Naomi: Since there's a model law that they pretty much all copy, I think it's like 27 states that all only regulate girls and not boys.

Ezra: Mack was one of the best wrestlers in Texas at the time and he repeatedly won the girls’ wrestling titles year after year. He was recruited to wrestle for a men's university wrestling team; he was that good. He actually got sued by the parents of cis girls who had to wrestle against him. Justices Barrett and Jackon brought it up that, This isn't only targeting trans people, just specifically trans girls. What do we do with that?

I see a big change from where Justice Barrett was when she wrote her concurrence in Skrmetti just a few months ago. That reflects something might be going on with her, and I don't think we should undervalue it, especially when we have to court people like her.

AM: There were a number of questions about whether a trans girl identifying as a girl was sufficient. It seems to me that we’ve pushed the concept of gender identity as far as it can go legally, and we need some other, or at least some additional basis, for arguing that trans girls are girls. For Becky, it’s clearly more than just her identifying as a girl: she’s had a female puberty, she has breasts, and essentially a female body, she lives her entire social existence as a girl. We need a legal concept that recognizes and utilizes that instead of just relying on gender identity.

Naomi: I have a few responses. We emailed about this, Riki. There is a case on the Court’s shadow docket where they let an order for a trans boy to use the boys’ bathroom go through. They were fine with that, right? So, I do think there is a difference between the trans girls and the trans boys in their thinking.

I want to return to my point about as applied challenges. I completely understand why the plaintiffs in these cases are bringing their challenges this way as a litigation strategy.

But the problem with that is that it becomes all about biology. This is to Riki’s point: How do you decide about the boy who's a bad athlete and wants to play on the girls team? And the only response that can be given is the biological one that they still have the testosterone levels of a boy.

But that's clearly not the only reason. I mean, that whole argument to me felt absurd. Like if you were an alien who came down from outer space to listen to this argument and you kept hearing them say physical advantages are why we segregate based on sex doesn't make any sense. Like a height differential of 1 or 2ft is going to give some kids a far greater advantage in sports like basketball.

AM: Texas Tech just signed Stephanie Okechukwu, the first 7 footer in women’s college basketball. She’s actually 7-foot-1. She has vast, vast biological advantages over nearly every other college woman. In fact, any kid who’s good enough to play Division 1 or even Division 2 sports has built-in biological advantages; we just decide that some are “unfair” and others aren’t.

Naomi: There are other sports like wrestling where we do separate based on size. But they’re only a few and they’re the exception. So why do we separate based on sex? It's not physical advantage. It's because it's a social class. I found the whole argument extraordinarily frustrating because it focused only on the biological of physical differences and it just doesn't make sense.

Ezra: 50 years ago I don't think Congress, let alone sports regulators thought we'd have all these sex segregated sports. My understanding is that it was a Band-aid to require at least some sort of equivalent sports participation for women and girls. I don't think the plan was that we were always going to maintain this huge hierarchy of sex segregated sports.

AM: Every time Becky’s lawyers would argue that an exception should be made for her because she has a girls’ body, the other lawyers would argue, No, no, we can't do special carve outs for bodies the law doesn’t fit. I wrote an Advocate article ten years ago called “Transgender Dinosaurs” which argued that bodies like mine are going to eventually be the exception, and those like Becky’s are going to be the rule. People like her may be an exception today, but they won’t be that much longer, at least not in the blue states.

Ezra: Riki you and I have talked about this before, how a lot of these legal frameworks fixate on the moment of transition and very oddly imagine that every trans person is constantly caught up in the moment of transition. Not that there is a world where you're post-transition and the differences range from limited-to-minuscule. Kids like Becky are pushing people to see this.

It's important to point out that there are non-trans girls whose bodies are different in lots of ways and they will get ensnared by this. In the earlier Idaho cases, it was cis girls who were caught in this. They didn't want genital inspections, they didn't want all this other stuff.

AM: I believe they chose the moment of transition because it’s legally the very weakest point for arguing for the primacy of gender identity and First Person Authority to announce who and what you are.

Ezra: This argument by the advocates that the law is only wrong as applied to these two plaintiffs didn’t make any sense. The justices were like, Shut up. We're laughing at you now because this is so dumb. Stop bringing it up. But the ACLU and the other attorney were like arguing narrowly, Why are you asking for this bizarre line drawing? We're looking at your actual clients. It's whether they win or lose, so why do we need to do more than that? And I think that was right for different reasons that have nothing to do with trans rights. I think it's important for the Court to look at the case in front of it and to decide that case. We don't want to think about trying a fix that works with every single case that might arise. You want to work on the facts of the case in front of you, the specific law, the way it's written, the specific way it's been enforced, how it is or is not unfair.

AM: I found the argument that states can’t be bothered to make exceptions for singular cases entirely disingenuous because both plaintiffs were extreme exceptions already. There are probably 5,000 trans kids in Idaho, and Hecox was the only one known to be competing. There's probably about the same in West Virginia. Becky is the only one who’s out. So, states are crafting laws around single individual exceptions, but then arguing to adjudicate these laws in ways that say making exceptions is too big a burden. It’s ridiculous – but I didn’t hear anyone making that argument.

