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- Michigan Might Elect A Trans Woman To The State Legislature For The First Time Ever

- Trans Couple Brutalized At Louisiana Park Bathroom, Then Charged By Police

- WNBA Coach Cheryl Reeve Wore “Trans Kids Belong” While Beating Sophie Cunningham’s Team

Michigan Might Elect A Trans Woman To The State Legislature For The First Time Ever

S. BAUM | AUG 7, 2026, 1:19 PM EDT | SOURCE

After nearly two decades at a megachurch and surviving conversion therapy, Joanna Whaley said she&#8217;s ready to take on the Christian nationalism of the Republican Party.

Caption: Photo from Joanna Whaley’s Facebook page.

Michigan is on track to welcome its first openly transgender woman to serve as a state representative.

Erin in the Morning readers likely first met Joanna Whaley in April or May of this year, when we reported that the 38-year-old hospital chaplain was running to be the state representative in Michigan’s 2nd House District. She had been temporarily knocked off the ballot because her opponent in the Democratic primary, Frank Liberati, contested her eligibility, arguing her name change documents were invalid and therefore disqualifying.

This maneuver didn’t work. Whaley beat Liberati and one other opponent in the Aug. 4 primary with 56% of the vote, with the second-place candidate trailing over 20 points behind. It was a margin of victory that surprised even Whaley. Now, Erin in the Morning can re-introduce her as the official Democratic nominee for Michigan’s 2nd House District.

She will face off against Republican Ronald Kokinda. But this district leans Democratic, making Whaley the predicted winner of the general election this November. If she crosses that finish line, she will be the first transgender woman to serve in the Michigan Legislature.

While equal rights for transgender people remains a priority, Whaley emphasized that she hopes to represent all constituents. She is campaigning primarily on issues like cost of living, health care access, and public safety. She also denounced corporate money and Christian nationalism as key culprits behind America’s democracy in decline.

“I had a pastor who would, from the pulpit, would say, if you listen to anything other than Fox News, you’re letting the devil into your house,” she told Erin in the Morning. “As a pastor myself, I think that is a terrible, terrible mistake to let a pastor think for you.”

The seat Whaley seeks is currently held by Democratic Rep. Tullio Liberati, the brother of Frank Liberati, who tried to get Whaley booted from the ballot. The current representative, Tullio, was one of eight Democrats who crossed party lines to vote in favor of a resolution calling upon the Michigan High School Athletic Association to discriminate against trans people.

Whaley faces unique obstacles that cisgender candidates may not. In addition to opponents trying to weaponize name and gender marker changes for political gain, trans people are plagued by an endless stream of questions about “electability.” In New Hampshire, for example, State Rep. Alice Wade recently said she was pressured not to run for higher office by a fellow Democrat who cast doubt on whether a trans woman could win in their state.

“I just remember standing in the poll lines,” Whaley said, recounting the primary. “Trans person after trans person, parents of trans kids—coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re making us feel like we can come out of our house again.’”

Meanwhile, Whaley said one of her highest campaign expenses was a security detail due to the sheer volume of anti-trans threats of violence that she receives.

But she credits her time in seminary and the two decades she spent at an evangelical megachurch—an experience that included surviving coercive anti-LGBT conversion therapy—with giving her a unique ability to connect with voters across backgrounds. “I speak fluent Republican,” she told Erin in the Morning. The proud parent added: “The term ‘family’ does not belong to conservatives.”

She admits change will take time, but she said she’s ready to be part of that process. “I don’t think I’m going see the fruits of some of this labor,” Whaley explained. “But it’s just continuing to be that voice of, you know, letting someone’s grandmother hear: ‘Oh my gosh, this trans person talked about something I never thought they would. They talk about loving their family. I thought Fox News told me they hated family.’ I think that that stuff’s gonna matter in the long term.”

Whaley said she will not back down in the fight for civil rights, including those of trans Michiganders. “I’m going to go into the belly of the beast for you,” she said.

Although many outlets are reporting that she will be the first transgender representative there, period, Rep. Emily Dievendorf, of the 77th House District, is nonbinary, and has served since 2022.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/michigan-might-elect-a-trans-woman at Aug 10, 2026 at 7:25 PM EDT.

Trans Couple Brutalized At Louisiana Park Bathroom, Then Charged By Police

S. BAUM | AUG 5, 2026, 1:32 PM EDT | SOURCE

An angry mob allegedly beat them. The police charged them. The municipality voted for one of the most severe anti-trans bathroom ordinances in the country.

