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All articles

- TWIBS: Justice Department Offers $25,000 Bonus to Transphobic Lawyers

- Can Conversion Therapy Be Just Speech?

- Education Department Targets Women’s College

- Journal Club: The Joys of Being Trans

- A Texas Judge Says Mifepristone Can’t be Prescribed by Mail. Is Hormone Therapy Next?

MAY 8, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | ALYSSA STEINSIEK | SOURCE

TWIBS: Justice Department Offers $25,000 Bonus to Transphobic Lawyers

After a very tough year and a lot of losses, the Justice Department is begging lawyers to come work for them, and offering $25,000 sign on bonuses for anybody willing to help them destroy transgender people and immigrants.

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.

The Justice Department is having a hard time.

Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, the Justice Department—and in particular their Civil Rights Division—has been, in essence, hemorrhaging attorneys. Now, per Bloomberg Law, the Justice Department is advertising some very tantalizing $25,000 signing bonuses for any lawyer willing to join in on the Trump administration’s crusade against transgender Americans, undocumented immigrants, and… well… probably just anybody who doesn’t like Donald Trump.

In February of last year, when Harmeet Dhillon was announced as the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, mass resignations and reassignments followed almost immediately. Dhillon made it clear from the start that the Civil Rights Division would be exclusively pursuing Donald Trump’s agenda, which was focused almost entirely on prosecuting his political enemies and torturing marginalized Americans, in particular trans people.

As the Civil Rights Division transformed into a tool for Donald Trump to harm his political adversaries and undesirables, more than 70% of their attorneys resigned, a fact which would alarm any normal person… but which Harmeet Dhillon delighted in. At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington last year, she told a crowd of onlookers, “Those who were left behind or had tendered their resignation but hadn’t left, began hosting ‘unhappy hours’. There were collective work crying sessions. They made their displeasure known, but ultimately, they left. So thank you to all of those people who left. I thank them as a taxpayer, because they weren’t willing to do the job.”

On December 9, the 68th anniversary of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, former employees collectively signed a letter decrying the gutting of the division and its heinous new purpose. Less than a week later, yet more attorneys would leave the division as the Trump administration directed them to harass pro-Palestine college students. In January, after the extrajudicial murder of Renée Good during ICE’s domestic terrorism campaign in Minneapolis, the Justice Department announced that they would not be pursuing an investigation into Good’s killer.

More resignations followed. So many, in fact, that federal prosecutors are finding it nearly impossible to do their jobs. Just this week, the fed at last turned over evidence in Renée Good’s murder case to a Minnesota district court, though whether or not that actually means anything remains to be seen.

Not long after, a federal attorney working on ICE’s behalf in Minnesota, Julie Le, had a breakdown in open court during which she bemoaned how miserable her job was and asked a federal judge to hold her in contempt of court so that she could get some rest. She was unsurprisingly reassigned, and is inexplicably now planning to run for Congress… against Ilhan Omar… one of the most beloved congressional representatives in America (and my representative!), who is planning to seek reelection.

Good luck with that, Julie.

All of these disasters and setbacks are, for career attorneys, unbelievably heartbreaking. In years past, spending a few years as an underpaid, overworked lawyer for the Justice Department was considered a prestigious career move. Now, the Justice Department has to offer significant cash bribes to attract new lawyers, as so many seasoned prosecutors have abandoned that sinking ship that the federal government is struggling to exist effectively in a court of law.

But is this, in some ways, for the best? A weakened Justice Department means Trump has a harder time carrying out malicious prosecution. At a time when our community is under nonstop attack from the federal government, a lack of competency among our prosecutorial enemies might just give us some breathing room. Of course, the already terminally slow wheels of justice only move slower every day, where federal law is concerned.

How will this all shake out? I have no idea! I’m not a lawyer or a legal expert of any kind. I can only express my sincerest wishes that, after the Trump administration comes crashing down for a (hopefully) final time, Harmeet Dhillon never works another day in her life, is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for her role in obliterating the Civil Rights Division, and ends up impoverished and miserable.

Fingers crossed!

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-justice-department-offers-25000-bonus-to-transphobic-lawyers at May 10, 2026, 12:42 PM EDT.

MAY 6, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

Can Conversion Therapy Be Just Speech?

