The Progressive

During the Jim Crow era, Black people in the United States were legally excluded from using the same bathrooms as white people—a segregation highly visible through signs outside bathrooms that stated “Whites Only.” Sixty years later, transgender people in the United States are facing a similar form of legal exclusion from public facilities, albeit without the placards.

I came out as gay in 2011 in Bangladesh, when I was twenty years old and still living under my parents’ roof. The first things my family said when I came out were, “What will society say?” and “If only we had been more religious, you wouldn’t be an abomination like this!” Religion was never a priority for my parents before I came out. But the moment I did, they quoted religious scripture from the Quran, which, according to them, prohibits queerness.

Many people assume that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of racial bigotry. After all, it bills itself as a civil rights organization and throughout its long history, it has battled housing discrimination against people of color and challenged racist groups including White Citizens Councils. Nonetheless, Emmaia Gelman, founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, argues that this reputation is unwarranted.

In the United States, transgender people make up just 1 percent of the population. Why, then, have their bodies and their very identities been the subject of so much political and cultural angst in recent years? This is the central question of Sarah Lamble’s important new book, Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash, one which they tackle with finesse. Lamble is a community organizer and a professor of criminology and queer theory at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Many people assume that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of racial bigotry. After all, it bills itself as a civil rights organization and throughout its long history, it has battled housing discrimination against people of color and challenged racist groups including White Citizens Councils. Nonetheless, Emmaia Gelman, founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, argues that this reputation is unwarranted.

In 2023, as Missouri legislators inched closer to passing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, Michael Walk, whose daughter is transgender, began making plans. Alongside his family, the St. Louis TransParent chapter co-leader came up with four different scenarios for how his daughter, who was seventeen at the time, could continue to receive gender-affirming care.

In April, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that Louisiana’s 2024 Congressional map—which sought to create a second majority-Black district in the state—was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. Within hours of the ruling, legislatures and governors across the South began moving with urgency to redraw Congressional maps, dilute Black voting power, and further weaken what remained of the protections enshrined in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Recently, I attended a meeting of an advisory task force in Austin, Texas, where I live, to urge more funding for housing and shelter. As I sat in the parking lot before going inside, I realized it was the same parking lot where, not all that long ago, I slept in a tent. I am no longer homeless, in large part due to the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), signed into law in March 2021 by former President Joe Biden.

Zainab al-Khalil walks among the trees of her home’s entrance garden in Baysarieh, Lebanon, 2.5 miles south of the nearest major city, Sidon. She is dressed in black as a sign of mourning. A small cat named Mishu plays between her feet. Two months prior, Zainab’s sister, Amal Khalil, brought the kitten home. “Our source of joy during the war,” al-Khalil tells The Progressive.

Over the past century, nothing has united the world in more rapturous joy than the World Cup. This remained the case in recent decades even as FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, eagerly allowed autocratic countries with shameful human rights records, including Russia and Qatar, to host the men’s side of the tournament.