CAPTION: Images of Aurora Rush and Shae Sanders over the years. Courtesy of Shae Sanders.

Content Note: This article depicts images and descriptions of violence against transgender people. Reader discretion is advised.

On May 31, Aurora Rush and Shae Sanders would do something that would forever change the course of their lives: The couple, both of whom are transgender, would use a public restroom in Bossier Parish, Louisiana.

Louisiana does not have an anti-trans bathroom ban on the books that would prohibit the pair from using their restroom of choice at the park, so this was wholly legal. Nonetheless, Sanders and Rush told Erin in the Morning that a mob of people at Cypress Black Bayou Park would exact revenge for this perceived transgression by beating them so severely that Sanders lost consciousness.

Sanders was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where they needed four stitches above their eye. Rush sustained injuries all over her body, including a concussion, but she wasn’t taken to a hospital. Instead, police took her to a men’s jail. Erin in the Morning could not find evidence that anyone else was arrested that day, and the Sheriff’s Office would not immediately provide those details. Sanders was charged with one count of disturbing the peace, and Rush with two—one for “fighting” and the other for the purported use of offensive language—meaning they face fines and up to six months or one year in prison, respectively, if convicted.

They say they didn’t even punch back. Still, a plea deal may help them avoid jailtime. But Sanders and Rush aren’t signing.

“I’m more angry at the response of the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office than I am at the people who beat us up,” Rush said. “They further victimized me. I cannot just go to court, sign a piece of paper, pay a couple hundred dollars in fines, and let it just go away like it never happened. It’s an egregious miscarriage of justice.”

In the weeks that followed the incident, the Police Jury—state nomenclature for what other parts of the country might call a county board of executives—unanimously voted for one of the most punitive anti-trans bathroom bans in the country, reportedly at the request of Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington himself. He was not available for comment ahead of publishing for this piece.

Courtney Newburry, the couple’s attorney, said that in her opinion, what happened to her clients is nothing less than a hate crime.

“I believe the facts will show that this attack was targeted, calculated, had been simmering all day, and is the direct result of the dangerous and harmful rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes transgender people,” she told Erin in the Morning. “I believe the facts will show that the attackers had made a determination as to Aurora’s gender and that determination led them to believe they had the power to do what they did; that they believed themselves to be the heroes here.”

Caption: The Cypress Black Bayou Park and Recreation Area, courtesy of Jim Noetzel via the Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau.

It began as a stereotypical “all-American summer day,” Rush recalls; friends gathered lakeside, had hot dogs grilled over an open flame, and tried to cool off from the relentless Louisiana sun.

But this is Trump’s America, meaning transgender people are being subjected to new and creative terror campaigns every single day. Even Rush, who has been living as a transgender woman in the deep south for over a decade, was blindsided by what happened next.

Rush had stepped away from the festivities to use the women’s room, and returned to the lake without incident. The day came to a quiet end. Then the couple parted from their friends and began walking back to their car, but first, Sanders needed the restroom. They are nonbinary, but assigned female at birth, so they often feel safest using the women’s room. They handed some belongings to Rush so that she could wait outside the building with it.

In Rush’s telling, that’s when a man began harassing her. She had never met him before; she didn’t recognize him. But as she walked back to her car in the parking lot, he followed. She said he threatened her if she entered the women’s room, called her slurs, and tried to goad her into a fight. Rush put her belongings down in her car, and returned to a pavilion area outside of the women’s room to wait for Sanders, and the man kept following her, she said.

But in the time it took Sanders to finish and wash their hands, a crowd of about ten people had formed. Sanders remembers emerging from the building to see their partner terrified, trapped at the center of a circle of men and women alike screaming profanities and threats. “It was every single hateful thing you can come up with that people say to a trans person,” Sanders said.

Sanders had to push past the crowd because, in addition to surrounding Rush, they were blocking the exit.

Sanders put their arm around Rush and tried to leave, but people blocked them.

What followed was a stream of vitriol. They allegedly called Rush a “tranny” and a “faggot.” They allegedly said they would stop Rush from entering the bathroom by any means necessary. They allegedly threatened to murder Rush. And they allegedly said they were protecting the children.

“I was in a total, complete, closed up circle,” Rush said. “There was no getting out of it. I could feel people behind me breathing down my neck.”

“We knew, at that point, that we were pretty much screwed,” Sanders said.

CAPTION: Shae Sanders after they and their partner say they experienced an anti-trans attack in Bossier Parish, Louisiana.

It’s not totally clear why the beating stopped, but evidently, a parks employee called the police. Sanders had been knocked unconscious and needed stitches for a gash above their eye. They were taken away in an ambulance. Rush sat in her car as police questioned her and others at the scene.