Trans legal experts discuss Chiles v. Salazar, the Supreme Court conversion therapy case.

by Riki Wilchins

Riki Wilchins spoke with George Washington University Law scholar Naomi Schoenbaum, CUNY Political Science professor Paisley Currah, and Albany Law School scholar Ava Ayers on the Supreme Court case, Chiles v. Salazar, which by 8-1 struck down a Colorado law banning inflicting conversion therapy on LGBTQ+ kids, saying it was unconstitutionally restrained free speech.

UPDATE One month after the ruling, the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee responded by moving forward a law creating a private right for conversion therapy survivors to sue for harm, attempting to circumvent the court’s actions using an approach cribbed from the anti-trans movement, which in recent years has given detransitioners extraordinary rights to sue their providers.

Riki Wilchins: We have research repeatedly linking conversion practices to depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicidality. The American Psychiatric Association and the Psychological Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have all rejected conversion therapy. Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole dissent, noted it was banned in Colorado because of the medical profession's broad consensus. So this is another instance of the Court finding a way to go anti-science and overrule expert medical opinion right?

Naomi Schoenbaum: Yeah. I mean, I think the Court has been extremely inconsistent in how it's treated these issues. What it’s really dealing with is the reality of harm to kids and in this decision it doesn't seem like the majority is at all concerned about this. Contrast that with a case like Skrmetti where while the Court claimed to be declining to give rigorous review to the Tennessee law that raised state concerns about harm to kids.  So in this case, it says First Amendment rights are so important in the contested politics of medical regulation. And then in Skrmetti it says, no, we have to defer to the political branches about these contested medical issues. So to me, one of the biggest things about the series of decisions is how inconsistent the Court is on recognizing individual rights versus deferring to the political branches. The only consistent thread is whatever is anti-trans.

Paisley Currah: Yeah. The inconsistency is so striking. I’m super interested in hearing from Ava, who understands more about how the Court operates, and especially why liberal Justices Sotomayor and Kagan signed on. What's the thinking behind them being part of this?

Ava Ayers: If you look at Sotomayor's decisions she's somebody who cares passionately about LGBTQ+ rights and who's comfortable saying so in language that's quite unusual for a Supreme Court decision. So. So at the very least, I feel confident that they're not signing on because they're part of the Roberts Court's political agenda. They're signing on because they think it's the best thing to do. What I find really interesting about the differences between Jackson, on the one hand, and Sotomayor and Kagan on the other, is that I think the latter are  consensus builders who try to keep reaching out the hand, no matter how many times it gets slapped away. And that's not what the Roberts court does from the other side.

And so Kagan and Sotomayor are sort of justices out of time. Jackson lets herself argue in ways that in American judicial culture only conservatives are allowed to argue. When there's a contradiction to be pointed and when prior precedents are blatantly wrong, she doesn’t feel constrained. You can see Sotomayor and Kagan in their decisions here both referring to precedent, which is what a Supreme Court justice is supposed to do.

You lost the last case, but now it's a precedent and you follow it. Jackson, who wasn't on the Court for the precedent case, is happy to just say, Look, that case said there's no special category of professional speech that gets lesser First Amendment protection. So she's not giving up, just like Alito and Thomas don't ever give up. They, they lose a case, so what? They keep making the arguments, right? They don't let themselves get boxed in by precedent, if they think it's wrong.

So my guess is that Sotomayor and Kagan are looking ahead and thinking if we refuse to allow conversion talk therapy bans, we're also preventing bans on gender affirming talk therapy bans.

Riki Wilchins: I’m just struck by the fact the Christian Right and this Court just can’t seem to stop themselves from inserting their biases in between doctors and patients, science be damned. They just can't stay out of the medical room. But none of you picked up on my argument on that, so I’ll let it go.

Paisley Currah: There's this great critical race theory book by Haney Lopez called, uh, White by Law—The Legal Construction of Race. At the beginning of the 20th century, in decisions about who could immigrate to the U.S., it was really kind of devolved around who was white. So the Supreme Court would cite racist science because it backed up what they wanted to believe. And then when anthropology came along with the idea that race was a social construction the science around race kind of fell apart. But this didn’t stop the Court from being racist: it just said, What does Webster's dictionary say race is? They just changed their authorizing narrative to common sense or the dictionary. And I think that's what's happening here.

