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Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

In a landmark decision on Tuesday, a three-judge panel for the Ohio Tenth District Court of Appeals struck down the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The ruling rested on two key findings: first, that gender-affirming care constitutes legitimate medical treatment, and second, that parents have the constitutional right to make healthcare decisions for their children. Notably—and with a touch of irony—the court’s decision was made possible by Ohio���s Health Care Freedom Amendment, a Republican-backed constitutional provision originally designed to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Now, the same amendment has been used to dismantle a key pillar of the state’s anti-trans legislation. “The medical evidence and clinical experience presented in this case demonstrate that, when provided in appropriate circumstances, gender-affirming care can meaningfully improve the health and well-being of transgender adolescents with gender dysphoria by lowering rates of depression and the severity of other mental health issues, as well as increasing patients’ quality of life,” reads the ruling, affirming many studies showing the importance of gender affirming care on the wellbeing of transgender youth. This finding was significant. In 2011, a state constitutional amendment was passed by Republicans in 2011 to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). 

[(B) No federal, state, or local law or rule shall prohibit the purchase or sale of health care or health insurance. C) No federal, state, or local law or rule shall impose a penalty or fine for the sale or purchase of health care or health insurance.]

As a result, Ohioans now have broader constitutional protections around healthcare access—protections that, in this case, worked against Republican lawmakers’ attempts to restrict gender-affirming care. In defending the ban, the state argued that gender-affirming care does not qualify as healthcare, relying on testimony from anti-trans medical “experts” and asserting that it was up to the legislature—not the courts—to determine what constitutes medical treatment. The judges rejected both arguments outright, affirming that gender-affirming care falls squarely within the legal definition of healthcare. The court thoroughly dismantled the credibility of the state’s witnesses, going so far as to eviscerate them in judicial footnotes. Of Dr. James Cantor, the ruling notes that he “is not a physician, has never practiced as a licensed clinical psychologist in the United States, is not licensed to treat patients under the age of 16, and has never provided treatments to patients under the age of 16.” Dr. Paul Hruz fared no better, with the court pointing out that “he never diagnosed or treated a patient with gender dysphoria.” The ruling also highlighted his history of anti-trans advocacy, citing his testimony in a transgender bathroom ban case, where he stated: “Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of impersonating someone of the opposite sex, achievable only through chemical and surgical interventions, is a form of child abuse.” Even the state’s sole witness with marginal qualification, Dr. Stephen Levine, ultimately undercut its case. The court noted that while Dr. Levine has experience in the field, he testified that he does not support a categorical ban on gender-affirming care and provided no evidence that such care is substandard in Ohio. In other words, the state’s own expert failed to justify the ban. [...] The ruling will likely be appealed in coming days to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Good news out of Ohio: An appeals court has struck down its state ban on gender-affirming care (HB68) in Moe v. Yost. Republicans in the Buckeye State get burned again on a 2011 anti-Obamacare referendum..

See Also:

The Advocate: Ohio appeals court strikes down ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth

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Anna Betts at The Guardian:

In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs. “I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.” Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card. The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent”, warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.” The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students. “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” the statement said. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.” Khalil described his arrest at his university-owned apartment building in New York in front of his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant with their first child. The agents who arrested him “refused to provide a warrant” before forcing him into an unmarked car, he said. “At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety,” he said. “I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.” He was then transferred to an Ice facility in New Jersey before being flown 1,400 miles away to the Louisiana detention facility, where he is currently being held. He spent his first night in detention, he said, sleeping on the floor without a blanket. In his remarks, Khalil said that in Louisiana, he wakes to “cold mornings” and spends “long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law”. “Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.” “Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” he added. Khalil drew comparison between his current treatment in the US and the ways in which he said the Israeli government uses detention without trial to lock up Palestinians.

“I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” he added, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel. “I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights,” he said.

[...]

Khalil also criticized Columbia University, arguing that university leaders “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”

The Guardian reported on illegally detained political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil’s letter from prison detailing that he is a political prisoner and urging Americans to fight for our freedoms that are under danger.

See Also:

Khalil's statement, via Document Cloud.

