Good Queer News: The First Edition!
In life, we find whatever we choose to look for. Let me help make it easier to find the news worth celebrating.
Testing… testing… Can you all hear me? Great! Let’s dive in.
My name is Ben Greene, I’ve been out as transgender for almost ten years and I am the most relentless optimist you may ever meet. I didn’t fall into this optimism by accident, nor by naiveté. This is a choice. Every day, I wake up and choose to look for reasons to be hopeful.
In 2020 I found myself, like many others, glued to my screens. I was scrolling on social media apps and news sites for hours every day, and I felt terrible. As I watched the anti-trans legislation numbers get higher and higher, I felt worse and worse. In 2023, I decided it was time for me to step up my advocacy game and get more involved politically. I saw many, many things that shocked me the further I went into the Missouri advocacy scene. The biggest, though, was the disconnect between the victories and the defeats that we were seeing and what was getting reported on. While the newest terrifying piece of legislation always made headlines, frequently national ones, many of our victories—both large and small—were met with crickets.
Even bills that we all on “the inside” knew had zero traction to move through any piece of the state house were blowing up on our facebook pages as further evidence of the cruelty of the state.
No, I’m not saying these “bad news” stories are false, or that they’re unimportant, but I am saying they’re skewed. Heavily. And you don’t have to take my word for it. In the media and advertising world, it’s a well known saying that “bad news sells more papers”, and one study found that for each individual negative word in a news headline, you’re more likely to click on and read that article. Source: The Journal of Nature and Human Behavior (March 2023)
All this is just to say that bad news is very, very easy to find, which can make it feel like there is only bad news out there. Fortunately for us, there is plenty of good news out there, we just have to choose to look for it! Perhaps even more fortunately for you, dear reader, I have created this newsletter to do that looking for you! Each week, I’ll send out a list of LGBTQ+ victories worth celebrating from around the world that you may not have heard about.
Without further adieu, I present to you the inaugural compilation of Good Queer News!
There are so many stories to choose from, so for brevity’s sake, I’m pulling from my favorite stories from the last two weeks.
Political Wins:
Florida: Most of the school board candidates backed by Ron de Santis, even in republican counties, lost their primaries! Even in states that some have written off as “too far gone”, there are many people showing up to reject extremism in their communities! This also represents yet another example of the losing streak of candidates endorsed by right wing organizations like Moms for Liberty.
Source: Tampa Bay Times (August 20th)
Court Victories and Challenges:
New Hampshire: The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld a school policy protecting trans students from forced outing to their parents, and provided a powerful response to “parents rights” concerns.
“The Policy,” the court wrote, “does not prevent parents from observing their children’s behavior, moods, and activities; talking to their children; providing religious or other education to their children; choosing where their children live and go to school; obtaining medical care and counseling for their children; monitoring their children’s communications on social media; choosing with whom their children may socialize; and deciding what their children may do in their free time. In short, the Policy places no limits on the plaintiff’s ability to parent her child as she sees fit.”
Source: LGBTQ Nation (August 30th)
South Carolina: The ACLU announced a lawsuit against South Carolina for their gender affirming care ban, stating that the care ban has no legal justification and is only the result of an ideological focus from state lawmakers.
Source: LGBTQ Nation (August 30th)
Healthcare Victories:
Nation-wide: Medical insurance company Aetna just announced that it’s going to be providing additional fertility coverage, specifically offering intrauterine insemination (IUI), to all policyholders regardless of sexual orientation or whether they’re partnered. They are the first major health insurance carrier to offer robust fertility coverage for all LGBTQ+ people, and hopefully this means that other health insurance providers will follow suit. While they are celebrating this as an inclusive choice on their part, it’s important to know that this policy change is the result of a lawsuit—real people just like you and I taking matters into their own hands.
Source: Fortune (August 24th)
International Visibility:
Tonga - Tonga held an annual Miss Galaxy pageant, a beauty pageant centering on Leitis, a third gender in Tongan culture where people assigned male at birth live as women and have traditionally taken on roles caring for elder Tongans and serving the royal family. Though there has been a rise in anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in Tonga recently, nearly 1/5 of the country watched the pageant and had an opportunity to celebrate the beauty of gender-diverse Tongans!
Source (which I highly recommend you check out for pictures of the event!): Washington Post (August 26th)
Thank you!
That’s all I have for you this week, but there’s loads more good news where that came from! While I’m working on building this newsletter up, it would mean a whole lot to me if you’d be willing to forward this to someone who you think might enjoy it, or to post about it on your social media! Help make it easy for someone else to choose to search for the good news, too.
Together in Hope,
Ben
Love this so much! It’s so easy to get sucked down into scary-news black hole. Love that you’re lifting us all up with bright spots to re-energize and give us perspective. 🙌❤️