Riki Wilchins: In treating conversion therapy as protected speech rather than a serious and regulatable clinical intervention, they collapsed the distinction between personal pronouncements and medical ones. Psychotherapy is not this free-floating exchange of ideas, but a regulated intervention where the state has a clear responsibility, especially when minors are involved.

Naomi Schoenbaum: We regulate the content of speech all the time. Would you ban a therapist from saying you shouldn't commit suicide? Would you ban a therapist from saying to an anorexic patient, you shouldn't lose more weight? So as Riki was saying, I definitely see this as in line with failing to respect medical experts and the surge of populist thinking that it doesn’t have to defer to what it views as like the elite. There’s an article called Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,  that says that liberals are much more likely to try to be consistent and follow neutral principles.

Riki Wilchins: So where does this ball stop rolling on it’s just speech? Kids are   extremely vulnerable to things a bunch of white coated adults say to them: You're being effeminate. Boys don't do that. This is really powerful stuff when you're talking to a 7- or 8-year-old who's separated from their parents and in some conversion therapy unit or camp alone.

Ava Ayers: Part of the challenge is that this area of law is so inconsistent that the project of constructing principles and following them fell apart long before we got to this case. First Amendment seems to be a particularly bad area even within common law. The Court is making these extremely unconvincing attempts to say that professional licensing is completely different, which demonstrates an astonishing ignorance of how professional licensing works, given that everybody who sits on the Court is a licensed professional. Gorsuch says professional licensing is all about your qualifications: yes, but if you engage in misconduct, we take your license away. If he  acknowledged that we de-licensed professionals for misconduct, he would have to acknowledge that this conversion therapy ban is pretty similar to that.

This is an area where I hope as a trans person that bans on gender affirming talk therapy will be struck down under this opinion. It's very clear there won't be a principled basis to not strike them down.

Riki, just to go back to your point about science, I think this is one of a number of areas where the Court is happy to use science when it thinks it offers support.

Riki Wilchins: Right. And then you see them flatly ignoring science in abortion cases, and in trans rights cases where scientists are trying to tell them what trans people are, and how being trans works. And I suspect that philosophers of language will be jumping out of windows every time a new First Amendment case comes down, because of the Court’s effort here to distinguish speech from conduct is so bizarre, right? Philosophers have been working for 3,000 years without coming up with a compelling answer.

The Supreme Court says, Oh well, therapy is clearly speech that you're regulating, Not in my experience of therapy. I don't think the things that I talk about in therapy with my therapist are pure speech. But I don't have a principled way to distinguish whether it is or not either, you know? So my criticism of the Court is not that they've failed to come up with a persuasive definition of speech. I'm not sure there is one. It's that they failed to think honestly about the consequences of their argument.

This reminds me of Butler’s work around gender performativity and Speech Act Theory in which some kinds of speech are acts, such as I now pronounce you husband and wife or You’re under arrest and of course It’s a girl. But the court has tried to say that speech is just talk. Despite this ruling, conversion therapy still remains malpractice and a violation of ethical standards that licensed mental health professional. On the other hand, I want to push back on that a bit as a non-lawyer and say that while professional groups can still govern licensing and ethics in Colorado and other states, their powers to do so seem weaker now than they did before this decision. This ruling also seems to weaken states’ ability to make sure that their professional licensing provisions closely track professional standards of care.

No one is saying anything. Have I awed you all into submission, or was that just complete legal  gibberish?

Naomi Schoenbaum: No, it's a great question.

Paisley Currah: No, I don't want to detract from that question but I have a different one. So go ahead Ava.

Ava Ayers: It is important to be clear on what the decision does and doesn't do. It's still possible to argue that conversion therapy can be prohibited because of the compelling state interests and the ban being narrowly tailored. So we will have more litigation on that. I don't know how likely it is that that will prevail, but even this challenge is not yet dead. Even this statute is not yet dead. And then you do have state licensing authorities and civil lawsuits as ways of challenging therapists who try to engage in this awful, awful practice.

However, state licensing authorities can be very timid about wading into areas of political sensitivity. It's kind of astonishing how few successful professional enforcement actions we've seen against Trump administration lawyers who have been blatantly violating every ethical norm the profession has in the front pages and yet very few have been disbarred. And when enforcement actions are brought, they tend to be for mundane empirically demonstrable things like you held on to a client's money and you kept it in your personal account. State licensing authorities are not equipped to engage in the kind of 20-lawyer litigation that is going to come up when you challenge the anti-trans movement where your staff of three is going to be facing everybody that the Alliance Defending Freedom and their donors can throw at you. While really limits those actions in an unfortunate way.