HuffPost: Mahmoud Khalil Shares Letter From ICE Detention: 'I Am A Political Prisoner'

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Dave Jamieson at HuffPost:

President Donald Trump fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, carrying out another legally dubious power grab at an independent federal agency. Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said on X that Trump had “illegally” removed him from the antitrust enforcement agency in the middle of his term, calling the move “corruption plain and simple.” In an interview with HuffPost, Bedoya said he planned to challenge the firing in court, asserting that Trump had no legal basis for removing him. He said he worried that Trump would turn the FTC into an agency that cuts sweetheart deals for friends of the administration, blessing the mergers of those who are politically connected. He noted that the FTC has ongoing cases against Meta and Amazon, whose founders, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, respectively, attended Trump’s inauguration. “People are hearing the news and thinking of me ― they need to be thinking not about me but about the billionaires behind President Trump’s shoulder at the inauguration,” Bedoya said. He went on, “Who does this benefit? Does it benefit the American people, or does it benefit the people who are behind the president?” Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, another Democratic commissioner, said in a statement that she had been fired “illegally” as well. “Why? Because I have a voice. And he is afraid of what I’ll tell the American people,” Slaughter said of Trump. Until Tuesday, the commission, which normally has five commissioners, had two Democrats and two Republicans, along with one vacancy. Former Chair Lina Khan, a Democrat, stepped down shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

Anti-American traitor Donald Trump illegally fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as part of his war against agency independence.

See Also:

The Guardian: Trump fires FTC’s only two Democrats: ‘The President just illegally fired me’

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Department of Defense deletes Code Talkers, Iwo Jima flag raiser Hayes under Trump’s DEI order

Prominent Native American figures in U.S. military history have been erased from the U.S. Department of Defense’s website as part of the sweeping effort stemming from President Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion.

The Department of Defense website removed articles featuring details about the Navajo Code Talkers — Navajo men who served during World War II and used their language as a secret code in battle — along with U.S. Marine Ira Hayes from the Gila River Indian Community, who helped raise the flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

“Navajo code has absolutely nothing to do with DEI because Navajo code was a weapon,” Navajo Code Talker Peter MacDonald said in response to the removal during an interview with the Arizona Mirror.

MacDonald, 96, is one of two living Navajo Code Talkers. He served in the South Pacific as a Code Talker and in North China with the 6th Marine Division.

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HEY GUYS!!

GUYS!!!

FRANCE HAS REACHED THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF SIGNATURES ON THE CITIZEN'S INITIATIVE AGAINST CONVERSION THERAPY IN THE EU!!

ONE COUNTRY DOWN, SIX TO GO!!

We also need still quite a few signatures in order to reach the one million required.

As to date, the six other countries with the most signatures are:

Spain - 38.72%

Finland - 30.31%

Ireland - 24.86%

Netherlands - 24.15%

Germany - 23.54%

Belgium - 23.09%

So yeah, still a long way to go, but we ARE slowly getting closer. Don't stop now! Don't let this stay within the community, either, if you have any friends or family who are open to queer rights, get them to sign, too!

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The cowardice and conniving define his life.

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The Agriculture Department has halted millions of dollars worth of deliveries to food banks without explanation, according to food bank leaders in six states.

USDA had previously allocated $500 million in deliveries to food banks for fiscal year 2025 through The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Now, the food bank leaders say many of those orders have been canceled.

The halting of these deliveries, first reported by POLITICO, comes after the Agriculture Department separately axed two other food programs, ending more than $1 billion in planned federal spending for schools and food banks to purchase from local farmers.

So Trump and Musk are just stealing food out of the mouths of poor people, at home and around the world, hurting American farmers while they do it. And also just breaking the law and violating the Constitution as they go.

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Elon is an arsonist.

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There is a special place in hell for Pam Bondi.

She shields rapists and sex predators, then lets women be harassed getting health check-ups.

A sexual abuser's best friend is Pam Bondi.

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Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

The Trump administration is preparing to eliminate all federal funding for domestic HIV prevention programs, a move that health experts say will undo decades of progress in combating the epidemic. The decision, which could be announced within the next 48 hours, would shut down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s HIV prevention division and halt all federally funded prevention efforts, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the development, citing sources within the Department of Health and Human Services who say the move is part of a broader restructuring effort targeting federal public health programs. When asked for comment, HHS Deputy Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told The Advocate that no decision had been made. “HHS is following the Administration’s guidance and taking a careful look at all divisions to see where there is overlap that could be streamlined to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure the federal government. This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard," she said. Additionally, an HHS official told The Advocate that if this decision is made, this work would be continued elsewhere at HHS. [...]

20 years of work will be erased

For organizations on the front lines of the HIV epidemic, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stacie Walls, CEO of the LGBT Life Center in Norfolk, told The Advocate that her Virginia organization relies on federal HIV prevention funding to provide free testing, access to pre-exposure prophylaxis, and linkage to treatment. “We have spent 20 years building these HIV and STI prevention programs to keep our community healthy,” Walls said. “The cuts to these programs would undo 20 years of work. People come to us for free testing. We link them to care, and they’re able to get treatment. Without these programs, that all disappears.” The vast majority of people who rely on these services, she said, are uninsured and would have nowhere else to go. “It’s already difficult to find providers who offer nonjudgmental, affirming care,” Walls said. “Without us, people won’t be able to go anywhere else to get this kind of treatment.” Beyond HIV and STI testing, organizations like the LGBT Life Center provide comprehensive services addressing housing instability, nutrition, and mental health challenges — all issues that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

This is dangerous: Trump Misadministration plans to end federal funding for HIV prevention programs, in marked contrast to his first term.