Ezra: I agree. In all sorts of contexts, most laws of any kind should have a safety valve. Because there's always the weird exception in which it’s going to be demonstrably unfair and wrong. A lot of cases go to the Supreme Court in different areas where their complaint is that the government didn’t allow a safety valve for unfair situations. That's just a bedrock part of American law that we allow for safety valves.

The Republican Party today is trying to push for is a false history of what it has been like to be trans in the United States, and what it has been like to have sex regarding laws in the US. The definitions they're trying to use like hormone levels, chromosomes, advantages and stuff. We had no idea what those things were until very recently, so that could not have been the basis historically for any of this stuff, right? We did not have uniform vital records and birth certificates until the turn of the 20th century, and even then they were pretty spotty. People relied upon what their socially recognized sex was.

And guess what? People have long accommodated trans people. Sex was literally what does the parish record say. And priests would alter those when trans people existed. How do we know? Because we have records of that, right? The Right is trying to argue that science has decided definitively X, Y, and Z. And even the conservative justices were pushing back, saying Isn't there disagreement in the field? If there's a disagreement, why should the Court step in and say this or that about sex? What the Right is trying to do is achieve a legal outcome by getting around the fact that their definitions of sex are tautological.

AM: The sponsor of that first bill in Idaho warned the stadiums would be empty because trans girls would have taken over women’s sports. Then she told an A/P reporter she didn’t actually know of a single trans female athlete anywhere in the state. Lindsay Hecox turned out to be the only one—and she was so “dominant” that she failed to make Boise State’s women track team when she enrolled the following year.

Ezra: Laws like this are literally going to disincentivize [cis] girls because they're going to be under hyper scrutiny. If they want to sign up for a sport they win at they have to worry someone will challenge their sex. That's the new generation of these laws that we're seeing where there is a private right of action to challenge an individual medalist because you want to confirm their sex is. This is not what Title IX was ever about. It was never about guaranteeing a medal more easily, it was to enable more women and girls to have the opportunity to compete and participate—not their right to win.

Ezra: I think the Court might be having some regrets about how they decided Skrmetti. I think they might have thought if they just gave a pound of flesh to the anti-trans side, people would calm down and there would be less fights. And I think they're seeing that it incentivized just the opposite that the Right is going to push even harder. To me the oral arguments sounded different.

Naomi: I'm much more optimistic. And the big difference was justices on the right, like Gorsuch and Barrett repeatedly wanted to put limits on how far the Right has gone on this. They were very worried that going against trans rights would lead to more discrimination against trans people and more sex segregation and be bad for women. So, I thought this argument was much better.

Ezra: These justices all live through and witnessed people benefiting from Title IX. Despite some failures in implementation, most people will agree has done a lot of benefit for women and men over the last 50 years. And I think many of them felt it was really weird to invoke this law to demand more discrimination; segregation upon segregation upon segregation. All of the justices seemed genuinely and rightly skeptical of that because there was no limit, Oh, this will only be trans people. I think they could see this how could escalate. Justice Gorsuch was saying, I don't trust you because I don't see any limiting factors on this rule that you're demanding.

AM: Ezra you’re quoted in The Advocate saying that elite trans athletes are going to have to navigate this like Black athletes did during the racial segregation. Like when Jackie Robinson went to UCLA, because it wasn’t segregated and he could play there. Naomi, do you agree?

Naomi: Sure, at the elite level, but in the lower level if you're a trans girl growing up in Idaho or West Virginia you’re going to have a hard time getting the experience and practice and training before college.

Ezra: That's the same thing that Black Americans had to deal with when they couldn’t join Little Leagues and so on. Nonetheless, communities found ways to carve out spaces. It doesn't mean that it's not harder. It doesn't mean that it's not unfair. I think part of what I was trying to get out is this isn't a zero-sum case where forever in all time trans people are royally screwed. There's still the possibility of survival and carving things out, right? That's something that sometimes younger trans people need to hear because they come under this misconception that, Oh, the Supreme Court's going to literally rule against all trans people for all time tomorrow, and then everything's fucked.

Naomi Schoenbaum is the William Wallace Kirkpatrick Dean’s Research Professor of Law at George Washington University.

Ezra Ishmael Young is a lawyer and constitutional law professor in New York.

Riki Wilchins is author most recently of “BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens”

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/trans-sports-supreme-court-hecox at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

JAN 20, 2026, 6:00 AM EST | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

From Play Dates to Protest: Rainbow Families Chart a Trans Evolution

Founded in a far different era, the Bay Area group has emerged as a highly effective advocate for policy and press strategy.

photo by Bart Nagel courtesy of Rainbow Families Action

by Evan Urquhart

They say they never set out to be an advocacy group. A social group, a resource center, a way to set up play dates, a source of support – that’s how parents of trans youth from Rainbow Families described their aims 12 to 13 years ago, long before children like theirs became among the earliest and most consistent targets of the authoritarian Trump regime.

As the regime has lied, threatened and broken the law in escalating attempts to force their children to stop being who they are, families say the bonds they formed over years are giving them the courage to fight back, and the power to win.

Rainbow Families was a large but mostly informal cluster of roughly 300 families setting up play dates and sharing advice and support, according to Calder Storm, Arne Johnson, and Nikki, all parents of trans kids in the Bay Area of California.