Riki Wilchins: There’s also tort law, but for that to be an alternative backstop, the challenge is that you have to experience harm. And that’s  going to be after the fact, so it’s not going to prevent conversion therapy in the same way.

As Ava said, what's important to note is that this did not strike down the law. It said strict scrutiny applies. So it'll be left to the lower courts to figure that out and to see how much they rely on the science.

Paisley Currah: One thing I understand is that people in Colorado are already working on amending their law to make it viewpoint neutral. So a therapist wouldn’t be able to press someone to be gay, just like they couldn’t press them to be straight.

One thing I wanted to touch on is that the Court keeps talking about the marketplace of ideas? But we live in a time when billionaires own all the social media and have convinced huge swaths of the American public that vaccines will kill them. So the notion of a free marketplace of ideas has always been problematic, but I don't think it's ever been such a problematic metaphor for public policy-making like it is now. I just found that shocking. I really like Jackson. I just love all her stuff. I read her stuff first, maybe the only thing I really read. And she says the marketplace of ideas doesn't enter into it here: this is therapy.

Riki Wilchins:  Kagan called Chiles a “textbook case” of viewpoint discrimination. But to me, we're talking about apples and oranges. On one hand, conversion therapy is an active, deliberate attempt to make someone straight or cisgender. In my experience, there is no corollary on the other side where therapists engage in active, deliberate attempts to make someone gay or trans. In fact, I suspect we would have had an entirely different outcome if this had been a case in which a therapist was trying to  make a cis kid trans. So while the Court has treated conversion therapy and affirming care as equal, to me it’s apples and oranges. In fact, what is usually called affirmative therapy really amounts to little more than simple respect in using a patient’s name, pronouns, and gender. It’s not any kind of deliberate attempt to change anything. So, to me, Kagan’s opinion made no sense.

To me, the more important perspective is the one that we have all been raising, which is that this isn't really about a marketplace of ideas where we should be concerned about content and viewpoint neutrality, but this case is of a piece with commonplace, long standing regulation of professions where it is okay for the state to put its thumb on the scale in favor of competence and in favor of harm reduction. In the context of medical regulation and professional regulation, there are certain viewpoints  that it's okay for the state to hold. If this weren't about protecting gay kids and trans kids, the Court almost certainly would not have subjected this law to strict scrutiny, right? If it was about preventing suicide or anorexia, probably the Court would have taken a different approach.

Ava Ayers: If you read Gorsuch's opinion, he says that for a gay client, Miss Chiles may express acceptance, support and understanding, but if that gay or transgender client seeks her counsel to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, Miss Childes cannot provide it. But those are deeds, not viewpoints. And Riki, I react the same way you do to this, which is there's just this slipperiness to the Court's analysis where it's very hard to get hold of in a way that you could predict where it will go in future cases.

Riki Wilchins: I also feel like this is of a piece with the right’s ongoing effort to recast trans denialism as a matter of free speech or freedom of viewpoint. Also, the Court keeps talking about consenting clients. But these are kids being pushed into conversion therapy by parents, not adult clients saying I want to go back to being cisgender or straight. I didn't understand why it didn't draw a response from the three liberal justices.

Ava Ayers:  When you have rights and protections, they can always be exploited, right? There's no set of protections you can construct that somebody can't drive something terrible through. So it’s inevitable that the idea of free speech comes into conflict with wanting to protect people from verbal bigotry and discrimination. People are going to draw those lines in somewhat different places, but we have a right to expect the Court to draw them in principled ways that bear in mind the consequences to people. I'm really happy to hear what Paisley said about trying to redraft this law because I think the trans movement loses nothing by prohibiting the “transing” of kids.

Riki Wilchins:  This was also another white evangelical Christian  in front of the Court. I don't think there was any place in the opinions where religious freedom to voice these anti-trans views was mentioned specifically, but I did feel like that was lurking behind the Court’s over-reliance on viewpoint discrimination. Okay—so let the record show everyone is nodding along enthusiastically.

Ava Ayers: Maybe that’s  a good thing for the Colorado folks to write into the next version of their statute and see if the Court is a little more friendly when it says you're not allowed to try to change someone's religion.

