Alternative genders

NY Times -  The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that a transgender boy may use the boys’ bathroom in a South Carolina public high school while he pursues a challenge to a state law requiring students to use the bathrooms for their sex as “determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth.”

The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. It applied to a single student and stressed that it was “not a ruling on the merits of the legal issues presented in the litigation.”

Rather, in rejecting South Carolina’s request to bar the student from the boys’ bathroom for now, the order said the state had not cleared the high bar for securing an emergency ruling in its favor.

The Guardian - Politicians in at least 51 countries used homophobic or transphobic rhetoric during elections last year, from depicting LGBTQ+ identity as a foreign threat to condemning “gender ideology”, according to a new study of 60 countries and the EU.

However, there were also gains for LGBTQ+ representation in some countries. Openly gay, bisexual and transgender people ran for office in at least 36 countries, including for the first time in Botswana, Namibia and Romania – albeit unsuccessfully – according to the report by Outright International. The number of LGBTQ+ elected officials doubled to at least 233 in Brazil.

As the visibility of LGBTQ+ people has risen in many countries in the last decade, so too has a backlash from conservative parts of societies, fuelled in many cases by far-right activists and politicians using gay and transgender people as scapegoats for other problems.