The group evolved rapidly after Donald Trump won a second presidential term. Today, the group’s advocacy arm, Rainbow Families Action, can stage a rally, get their message in the press, collaborate on legislative proposals, and successfully pressure a major health provider to reverse course on ending youth trans care.

“We were not an activist organization, partly because we’re just really fortunate in the Bay Area to have really strong supports,” said Arne Johnson, one of the semi-official leaders of Rainbow Families Action. “Our main concern was just taking care of our kids and getting them the safest, best experiences that we could.”

Johnson says that changed after the trans community was attacked relentlessly in the last election, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on  anti-trans campaign ads. “We knew what that all meant for our kids,” he said in an interview with Assigned Media.

Some of the parents started doing weekly Zoom calls to discuss how they might respond.

“At first it was just a couple people, then a couple people more. We would just get together and gnash our teeth and cry, then bit by bit we launched an email campaign about a bill and started to feel our way into activism,” Johnson said.

This was where things stood when some Rainbow families learned from their doctors that Sutter Health, a major Bay Area medical company, would stop providing care for their children.

“On Trans Day of Remembrance [November 20, 2025] some families of Rainbow Action heard from their Sutter provider that Sutter was going to be ceasing all gender-affirming care for people 18 and under,” said Calder Storm. A trans man and parent of a trans daughter, Storm has also become something of a leader within the Rainbow Families Action subgroup.

Nikki, who prefers not to publicize her last name, was among those contacted by her doctor. She says she was informed that Sutter would stop providing support for her son’s care in three weeks.

Nikki’s son is now 14. She says he came out to his parents when he was seven years old. Together, the family has been through years of therapy, followed by years of  puberty blockers as he took time to consider his eventual gender presentation. Less than a year ago, her son, family, and their doctors at Sutter agreed that testosterone therapy was the right next step to ensure the boy could have as normal an experience growing up as possible.

But on November 20, Nikki was abruptly informed that the care that had helped her son become more confident, more social, the care that helped him like his body in ways he hadn’t before, would soon be cut off.

Their doctor from Sutter informed Nikki that  gender care would stop in three weeks. The doctor offered no referrals saying “they felt badly, but it was implied, like, good luck, figure this out on your own.”

What the families figured out was that they weren’t going to take this lying down.

The group first reached out to  Sutter to discuss the situation. When informal attempts failed, they put together a letter from Rainbow Families Action and partner organizations such as PFLAG. Sutter did not agree to meet with the families, eventually issuing a vague statement to media outlets that avoided confirming that they were ending care.

That’s when the group decided to take to the streets. On December 8, a group of about 150 protesters marched to Sutter’s administrative headquarters, staging a rally there with speakers including activist and drag performer Honey Mahogany, clergy, healthcare worker advocates, and trans youth. While Sutter did not respond publicly, within days, families whose children had their appointments canceled were contacted to say they’d been put back on the schedule.

This was a huge win, and the only reported example of an advocacy group securing a reversal from a healthcare provider who stopped care (some providers have halted and resumed care in response to actions by federal courts).

As of this writing, nonsurgical care remains available to trans youth at all four major Bay Area providers. However, soon after Sutter’s quiet reversal, the Trump administration proposed a radical new rule, threatening the families’ fragile sense of peace. The rule would deny Medicaid and Medicare funds to any facility offering treatment for gender dysphoria to trans youth, making it financially untenable for any major hospital to continue providing care.

This move by the Trump administration is seemingly unlawful, as the text of the Social Security Act establishing Medicaid and Medicare explicitly bars the federal government from using the program to achieve “any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided.”

The ACLU has already pledged to challenge the rule in court. However, the families are afraid that, as before, providers will stop providing care beforehand out of fear of losing funding. In response, Rainbow Families Action has launched a “no pause without cause” campaign, seeking to pressure providers to follow the law and provide treatment unless a rule or law preventing it actually goes into effect.

Nikki says she’s frustrated she needs to be so vocal just to ensure her child continues receiving the medical care he needs. She says she sees a difference between how Sutter views her son’s needs compared to those of other kids.

“If [Sutter’s] administration unanimously agreed that trans kids matter as much as everybody else, they would be making wholly different decisions,” Nikki said. “They’d be much more vocal to us in affirming that they’re not going to stop things until they’re absolutely legally required to.”

Until trans kids matter to hospital administrators as much as every other kid, Rainbow Families Action say they will be fighting on.

Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/sutter-transgender-care-protest-rainbow-families at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

JAN 19, 2026, 7:40 AM EST | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

A Blue Wall Against Bias, a Red Attack on Academic Freedom

Leading Off: States are taking sharply different stances. Democratic states are standing up to Trump. Republican officials impose blunt bigotry. The top story lines for the week.

by Assigned Media

Blue state attorneys general have been a bulwark against the administration’s sweeping efforts to tie federal health, education, and research funding to Donald Trump’s bigoted gender ideology that seeks to deny the existence of trans people and impose unscientific definitions of sex.

A coalition of 12 attorneys general led by Letitia James of New York filed suit last week against the Health and Human Services Department’s unilateral threat to terminate grants, demand repayment of past funding and pursue civil or criminal penalties against states or institutions that don’t comply with his edict.