Paisley Currah: There was this memo from Pam Bondi, who's no longer the Attorney General which talked about how anyone who holds extreme views on mass migration, radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, or anti-capitalism could be investigated as a domestic terrorist. So it'll be interesting to see, like when these First Amendment cases float up to the Supreme Court, what they do and if they’re consistent.

Riki Wilchins:  Yeah, those would seem to be cases of viewpoint discrimination and state restriction on the “marketplace of ideas” to which this Court would be sympathetic.

Thank you all for joining us today.

Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/is-conversion-therapy-free-speech at May 10, 2026, 12:42 PM EDT.

MAY 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | ALYSSA STEINSIEK | SOURCE

Education Department Targets Women’s College

The Department of Education has set their sights on a 150 year old women’s college to punish transgender women.

by Aly Gibbs

The slow motion collapse of the American economy. An illegal war in Iran claiming countless innocent lives but, more importantly, raising gas prices. The terrifying rise in illnesses once believed to be nearly eradicated, thanks to anti-science populism. These are all problems that the leaders of one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth, and in fact in the history of mankind, could choose to solve.

It is obviously more important, however, that transgender women going to college be destroyed.

The latest in a long, long, long… long list of federal battles being waged over the mere existence of trans Americans is, yes, the Trump administration launching an investigation into the admission of trans women into Smith College, an all-women liberal arts school in Northampton, Massachusetts.

You’ll have to excuse me if I’m somewhat incredulous of the fed’s concerns for a women’s liberal arts school, considering… you know… the personal beliefs of every Republican man in the nation when it comes to the topic of women in college and anybody pursuing a liberal arts degree. If I were a cynic, I might even suggest that an investigation into the admissions rules for an all-women liberal arts school has more to do with a desire to disenfranchise trans women and remove us from public life as completely as possible than like… protecting women, or whatever.

The Justice Department, the federal organization responsible for this investigation (and many other flagrant wastes of taxpayer dollars, of late), released a statement on Monday:

“Today, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened an investigation into Smith College, one of the nation’s largest all-women's colleges, for admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams. OCR will determine whether the college violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) by allowing biological males into women’s intimate spaces.”

The referenced Title IX is, of course, the law disallowing discrimination based on gender in American education. It’s been used as a political football for well over a decade now, with the Obama and Biden administrations declaring that it protects trans Americans from discrimination, while the Trump and Trump administrations interpret it in exactly the opposite way.

The statement goes on to read, “Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies—but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity. An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.”

The confidence with which this is stated, when the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX protections is only one of many interpretations, is sort of amusing. This is not some concrete truth, and in fact, Smith College officially began accepting trans women as applicants more than ten years ago, during the Obama administration, when this was indisputably allowable. All that’s changed in the intervening years is the rise of an ontologically evil, fascist regime in American politics. I mean, uh… a more ontologically evil, fascist regime in American politics than previous ontologically evil, fascist regimes in American politics.

“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” said Kimberley Richey, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and vile mouthpiece for a genocidal despot. “Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law. The Trump Administration will continue to uphold the law and fight to restore common sense.”

This is when I must remind you that Executive Orders (the foundation of the Education Department’s claim that Title IX does not protect trans women) are not legally binding, and that only Congress can make, alter and abolish laws in the United States of America. The president and the Education Department can’t establish their own legal system for fun; instead, they’re threatening to pull federal funding for any college that doesn’t comply with their demands to discriminate against trans Americans. Some institutions are refusing to comply, even though losing federal funding would cost them everything. Others are folding to Trump’s demands, sometimes with unbearable consequences.

We can only hope that Smith College chooses the path of bravery and fights these miserable fucking ghouls every step of the way.

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/education-department-targets-womens-college at May 10, 2026, 12:42 PM EDT.

MAY 5, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

Journal Club: The Joys of Being Trans

A 2024 paper investigates the joys that being trans can bring. Journal Club takes a look at this paper to see just what people had to say.

by Veronica Esposito

The trans experience is frequently thought of as one filled with some of the worst forms of adversity that a person can face. While there is good reason for that—in the United States, trans people are subject to attacks that parallel some of the worst in American history—it shouldn’t prevent us from losing sight of the unique joys that trans people get to experience.

