12/17/24

Hi all,

📢 Say it with me: No, the suspected Wisconsin school shooter was not trans. Yet again after a tragedy like this, misinformation and disinformation sprang up on social media in what's become the transgender shooter myth.

🗳️ California won’t elect a new governor to replace term-limited Gavin Newsom until 2026, but the race is already attracting plenty of attention and high-profile candidates. But the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund thinks it has a winner in longtime California legislator Toni Atkins, who it has just endorsed. If elected, Atkins would be California’s first woman governor and first LGBTQ+ one, after having been the Senate’s first woman and first out Senate president pro tempore. She spoke to The Advocate's Trudy Ring about her run and the endorsement.

❌ Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, a Republican candidate for governor in 2025, has positioned herself as a champion of far-right social policies, aligning with an extremist agenda targeting LGBTQ+ protections, reproductive rights, and divorce laws, LGBTQ+ advocates say. As she seeks to secure the commonwealth’s chief executive office, activists warn that she would take the increasingly progressive state backward.

🏛️ Democrats in the Senate are fighting against anti-LGBTQ+ legislation passed by the House. Out U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and 20 of her fellow Senate Democrats have introduced an amendment that would remove anti-transgender language from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). “Let’s be clear," Baldwin said in a Senate floor speech on Tuesday. "We are talking about parents who are serving our country in uniform having the right to consult with their family’s doctor and get the health care they want and need for their transgender children. That’s it. They want the right to whatever health care is best for their child, something I imagine all parents want.” Read more about the NDAA here.

Onward and upward,

Alex Cooper

Editor-in-chief, Advocate.com

P.S. Support The Advocate's journalism. Find out how here.

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