“The federal government is trying to force states to choose between their values and the vital funding their residents depend on,” James said in a statement. “This policy threatens health care for families, life-saving research and education programs that help young people thrive in favor of denying the dignity and existence of transgender people. New York will not abandon our values, our laws, and above all, our residents.”

Capitulation to Trump, she added, would “have far-reaching and potentially dangerous consequences across a vast spectrum of health care and social services.“

The policy being pushed by the Health and Human Services Department, run by the anti-science zealot Robert Kennedy, would affect states, public universities, health agencies, hospitals, and other recipients of federal funds. It demands they certify compliance with Title IX rules that have been unilaterally rewritten to exclude trans people, or face retaliatory action.

The states joining with New York in the lawsuit are California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. They have all been part of previous joint actions against the federal government in defense of transgender Americans.

In her statement, James said the administration’s effort “violates the U.S. Constitution by overriding Congress’ power of the purse, breaks federal law by attaching vague and retroactive conditions to funding, and violates the Administrative Procedure Act by imposing a major policy change without notice or explanation.”

These policies would directly contradict laws in many states that provide protections for trans people, decades of court opinions and settled federal guidance recognizing that Title IX protects from discrimination – not promote it.

The University of Arkansas School of Law abruptly withdrew its appointment of its new dean late last week after Republican lawmakers objected to her having previously signed an amicus brief in a case challenging laws barring trans inclusion in sports.

Emily Suski, a South Carolina attorney, professor and expert in Title IX law, had been hired just this month after a two-year-long search by the law school, which had praised her in a press release announcing the appointment as “accomplished scholar” with “extensive experience in leadership roles in legal education and practice.”

Suski was among 17 leading scholars who signed on to an amicus brief, filed in November, in the case of state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban trans athletes. The case is pending before the Supreme Court. The scholars argued that students have a right under Title IX to be free from discrimination in school athletics and must be afforded equal athletic opportunity.

Leading academic scholars routinely join amicus briefs in cases that have far-reaching consequences.

Republicans who suddenly objected to Suski’s appointment were blunt in their bias and their unvarnished intrusion on academic freedom. ”There’s no way the people of Arkansas want somebody running and educating our next generation of lawyers and judges [to be] someone that doesn’t understand the difference between a man and a woman,” said one, Senate President Bart Hester.

Continuing its war against the state of Maine over trans athletes, the Trump administration has launched an investigation into a school district over a trans youth participating on a cheerleading team. This action comes as part of a larger series of investigations that the Department of Education has launched nationwide, predominantly into school systems in blue states.

State law in Maine protects transgender athletes from discrimination with the Maine Human Rights Act, which, among other protections, allows participation in sports based on gender identity.

However, even if that were not the case, the superintendent of the district, Michael Hammer, explained that the team was not going against policies as defined by the Trump regime, saying, “It’s a co-ed cheering team. Boys can join, girls can join. No one lost a place on the team because a transgender student joined.”

Assigned Media is one hundred percent supported by our readers. Become a member today and get a members-only essay every Thursday.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/blue-state-ags-sue-trans-maine-cheerleader-arkansas-law-school at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

JAN 16, 2026, 8:22 AM EST | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

Trans Victims Fight for Rohingya Justice in The Hague

Targeted for rape and harrassment, visibly trans members of Myanmar's Rohingya ethnic group are among the most vulnerable victims of the regime.

UN Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek. Courtesy of the ICJ. All rights reserved.

by Molly Quell

R was just 15 when she fled with her family to Bangladesh to escape a brutal crackdown by the Myanmar military that targeted the Rohingya ethnic minority.

“They would do anything with us,” she told Assigned Media, in an interview ahead of hearings in The Hague, where Myanmar stands accused of genocide for its so-called 2017 clearance operations, a campaign of state violence following an attack by a Rohingya insurgent group.

A minority within a minority, R’s plight is made even more difficult by being transgender. She refers to herself as hijra, an umbrella term for trans and intersex people in Southeast Asia.

“We've suffered for years and years, years of torture and brutality,” R says. She did not want to use her full name out of concerns for her safety. “We have really high hopes for this.”

When the West African country of Gambia first filed the complaint at the International Court of Justice in 2019, R had been living in a densely packed refugee camp in Bangladesh for nearly two years. Sharing a tent with eight other family members, she survived on humanitarian aid as did the nearly 700,000 other Rohingya.

“We just want to live normal lives,” said S, another Rohingya hijra who spoke to Assigned Media from a refugee camp. She also did not want to use her full name over safety concerns.

Seven years after the case was first brought, hearings opened in The Hague on Monday. Myanmar, first represented at the International Court of Justice by its one-time leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, claimed that Gambia was too disconnected from the situation to bring a case under the 1948 Genocide Convention, signed in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War.

In 2022, judges at the court rejected that argument and allowed the proceedings to move forward. By then, Myanmar had undergone a military coup, Suu Kyi had been jailed, and the lives of some of the most persecuted people in the world had worsened.

Now an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya - nearly the entire population - have been displaced.

Myanmar denies that the Rohingya are citizens or one of the country's 135 ethnic groups, claiming they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Rohingya cannot serve in public office, cannot hold government jobs and are unable to travel freely.

The country claims the death and destruction are part of an “internal armed conflict.”