Building on the essential research of Stef Shuster and Laurel Westbrook, researcher Matilda Wurm and colleagues offer us a paper full of insights into the upside of being trans. Breaking her research down into the themes of joy, growth, and peace, Wurm offered compelling reasons why someone would want to live a trans life.

Recruiting some 33 trans individuals, Wurm and colleagues interviewed each for an average of 48 minutes, asking them a series of questions along the lines of, “What advantages do you experience that you have because you are [insert term used by participant, e.g. nonbinary] and what positive experiences have you had that you would not have had if you were cis?” Participants were also asked to brainstorm freely about positive experiences that came with a trans identity.

Many participants expressed that there can be unique privileges that come from being less subservient to social stereotypes around gender, as well as from living a portion of one’s life as a different gender than what they transitioned to. One respondent stated that having lived as two genders gave her “a deeper understanding of people in general,” while another declared having “more broad-mindedness, when it comes to people and the enormous variation of humanity,” and another enthused how the experience had made her a much deeper thinker:

It has made me more critical in my thinking . . . . I believe that on a purely moral level, when you’re forced to think more critically, you develop a more nuanced moral understanding and might become kinder toward others. So, I find a lot of joy in that.

Respondents also emphasized the unique growth experiences that come from the adversity that trans people are forced to address in order to survive. One theme was that in coming out and transitioning, trans people were given the opportunity to understand their life in ways that cis people are rarely called to do. One respondent mused:

It might not be common for people to be forced to sit down at some point and really think through "Who am I?", you know, "What am I doing?" in such a fundamental way. This is something you have to go through if you’re deciding first whether to undergo the entire gender changing process and then actually go through it. . . . I feel much more certain about the fundamental things I’ve needed to think through.

Another common observation was the much greater confidence and courage that trans people are often able to create in their lives due to having to face up to the immense challenges of coming out, transitioning, and understanding life in a gender other than what they had been assigned to live as. They likened transitioning to one of the most momentous personal growth experiences a person could have. One person even expressed awe in the face of realizing the intense journey that life had in store for him, saying that he felt “humility toward life and understanding that life can take you on a journey you never imagined for yourself.”

In contrast to the more familiar minority stress—unique adversities faced by members of a minority group—Wurm discovered shared experiences of relaxation and peacefulness, which she termed “minority peace.” Some participants fondly described periods of respite from poor mental health, particularly after receiving gender-affirming medical care and coming into greater acceptance of their trans identities. Others shared feeling peace while in community with other trans people, while being out in society, and even at locations like nude beaches, where one participant found relaxation in highlighting his body: “I’ve started going to nude beaches in recent years. And it’s also because I feel so comfortable there; it’s incredibly relaxing. So I’ve almost sought out environments where I can feel especially at ease in my body.”

Participants also stressed that their journeys had helped them to develop a trust in their own intuition and a closer relationship with their emotions: “I think I’m much closer to my emotions than I would have been otherwise, because I wouldn’t have dared to be otherwise. That’s something I reflect on and am grateful for.” One shared that finding the confidence to come out to others even though she passed for cisgender was a significant part of having self-acceptance:

This kind of second wave of coming out . . . that I’ve experienced since last summer, is a pretty big deal for me and my life. This self-acceptance, becoming more okay with being trans and being a trans woman, and being able to talk openly about it—it’s like a huge thing.

Popular depictions of trans people understandably center the adverse experiences we can have—given widespread ignorance about trans lives, it is essential to educate the public about just how hard it is to be trans. But it is also important to not let those hardships obscure the wonder that comes with being trans. Mainstream narratives of trans lives like The Matrix and Pose have foregrounded the empowerment and wonder that trans people can uniquely experience—it is essential that we also remember that this is too part of the trans experience.

To conclude with the words of one trans man, finding our true selves can give us the capacity to dare to do more than we ever thought possible:

For me personally, it’s one of the biggest aspects . . . daring to explore all the other positive things that I now have the energy, time, and motivation for. And that leads to all sorts of things. It makes everything more enjoyable, and it leads to me daring to do more things.

Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/journal-club-joys-of-being-trans at May 10, 2026, 12:42 PM EDT.

MAY 4, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT | ASSIGNED | SOURCE

A Texas Judge Says Mifepristone Can’t be Prescribed by Mail. Is Hormone Therapy Next?