Both maintain they didn’t even really fight back; more than anything, they weren’t in fighting condition. Rush lives off of disability benefits because of a hip injury; she has trouble lifting heavy objects and moving one of her legs. Sanders has a structural defect in their spinal cord. An injury as mild as whiplash could render them in need of emergency surgery. After the ordeal at Cypress Bayou, they were blind in one eye for several days—the product of a scratched cornea.

Sanders is also medically vulnerable due to a neurostim implant in their shoulder—a device similar to a pacemaker, but connected to the brain instead of the heart. Doctors are still trying to determine if the attack damaged the wires, which could kill them.

Rush also incurred head trauma, scratches, contusions, and massive welts; one knot above her knee swelled to the size of an apple. Blood pooled around her eyes, a sign of a concussion. But the physical injuries were compounded by the moral ones.

The worst part, for Rush, may have been when officers approached her car, told her to step out of her vehicle, and informed her that she was under arrest. Despite the “female” gender marker on Rush’s driver’s license, they took her to a men’s jail, had her patted down and searched by a male guard, and initially booked her under a man’s name—and not even one she had ever used or heard of.

A photo she shared with Erin in the Morning appears to show a plastic bag where they had collected her belongings, labelled with a moniker she didn’t recognize. The name is crossed out and her proper, legal name is scrawled underneath. Upon her release from police custody, she looked up the name on Facebook, and she immediately recognized the face staring back at her.

It was one of the men, she says, who had attacked her.

CAPTION: A leg injury Aurora Rush says she maintained during an anti-trans attack in Bossier Parish. A contusion on her leg swelled to the size of an apple. She also suffered from two black eyes.

Rush and Sanders were scheduled for arraignment on July 15, but that date was changed at the last minute. Their next court date is expected to be in August, Newburry told Erin in the Morning.

Coincidentally, July 15 was also the date the Bossier Parish police jury voted unanimously in favor of Ordinance No. 22—a resolution that would impose criminal sanctions on anyone accused of being in a gendered bathroom that deviates from their sex assigned at birth, and who refuses to leave upon request. It covers any bathroom, locker room, or changing room owned or operated by the Parish, including at courthouses, government buildings, and public parks.

It cited the passage of the Women’s Safety and Protection Act, a bill pushed by anti-trans activists “establishing definitions relating to biological sex and recognizing the authority of governmental entities to maintain separate accommodations based upon biological sex,” a resolution from the July 15 police jury meeting reads.

Ordinance No. 22 would require any and all municipal employees, from police officers to janitors, to monitor bathrooms for suspected trans people using the “wrong” one. If an employee fails to eject the individual whose gender or sex has been called into question, then they must be met with disciplinary action, the ordinance reads.

And if a trans person, or presumed-trans person, does not leave upon request from a stranger making assumptions about their gender, genitals, and biological make-up, then they could face criminal charges and up to a year in jail. The criminal charges and threat of incarceration make it perhaps the most severe anti-trans local bathroom policy in the country.

It’s also unclear whether the ordinance is actually in effect; government officials gave Erin in the Morning different answers when asked. Initially local news reports said there would be a final vote on Aug. 5; several jurors told Erin in the Morning the adoption was final; the Parish attorney did not respond to requests for comment; the Sheriff’s office said it had not yet been adopted at all.

A document posted ahead of this week’s Aug. 5 meeting indicates they will consider having another public hearing; nobody showed up to testify at the first one. The ACLU of Louisiana sent the governing body a letter alleging it didn’t properly advertise the vote, violating Open Meetings Laws, and that they would need to restart the process. If that resolution passes, then there will be an opportunity for public comment on the matter scheduled for Sept. 2, Parish documents indicate.

Now, community groups are mobilizing both to support Rush and Sanders and to challenge Ordinance No. 22. “Things have gotten bad,” said Peyton Michelle Rose, executive director for the statewide advocacy group Louisiana Trans Advocates. “But we’ve already had it bad. We’re used to standing up for ourselves.”

Meanwhile, multiple jurors told Erin in the Morning that the ordinance was requested by Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington himself in the weeks following what happened to Rush and Sanders.

“There was nothing on the books for him to do as law enforcement,” juror Glenn Benton said in an interview. “That’s why he asked us to do it.”

For Rush and Sanders, the uphill climb that remains is not just legal or political. They continue to struggle with chronic health problems as a result of the physical assault they experienced. They are still adjusting to their new normal of chronic migraines, shifting court dates, mounting medical bills, and severe PTSD.