“The allegations made by The Gambia are flawed and unfounded in fact and law,” Myanmar’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

Hijra people in Myanmar face additional discrimination. Laws enacted when the country was still a British colony ban same-sex relationships. A person cannot legally change their gender, and there are no protections against discrimination.

A 2024 UN report found that sexual harassment and rape by police and security forces is widespread. “LGBT people, particularly individuals who are visibly transgender, have been subject to some of the most cruel and inhumane forms of violence,” the report says.

The proceedings at the International Court of Justice are the first time the plight of the Rohingya have been heard in an international court. “It matters that the highest court in the world is going to be listening to them,” Antonia Mulvey, the executive director of Legal Action Worldwide, which brought R and other Rohingya to The Hague for the hearings.

The International Court of Justice adjudicates disputes between countries; it is not a criminal court. No individual members of the Myanmar government have been charged with a crime.

But in opening statements on Monday, Gambian Justice Minister Dawda Jallow told the judges the country had “a sense of responsibility” to bring the case following its own 20-year experience with a repressive military government.

The court does not typically hear witness testimony, but at the request of Gambia and the urging of victims groups, several days of the three weeks of hearings will be devoted to closed-door statements from Rohingya.

There is some hope that members of the Myanmar regime may eventually face their own justice. Down the road from the International Court of Justice, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for Myanmar's acting president, Min Aung Hlaing, in 2024. When judges at the court authorized the opening of an investigation in 2019, the decision notes that hijra were “targeted for rape and sexual violence.”

Mulvey’s organization is also involved in a case in Argentina on behalf of the Rohingya.

A final decision from the International Court of Justice will take months or even longer. Should Gambia prevail, the court could order Myanmar to allow the Rohingya to return and extend them full citizenship rights.

In the convention’s nearly 80-year history, the court has never concluded a country has committed genocide. In 2007, judges ruled that Serbia had failed to prevent the Srebrenica genocide -- the 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys during the Bosnian War -- but did not hold the country directly responsible for the massacre.

R would like to see that change. The outcome will have a “huge impact on what our future will look like and if we will ever be able to go back and start our life, like a new life with better opportunities, a life of peace,” she said.

Molly Quell is a Dutch-American journalist based in The Hague, Netherlands. She was previously with the Associated Press and her work has appeared in the Guardian, the Economist, and Mother Jones.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/myanmar-trans-genocide-hague-rohingya at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

JAN 16, 2026, 6:00 AM EST | ALYSSA STEINSIEK | SOURCE

TWIBS: Bob Ferguson, Spin Victim

An English tabloid put some spin on a brief altercation the Washington state governor had with a right-wing influencer.

by Aly Gibbs

This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.

Let’s talk about the ways in which media outlets with a particular slant like to linguistically frame certain events in a way that seems almost hallucinatory.

Last Friday, insufferable podcaster Brandi Kruse asked the governor of Washington state, Bob Ferguson, about “biological boys” in school sports, and she wasn’t satisfied with his answer. Kruse likes to package herself as a “rugged individualist” with “common sense,” but is ultimately a paint by numbers conservative influencer woman, now manifesting in brunette instead of bottle blonde.

“You talk a lot about your own daughter and her participation in athletics publicly, I know she goes to a private school… would you support a biological boy competing against your own child?” Kruse asks.

“Oh, Brandi, for god’s… look, I understand your obsession,” Ferguson begins, exasperated. Kruse interrupts to ask, “With what?” and Ferguson clarifies, “With trans kids.”

“So what I would say is, look, we live in a world right now where trans kids are going through a lot,” Ferguson goes on. “I want to support trans kids. We have a federal government that essentially wants to erase that community. I am diametrically opposed to that.”

Ferguson was Washington state’s attorney general from 2013 to 2025, and has been the state’s governor for about a year now. Ferguson is an accomplished lawyer who used to provide legal assistance to an Arizona indigenous tribe, as well as death row inmates. He also happens to be a chess master, and was included on the 2017 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world after George Takei nominated him.

Ferguson has long advocated for transgender rights, working alongside New York’s AG Letitia James and 21 other attorneys general to block trans bathroom bans before he was governor, and publicly signaling his support of the trans community as governor. In June of last year, after the disastrous results of United States v. Skrmetti, Ferguson posted to social media saying, “As long as I'm Governor, I will stand up for the civil rights of transgender Washingtonians. I know that many are deeply saddened and angered by today's Supreme Court ruling. I am with you. But today's ruling does not change Washington's laws or the civil rights protections that we've adopted—I will fight for those protections.”

Your boy B. Fergie seems like an all around upstanding, decent dude. So I was sort of bewildered to see his response to a transphobic twerp get so aggressively twisted this week, even if the slant was done by… well… the Daily Mail.

I know! I know, I know, I know. British readers (and probably quite a few American readers, really) are well aware that the Mail is an absolute fucking rag, and has been basically forever. “I saw something bad in the Mail” isn’t exactly news, right? I won’t link to the article, because I don’t want to provide the Mail with traffic through our website, but you can easily find it with a quick Google search (once you’ve scrolled past all the AI generated slop telling you to eat several medium-sized rocks a day at the top of the page), but it feels important, to me, to highlight the bizarro magic tricks these publications have to pull in order to convince their readership to believe in a reality that, frankly, doesn’t exist.