Leading Off: Abortion drugs blocked from being prescribed by mail, the state if Idaho is sued over a bathroom ban, and Illinois seeks to protect women and trans people. The top headlines as we start off the week.

analysis by Evan Urquhart and Valorie Van-Dieman

On Friday a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a nationwide injunction requiring the abortion medication mifepristone to be prescribed and dispensed in person, effectively banning access to the drug by mail. In combination with the 2022 ruling overturning Roe v Wade, this decision stands to have a devastating impact nationwide on people’s access to abortion options.

As of Saturday, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, two companies which manufacture the drug, have filed emergency appeals to the Supreme Court seeking to pause the lower court’s ruling.

Last week, Billie Jean Sweeney wrote for Assigned Media about the connections between the anti-abortion movement, the anti-trans movement, and other right wing anti-science causes. In light of this, trans people may reasonably wonder whether the tactics here could be applied to transgender people’s hormone therapy.

For now, the answer is: It’s complicated.

Mifepristone has long been a conservative obsession. During Biden’s presidency, the FDA allowed the drug to be sent to patients via mail for the first time, a move that incensed conservatives in the wake of newly legal state bans on abortion after the Dobbs decision. In 2023, a Texas judge briefly attempted to overturn a 20-year FDA precedent and ban it nationally. However, even if the ban on mailing mifepristone stood, mail-prescribed medication abortions would still be available to women in their first trimester with a single-drug regimen.

So, in the short term, preventing the mailing of mifepristone wouldn’t even stop the mailing of drugs for a medication abortion.

The drugs used in transgender hormone therapy have a wide range of uses, and a history of FDA approval that goes back much further than mifepristone. Mail-order doctor services that provide testosterone to cis men have multiplied in recent years, and testosterone is a much more highly regulated drug than estrogen. Interfering with their remote prescription would have extensive knock-on effects for the many more cisgender people who use these drugs, making an attempt to stop their prescription by mail in the court far more politically risky.

Still, the increasing appetite of conservative judges for deciding cases in whatever way is the most politically convenient is a worsening problem, and gambits to restrict trans people’s healthcare have often advanced hand in hand with abortion restrictions and ahead of other anti-science measures aimed at vaccines or other, more popular, medical treatments. While restricting hormones-by-mail would be much messier and more difficult than restricting mifepristone, it’s difficult to call anything truly impossible.

In response to the harsh bathroom ban enacted by the state of Idaho, six transgender Idahoans are suing the state, arguing that the law is unconstitutional. The penalties for the ban are some of the harshest in the nation, with a possible penalty of a year in jail for a first offence for a trans person who knowingly uses a restroom different from their birth-assigned sex.

In addition to the extreme penalties, the law also applies to bathrooms in private businesses, not just in government buildings as most laws of this kind do. This added restriction, the plaintiffs argue, would add undue burden to them both in their personal lives and their professional ones, with several of them noting their own places of employment would not have facilities appropriate for them to use, which would require them to restrict their food and water consumption just so that they can work.

Diego Fable, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement, “The only safe option truly available is to just stay home, or leave the state entirely.”

In Illinois, a bill seeking to protect trans people and abortion patients has passed a senate committee, allowing it to move forward for a full vote. The bill, SB 4834, seeks to remove testosterone, estrogen, GnRH analogues, mifepristone, and misoprostol from the state’s Prescription Monitoring Program, a program which tracks certain prescriptions in order to prevent abuses to the system in the cases of controlled substances.

In addition to the removal of these prescriptions from tracking, the bill also seeks to purge all records of testosterone prescriptions, with proponents of the bill arguing that a database containing this information leaves trans people in danger of government tracking and targeting.

If voted into law, the bill would take effect immediately, with the data purge being required to be done by January 1st 2027.

Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media. Follow him on Bluesky @evanurquhart.bsky.social

Valorie Van-Dieman (they/she) is an Associate Editor at Assigned Media. @valorievandieman.bsky.social

This article was downloaded from https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/mifepristone-ban-trans-hormone-therapy at May 10, 2026, 12:42 PM EDT.

Table of Contents

Assigned Media: 2026 May 8

All articles

TWIBS: Justice Department Offers $25,000 Bonus to Transphobic Lawyers

Can Conversion Therapy Be Just Speech?

Education Department Targets Women’s College

Journal Club: The Joys of Being Trans

A Texas Judge Says Mifepristone Can’t be Prescribed by Mail. Is Hormone Therapy Next?