See Also:

LGBTQ Nation: Trump may eliminate CDC’s HIV prevention division despite risk of public health disaste

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Scott grew up in Baltimore, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, “thinking that the government was an honorable place to work.” His grandfathers were Westinghouse engineers who conducted state-funded research. His parents were public-school music teachers. “Kids used to make fun of me for carrying a violin,” he told me. In college, he joined the R.O.T.C. and later entered the Air Force. He met his wife, a nuclear missileer, at their shared duty station in California. They both left active duty, but he continued to serve in the Air Force Reserve and went on to law school.

In 2013, he got a job as an attorney-investigator at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency that monitors and investigates banks, payday lenders, debt collectors, and other businesses. The C.F.P.B. was established in 2010, under the Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to prevent the kinds of mortgage scams and unregulated investments that had led to the Great Recession. “My specialty was delinquent-loan services, people struggling to get mortgage modifications,” Scott said. (He asked to use a pseudonym because he is not permitted to speak with the press.) Later, he joined a team that focusses on servicemembers, a population that’s particularly vulnerable to predatory practices because of the nature of their work—modest but dependable income, frequent relocation, peer pressure to buy “the biggest truck.” A lot of enlisteds get married young and have kids young, or have to support their parents. “They are getting money for the first time,” he told me. “They get preyed on.”

Scott liked the idea of helping the military community, and knew that his own status as a veteran had given him an advantage at the C.F.P.B. “It got me in the door,” he said, though he still had to take an entrance exam. Veterans often receive a preference in government hiring and promotions, which partly explains why they make up about thirty per cent of the federal workforce. “The preference tries to put us back where we would be, had we not served,” Scott said. “It levels the playing field.”

He has worked for the C.F.P.B. ever since. The agency has sued companies for persuading veterans to sell their pension and disability payments, for charging military families more than thirty-six per cent interest on pawn loans, and for misleading servicemembers to take costly cash-out refinance loans on their homes. He recalled cases in which a debt collector had lingered outside someone’s house, pretending that his cellphone was a police walkie-talkie, or gone through the drive-thru of a Taco Bell to harass someone working the window. Since its founding, the C.F.P.B. has recovered more than three hundred million dollars in damages to military personnel and veterans.

I visited Scott last week at his home about an hour away from D.C. He looks the part of an airman: tall, fit, and fastidiously groomed. The house was also big and spotless, save for the area occupied by two yappy Chihauahas. He showed me the dining room, which doubles as his office. Next to his work laptop was a bound copy of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, whose worn lime-green cover was signed, in Sharpie, by one of the creators of the C.F.P.B.:

Keep ’em honest Elizabeth Warren

In early February, the Trump Administration had shut down the agency headquarters. Elon Musk pronounced it dead—“RIP CFPB,” he wrote on X—as his DOGE operation dug into the computer systems. “Employees should not come into the office,” Russell Vought, an outspoken critic of financial regulation and the C.F.P.B.’s new acting director, wrote in an “AllHands” e-mail. “Employees should stand down from performing any work task.” He then fired ten per cent of the bureau and oversaw a “wholesale termination of the contracts needed to keep the C.F.P.B. running,” a procurement staffer stated in a recent affidavit. Vought’s plan to terminate nearly everyone at the agency “within 36 hours” was halted by a federal judge.

Scott was spared but put on administrative leave. He could do little more than check his e-mail and wait. Normally he would be analyzing the complaints submitted by servicemembers, organizing outreach events, and discussing emerging concerns with colleagues at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Now nothing was getting done.

Several time zones west, in Honolulu, a financial coach and military spouse named Heidi Clemons was feeling alarmed by the news about the C.F.P.B. The packet of materials she gave to servicemembers and families was filled with links and references to the agency. “We’re trying to point our servicemembers to the most trusted information—historic, government-backed, lasting, not scam-based or profit-based,” she told me. Suddenly, in February, the links led to a “Page Not Found” message. All the YouTube explainers were gone. “It was a hot mess,” she said. “We had to pull the C.F.P.B. from all our resourcing.” Though the website was later restored, she didn’t want to take the risk of sending people to “a dead-end link.” “The impact of shutting down the C.F.P.B. on our servicemembers—it’s huge,” she said.

Scott had been to that part of Oahu for military exercises. Fort Shafter sits between the misty, dark-green mountains of the Ko’olau Range and the Ke’ehi Lagoon. “There’s a lot of sleazy businesses,” he said. Cash for gold, title loans, pawnshops. There are high-tech temptations, too: crypto and various money-making schemes on Venmo, Zelle, and other peer-to-peer payment apps.