Writing for the Mail, Joe Hutchison, who looks like the sort of spindly fivehead weirdo that Hollywood typecasts as a school bully these days, described Ferguson as “Woke Washington governor,” and characterizes his reaction to Kruse’s obtuse question as “[sneering at a] journalist for voicing concern about biological males competing in women's sports.”

In his opening paragraph, Hutchison points out that Ferguson “sends his own kids to private school,” as if that has any real bearing on the situation at hand. He goes on to claim that Ferguson sidestepped Kruse’s question, which… no, he didn’t? You buffoon? You clown? You unrepentant toilet of a man? Ferguson answers the question very clearly by stating that he supports trans kids and will fight against the federal government’s intent to eradicate them, of which sports bans are a major component. Disallowing trans people of any age from participating in normal, day to day life is part of this administration’s plan to carry out social genocide against us. Kruse supports that genocide, Ferguson does not. Question answered!

The rest of Hutchison’s article gets very detailed about the private lives of Ferguson and his children for no particular reason, then pivots towards an interview with a cisgender athlete who claims to have been relentlessly bullied by a trans student athlete’s mere existence. He describes her tearful recollection of the trans girl showing up to compete and being “built very different,” though he undercuts that statement by providing pictures of the trans girl in question, who is exactly the same size as her cis peers, and notably did not win first place in the competition.

Oh, and he sourced that photo from Brandi Kruse’s website, to boot. What a funny coincidence!

Listen, I try not to highlight dishonest rags masquerading as news and the small fry wannabe journos who spend their time stoking hate against minority strangers. I’m not gonna talk about any of the players involved here again anytime soon, but we all need to consider how these losers lie. I mean, it’s practically all they do, and it’s downright Orwellian. Don’t believe what your eyes can see and your ears can hear. They’ll even show you photographic evidence that they’re lying.

Hopefully people with integrity, like Ferguson, continue to fight the good fight against these awful fools.

Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/twibs-bob-ferguson at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

JAN 15, 2026, 8:32 AM EST | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

News Stories Shape Public Perception of Trans Lives. We’re Keeping Score.

Introducing the 2026 Trans News Tracking Project from Assigned Media.

by Assigned Media

On January 8, a story for CBS News referred to athletes banned from participating in girls sports teams as having been “assigned male at birth.” Three days later, another CBS story on the same topic, but by a different reporter, used language favored by anti-trans activists instead. The piece referred four separate times to students’ “biological sex at birth.”

Was this merely a style difference between the individual reporters or their editors? Unlikely, according to reporting in The Wrap, a site covering media and entertainment business news. Corbin Bolies reported there yesterday that a memo from the network’s senior director of standards and practices, Tom Burke, directed CBS reporters to “use the term biological sex at birth” with “no quotes needed” in stories relating to the Supreme Court case over trans athletes banned from women’s sports.

According to Bolies, Burke had until recently suggested reporters follow the style guide of the Trans Journalists’ Association, which recommends against use of the phrase “biological sex” as imprecise and frequently used in contradictory ways.The recent installation of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS. Weiss’ is the most likely impetus for the change. Weiss’ right wing Free Press blog, now itself a part of CBS News, regularly champions anti-trans causes.

Assigned Media has covered the ways news media report on issues related to the trans community from day one. We’ve chronicled how far-right talking points migrated into legacy media coverage, resulting in an environment where falsehoods and bad-faith talking points frequently overwhelm the basic facts relating to trans people’s bodies, healthcare, and lives. And this year, we’re launching our most ambitious media tracking project yet.

The 2026 Trans News Tracking Project seeks to catalogue every story or transcript in 2026 that references trans people, trans medical care, or the political fight over trans rights across eight major legacy outlets and two independent news organizations. Those publications are The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, the Associated Press, Mother Jones and the 19th.

For our legacy publications, we started with three national outlets that have undergone politically driven newsroom changes: The leadership of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CBS have each reportedly pushed coverage to the right. To those, we added five comparable legacy outlets including one newspaper thought to lean right, the Wall Street Journal; the newsrooms of the two other major broadcast networks; along with the Associated Press and NPR. (We are not including CNN due to difficulties with reliable search results both on their site and using Google’s site specific search.) We also added Mother Jones and the 19th, smaller, more progressive and inclusive newsrooms whose coverage of trans issues has distinguished them in recent years.

Every day or two Assigned Media will conduct searches of each website’s contents for the words trans, gender, and sex, attempting to collate stories that reference topics like gender ideology or gender affirming care even if they don’t use the words trans or transgender themselves. In addition to the headline, summary, and author’s name, we’ll also note the section of the news outlet where it ran (for example, “politics” or “entertainment”), the sources who are quoted, whether any trans people are among those sources, and any specific phrasing outside of quotation marks used to describe trans people, their bodies, their identities and their healthcare. We see this effort as a compliment to other media tracking work, such as TJA’s Trans News Initiative. Our tracker drills down into the details of how some of the most influential news organizations in the U. S. cover trans news.

Although the tracker has only been running half a month, it’s already provided a fascinating look at how U. S. newsmedia covered trans athletes at the Supreme Court. In short, we found The New York Times owned the story with more extensive coverage than any other news outlet.

On January 12 and 13, NYT published 11 separate stories on trans sports bans being heard at the Supreme Court. Three reporters each wrote more than one story each, with three more writing once or contributing reporting in some way.