“I am a completely different person,” Sanders said. “I am terrified now. I’ve never been scared like this before.”

CAPTION: Shae Sanders in the hospital after the apparent trans bashing at Cypress Bayou. They needed four stitches above their eye; their shirt is caked with blood.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trans-couple-brutalized-at-louisiana at Aug 10, 2026 at 7:25 PM EDT.

WNBA Coach Cheryl Reeve Wore “Trans Kids Belong” While Beating Sophie Cunningham’s Team

S. BAUM | AUG 4, 2026, 10:27 AM EDT | SOURCE

The crowd was equally indignant, reportedly booing whenever Cunningham touched the ball.

A picture can speak a thousand words—but sometimes, all that’s needed are three.

The Minnesota Lynx Coach Cheryl Reeve was seen sporting a “Trans Kids Belong” shirt at Sunday’s match against the Indiana Fever. This comes after Fever guard Sophie Cunningham used her platform to reject the notion that trans girls deserve the same equal rights in sports as cisgender girls.

The crowd was equally indignant. “Sophie Cunningham is getting booed every time she touches the ball here in Minneapolis,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice reported during the game.

“I come from a space of inclusion,” Reeve told reporters. “The narrative that I think is problematic is to suggest that transgender athletes are the biggest problem in women’s sports. This is what’s bothersome. There is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.”

Sunday also marked the end of the Fever’s five-game winning streak, losing to the Lynx 108-100. (Cunningham scored a whopping three points.)

Afterwards, reporters asked the Fever’s point guard Caitlin Clark—arguably one of the most magnanimous figures in the league—her take on the matter.

“I think it’s for leagues and governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions,” Clark told reporters. “Our focus is on basketball. That’s what we talk about and how we can get wins and obviously we didn’t do that tonight. So we need to find an area to improve in that way.”

Outside protestors also gathered in pro- and anti-trans camps.

On the court, Reeve was also seen talking to Cunningham, appearing cordial. “Both of us understand that we have platforms and we both talked about wanting to, more than anything, educate,” Reeve said, as per ESPN. “There are some things that we have in common, and maybe some things you differ on, just like any issues. I think it’s how you handle things. It was nice to be in person, for sure.”

As the ultra-right has openly stated time and time again, the manufactured crisis around transgender athletes is just a gateway drug for transphobia. It’s a wedge issue, conservative strategists have boasted; once they get people “comfortable” debating trans women in sports, it opens up endless possibilities for a full-scale attack on all trans rights, women’s rights, and the rights of the LGBTQ community at large.

Last week, a similar scene erupted outside a Fever game against the Seattle Storm, Erin in the Morning reported. A far-right sportswear brand founded for the purpose of promoting anti-trans ideology latched on to Cunningham’s comment to drive a wedge between WNBA players, seemingly placing a paid spokesperson courtside during the recent Fever-Storm game, with signs and shirts supporting Cunningham and promoting a subtly anti-trans message. They thanked her for “speaking up for girls.”

Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton allegedly confronted them and was suspended and fined because she supposedly called them “fucking insane” over the course of that interaction.

Keaton and Reeve’s acts of solidarity, however small, are far from the only resistance to Cunningham. Backlash from the WNBA’s overwhelming LGBTQ fanbase was swift. “I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,’” Cunningham told ESPN. In the same interview, where she doubled down on calling trans women “biological men,” she insisted: “I think that I am here to extend love.”

Coach Reeve, on the other hand, used Sunday’s game to reiterate her support for the trans community. “We need to protect trans kids,” she said. “It’s a human rights issue.”

Support for trans youth remains widespread in the league. In fact, in 2021, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association filed an amicus brief before a federal court to protect transgender student athletes.

“At the WNBPA, we honor the diversity of identities and perspectives our members bring to the table,” said the group’s Executive Director Terri Jackson at the time. “The players believe in the power of sport to fundamentally change the lives of all young people. As attacks across the country continue to escalate, we want to send an unequivocal message to trans and nonbinary youth in sports: we see you, we are an ally and we will fight for you.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/wnba-coach-cheryl-reeve-wore-trans at Aug 10, 2026 at 7:25 PM EDT.

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Erin in the Morning: 2026 Aug 7

All articles

Michigan Might Elect A Trans Woman To The State Legislature For The First Time Ever

Trans Couple Brutalized At Louisiana Park Bathroom, Then Charged By Police

WNBA Coach Cheryl Reeve Wore “Trans Kids Belong” While Beating Sophie Cunningham’s Team