Military personnel have long been vulnerable to shady enterprises and cons. Twenty years ago, the Government Accountability Office conducted a study for the Defense Department, based on “continuing concerns about servicemembers’ use of predatory consumer loans.” The report found that these products could lead to “severe negative consequences for the military as a whole (e.g., decreases in unit readiness and morale) as well as for the servicemembers themselves (e.g., criminal and adverse personnel actions, including possible discharge from the military).” Clemons told me that she had one client whose husband had stolen her identity; that another, a Reservist, owed money to a loan shark; and that apartment complexes near the base were having military applicants “waive away their rights” under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which allows active-duty renters to break their lease when necessary. In 2023, of the eighty-four thousand or so complaints submitted by servicemembers to the C.F.P.B., the second-highest number came from Hawaii.

Earlier this year, a unit based at Fort Shafter—the 9th Mission Support Command of the Army Reserve (motto: “Pride of the Pacific”)—had asked for a C.F.P.B. representative to staff a booth at an upcoming resource fair for soldiers and their families. Scott arranged for a co-worker to be there with plenty of bureau literature and swag. The event took place on March 1st, but the rep never showed up—because no one was allowed to work. “They didn’t know where we were,” Scott said.

On Sunday, March 2nd, Scott and other remaining staffers received a confusing e-mail from Mark Paoletta, the C.F.P.B.’s chief legal officer:

On behalf of Acting Director Vought, I am writing to you to ensure that everyone is carrying out any statutorily required work, as he set forth in his February 8th email. … Employees should be performing work that is required by law and do not need to seek prior approval to do so.

A month earlier, Vought’s message had clearly said not to perform “any work” at all. Scott and other C.F.P.B. employees concluded that this new directive was an attempt to rewrite the story for purposes of litigation. A lawsuit filed by the workers’ union alleged that by issuing a stop-work order to all staff the Administration had violated the Dodd-Frank Act. A hearing was scheduled for the following day. “They’re trying to develop cover for the court case,” Scott told me.

Meanwhile, the invitation to do what was “statutorily required” let him resume some of his work. “I currently have three hundred and twenty-three unread e-mails,” he told me. “Usually, I try to clear them out as fast as I can.” We were in his dining room, sitting at a table covered in delicate white lace. He sipped coffee from a Pentagon mug. The complaint system for servicemembers and veterans had continued to function through the pause, though with noticeable glitches, and Scott was finally able to download the latest data. “Our all-time record is ten thousand complaints for any month,” he said. “And then January was nineteen thousand!” A lot of the submissions had to do with credit reporting. Late last year, the C.F.P.B. had forced Navy Federal, a credit union with a large presence on military installations, to return eighty-one million dollars in overdraft fees to consumers. Scott guessed that the settlement had prompted fresh complaints about other institutions.

But he wasn’t able to track the complaints as he normally would. Typically, when a complaint comes in, it is both reviewed by the C.F.P.B. and routed to the relevant financial company, which is then obligated to respond, and often does so through e-mail with an attached PDF. The many contracts Vought had cancelled, however, included one “with a software company who would scan all our documents for viruses,” Scott explained. “So, now we’re not able to open attachments.” What this meant, he continued, was that “Nobody’s monitoring, right now, to make sure the responses are timely or that they’re complete.” He shrugged.

We got in the car and drove southeast, past the main gate of Fort Meade, past a Northrop Grumman campus, past a strip mall advertising cheap tax preparation. “Some people get loans against their tax refunds—I worry about that,” he told me. I asked him what the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Defense might do to help members of the military, if the C.F.P.B. no longer could. “I mean, not a lot,” Scott said. “For some things, the servicemembers could go to their JAG”—the military’s law department—“and the JAG might write a letter, but that’s about all they’re going to do.”

Enough of the agency was still intact that Scott believed it could be brought back to life. The day after my visit, a federal judge in Maryland ruled that thousands of fired federal workers, including those at the C.F.P.B., would have to be temporarily reinstated; the Trump Administration appealed the order. Some probationary workers subsequently received a “notice of rehiring” that put them on paid administrative leave. Though Scott had recently interviewed for jobs in a city prosecutor’s office and at a credit union in need of a compliance officer, he still hoped to return to the bureau. “If this blows over, I can come back,” he said. He hated to think what would happen if the agency went away completely. “You’re going to see a boom and bust in crypto. You might see a recession,” he told me. “We’re gonna see foreclosures. People forget that. People don’t remember what that’s like.” ♦

The New Yorker is committed to coverage of the federal workforce. Are you a current or former federal employee with information to share? Please use your personal device to contact us via e-mail (tammy_kim@newyorker.com) or Signal (ID: etammykim.54).

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