The paper has been frequently accused of allowing anti-trans bias to color their reporting, and this coverage seemed to continue that trend. In one story, by Amy Harmon, the phrase “biological sex” appeared outside of quotes. Another piece on the special insights Brett Kavanaugh has into women’s sports due to his coaching girls’ basketball was notable in what it didn’t say: The warm picture of Coach Kavanaugh did not include and quotes from people representing the trans supportive side of the case, but a piece centered on Becky Pepper-Jackson, one of the trans athletes suing to be allowed to compete in high school track and field, included lengthy quotes from John McCuskey, the West Virginia AG supporting the ban.

In comparison, the Washington Post wrote four news stories on the trans athlete cases at the Supreme Court. This was supplemented by two opinion pieces, both opposing trans inclusion in women’s sports. The Associated Press had three stories, as did NPR and NBC, and the other outlets each published two.

Of all the outlets in our tracker, only the Associated Press mentioned trans people in another story during those two days, in a piece on Mackenzie Scott’s gift of $45 million to the Trevor Project. (AP stories that run in other outlets are counted only in our tracker for AP). A story by CBS covering Scott’s gift to the Trevor Project did not contain the word trans.

Is the New York Times dominating coverage of the trans community, or was the gap between them and other outlets on the recent SCOTUS case a fluke? Will CBS routinely leave out mentions of the trans community out of stories other outlets don’t? How are news organizations style guides evolving, and is there reason to believe that bias is driving the decisions on how reporters write? We plan to answer these questions with a series of stories and data visualizations throughout the course of 2026. Media watchers, stay tuned.

Assigned Media is one hundred percent supported by our readers. Become a member today and get a members-only essay every Thursday.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/trans-news-tracker-introduction at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

JAN 15, 2026, 6:00 AM EST | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

Law and Ignorance: The Enemies of Empathy in Prison

When it comes to care for trans inmates, the empathy of individual officers and workers often comes into conflict with the law. A problem that is only worsened by a lack of understanding.

by B Speaks

For queer and transgender people behind bars, the lived reality of confinement is shaped profoundly by the attitudes and actions of the staff who implement policy day to day. This dynamic becomes especially stark in states like Georgia, where political decisions have thrust transgender health care and staff perspectives into legal and ethical controversy.

Earlier reporting by Assigned Media at one Central Georgia facility highlighted a profound divide between the state’s anti-trans policies and the views of prison staff who work closely with trans inmates: Medical staff expressed deep discomfort with orders to force trans women to discontinue hormone therapy, while office staff who interact closely with queer inmates often demonstrate empathy and respect.

A Lieutenant at a Central Georgia prison, who supervises housing units, described a pragmatic approach, but hinted at conflict in the ranks:

“My job is safety. I don’t care who you are on the street, when staff don’t understand your identity, it can turn into tension. I’ve seen situations calm down just by treating someone with respect, but not everyone on my shift sees it that way.”

These anecdotal insights reflect broader national patterns about what correctional staff think about LGBTQ+ people, and how those attitudes materially affect incarcerated individuals’ health, safety, and dignity.

In Georgia, these tensions have played out in the context of new laws restricting gender-affirming care, federal lawsuits, and internal policies on transgender inmates.

LGBTQ+ and Trans Incarceration in Context

Transgender people are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates. According to research by the Williams Institute, approximately 16% of transgender adults have experiences with incarceration, compared with roughly 2.7% of the general U.S. population. This disparity stems from intersecting inequalities, including poverty, discrimination, and policing of survival behaviors. National surveys show that transgender and gender-nonconforming people face elevated rates of victimization inside prisons and jails, including harassment and physical violence , often with little protection from staff or administrators. Against this backdrop, staff attitudes, whether supportive or hostile, profoundly shape the day-to-day world of incarcerated LGBTQ+ people.

Correctional officers, the staff who oversee inmate movement, enforce rules, conduct searches, and respond to incidents, are the people most frequently in contact with incarcerated individuals. Some officers acknowledge gaps in training and institutional guidance. The same Georgia lieutenant emphasized that attitudes are shaped as much by policy as by personal belief: “We’re given rules, but not the education to back them up. Officers get told what not to do, but not why it matters. That leaves a lot up to personal opinion, and that’s where problems start.”

Nationwide, officers’ attitudes toward transgender inmates range widely, with some expressing misunderstanding or discomfort about gender identity, while others develop respectful working relationships that improve safety and trust.

A peer-reviewed scoping review in Health & Justice found that many custody officers lack basic information about transgender identities and may see gender issues as “extra” or irrelevant to security work. In other facilities, officers deeply committed to safety and order may inadvertently marginalize transgender people by dismissing their needs or failing to intervene in harassment, behavior that advocates say compounds risk.

Administrative staff, including case managers, program coordinators, and office personnel, often interact with LGBTQ+ inmates in non-coercive contexts: scheduling appointments, managing records, and helping with reentry planning. Administrative staff often frame their interactions in more relational terms. An administrative assistant who works in records and scheduling described a different dynamic. “When you’re handling someone’s paperwork, their medical appointments, or their reentry plan, you see them as a whole person. A lot of the LGBTQ inmates I work with are just trying to survive the system with their dignity intact.” These less hierarchical interactions seem to foster more positive attitudes toward trans and queer inmates. Our prior reporting suggests that staff who communicate directly and respectfully with LGBTQ+ people develop more nuanced understanding and empathy.

This dynamic was visible in our own reporting: office staff who work with queer inmates closely often view them positively and humanely, in contrast to other staff groups.

Medical and Mental Health Personnel

Healthcare workers in correctional systems carry a dual load: providing care within budget and policy constraints while navigating institutional resistance or indifference. Studies indicate that medical staff often lack training in transgender health needs, which complicates access to gender-affirming care like hormone therapy. But medical staff are also disproportionately likely to push back when policies conflict with clinical judgment, as occurred recently in Georgia, where internal controversy erupted over halting hormone therapy for transgender inmates.

The Georgia Department of Corrections does maintain written policies governing transgender and intersex inmates. According to GDC Standard Operating Procedures, staff must engage respectfully with transgender offenders, avoid derogatory comments, and are encouraged (but not required) to use preferred pronouns.

A Deputy Warden, responsible for balancing compliance and operations, acknowledged the tension between law, policy, and staff belief:

“We’re caught between state lawmakers, federal courts, and the reality of running a prison every day. Personal opinions can’t override court orders, but changing culture is harder than changing policy. Some staff adapt quickly. Others fight back quietly.”

Another GDC policy, SOP 507.04.68, asserts that the Department will provide constitutionally appropriate medical and mental health treatment to offenders with gender dysphoria. These policies suggest an official baseline of respect and medical care, with an emphasis on individualized treatment.

In 2025, Georgia became a focal point in national debates over transgender healthcare after lawmakers passed Senate Bill 185, banning public funding for gender-affirming care in state prisons and blocking incarcerated people from paying for it themselves. Transgender inmates, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, sued, arguing the law violated the Eighth Amendment. A federal judge agreed in December 2025, ruling that denying medically necessary hormone therapy was unconstitutional and ordering prisons to continue providing care, though the Georgia Department of Corrections has continued to appeal.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice has raised broader concerns about Georgia’s prison system. Federal findings cite a pattern of constitutional violations, including failures to protect incarcerated people, especially LGBTQ+ individuals, from violence and sexual abuse. The DOJ has also affirmed that gender dysphoria is a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, requiring proper medical care, placing Georgia’s prison policies and institutional practices under heightened federal scrutiny.

Across prisons nationwide, transgender people face heightened risk of violence and harassment. How officers perceive threats, and whether they take complaints seriously, directly affects whether prisons are safer or more dangerous for queer and trans inmates.

In Georgia’s larger system of more than 50,000 people incarcerated, these risks are amplified by chronic understaffing and overcrowding.

In Georgia, the conflict over hormone therapy illustrates how staff attitudes intersect with politics and policy. Healthcare workers who advocate for gender-affirming care may find themselves at odds with administrators implementing restrictive laws, or with guards who view hormone therapy as unnecessary. The federal court ruling requiring continued treatment underscores that clinical judgment and human rights cannot be sidelined based on ideology. Respectful staff interactions, such as consistent use of names and pronouns, make a measurable difference in incarcerated people’s mental health. In a punitive environment, consistent dignity by staff can mitigate trauma; dismissive or hostile attitudes worsen depression, anxiety, and isolation. Georgia’s formal policies acknowledge respectful communication as critical to safety, but enforcement depends on how seriously staff take those directives.

Research shows that targeted training on LGBTQ+ issues reduces incidents and complaints. In Georgia, the existence of written policies on transgender management and gender dysphoria indicates some baseline awareness, but political backlash and legal battles reveal deep institutional tensions over gender-affirming care and staff beliefs.

What happens behind bars isn’t just about rules on paper. It’s about how individuals, officers, administrators, medical staff, interpret, enforce, and sometimes resist those rules. In Georgia, where political decisions have blunted access to care and pushed transgender rights into courtrooms, the attitudes of correctional staff are both a reflection of broader social conflict and a determinant of daily reality for some of the state’s most vulnerable people.

For transgender and queer inmates, staff perceptions aren’t abstract, they influence safety, health, and survival. And in systems where policy is contested and federal orders override state law, staff attitudes often become the frontline battleground over human rights and respect.

B Speaks is a writer and advocate interested in prison/criminal justice reform, LGBTQ rights, and government/cultural criticism. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, B served as a political strategist and grassroots organizer in Washington D.C. Currently incarcerated in Georgia, B writes to expose and challenge the realities of the carceral system, advocating for justice reform and the voices often left unheard.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/law-and-ignorance-enemies-of-empathy at Jan 21, 2026, 6:14 PM EST.

Table of Contents

Assigned Media: 2026 Jan 21

All articles

Dylan Mulvaney’s Broadway Debut Rattles Bigots

Discussing Trans Sports at the Supreme Court

From Play Dates to Protest: Rainbow Families Chart a Trans Evolution

A Blue Wall Against Bias, a Red Attack on Academic Freedom

Trans Victims Fight for Rohingya Justice in The Hague

TWIBS: Bob Ferguson, Spin Victim

News Stories Shape Public Perception of Trans Lives. We’re Keeping Score.

Law and Ignorance: The Enemies of Empathy in Prison