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Trans News Network
@transnews.network
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Trans News Network (TNN) is a worker-run nonprofit LGBTQ+ newsroom publishing articles that impact trans communities.

Follow our work and socials: https://transnews.network/bio

Our writers: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/transnews.network/3luvqfz7loz2d
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transnews.network
This is a powerful, grounded account of community resistance in the face of still-ongoing brutality. We'd encourage folks to read it for a reality check about what's going on in Minneapolis.

Article edited by @davidforbes.bsky.social
We became unified against ICE in a way I’ve never seen before. Actions are decentralized, every single person is mobilizing, ready to put themselves on the front lines for their neighbors. More people are shot. Another person, Alex Pretti, is killed. Time starts to lose its meaning. I’m dissociating most of the day every day. I keep my whistle on me, have a supply kit ready to go and a plan if things escalate. I still have to work, pay bills, do errands, attend appointments, do chores. Meanwhile, people are kidnapped, infants are choking on tear gas. ICE is beating minors and abandoning them with nothing on their person in places they’ve never been. I’m checking every license plate I see, jumping at every bang I hear, running to the door at every gut-wrenching feeling I get. Local and state cops — along with the National Guard — continue working with ICE. People deny it, but the knowledge hits in that no one will save us, no authority will liberate us. More and more realize this is real, and this is now the way things are Like many trans people in poverty, I’ve dealt with no shortage of oppression and violence in my life, but for the first time, it properly sinks in how myself and everyone I love, everyone I know, everyone I see and could have contact to, can die in an instant. Before I know it, I could be next. My loved ones can be next. My neighbors can be next. I have no way of knowing. No one does. It sinks for everyone here that the only way out is through, to keep organizing. Any of us can be next.
February 2, 2026 at 7:19 PM
transnews.network
Glad folks are also taking some inspiration, especially from this part.

Too often coverage of what trans people are up against turns into fearmongering. While we must be honest about what we face, people can and do fight back. Oppression is not invincible.

At TNN we always strive to remember that
The fact that so many communities are under attack alongside us must also be the start of something better, of widespread organizing in solidarity against our common enemies. We can start with the fact that the same rich assholes keep betraying us, and the same rich assholes want us all gone. Together, we can give them the only answer they deserve: we’re not going anywhere. Rather than a sanitized tale of how much better things used to be, the actual story of HB2 — its “repeal” and all — is much more instructive for understanding everything that’s happened since. The far-right accurately read that Democratic officials were willing to ditch trans people, and that their lack of any real commitment to human rights for all can quickly be exploited, all the way from initial “legitimate points” compromise to outright abandonment. For the rest of us it teaches a different set of lessons: that if you want to hit even the most die-hard bigot where it hurts, you target their money and power. Then, when centrists tell you to compromise and let up the attack you laugh in their faces. North Carolina Democrats, like their colleagues around the country and their predecessors all the way back to segregation, will not yield an inch until the costs become too high for them to do anything else. The ivy of civility still covers the old wall of coercion. It is far past time to tear it down.
January 21, 2026 at 4:56 PM
transnews.network
Important to emphasize: while the realities depicted in this article are grim, the trans political prisoners are also building community. They do have real support both behind bars and outside. This is part of a long history of U.S. political prisoners organizing.

People resist. Always.
Where do we go from here While the brutality of the U.S.’s authoritarianism has ramped up since Trump’s reelection, the country has a long history of using similar authoritarian tactics to arrest Black, Indigenous, Muslim, queer, and environmental activists as political prisoners. Throughout this long history of oppression, activists have built community networks, even from behind bars and persevered with new tactics that adapt to the times. Everyone reading this has a chance to play a part in doing that in our current time too. Initially after transferring to the federal facility, she felt immense fear, owing to the extremely high rates of sexual assault against incarcerated trans women housed with men. Nevertheless, the community she formed inside has been instrumental in helping her approach this situation. “Outside of those first few days of uncertainty, I have felt nothing but a sense of community here. Jail reminds me more than anything else of Boy Scout Camp - my co-defendants describe it as being like living in poverty or at high school, but with extremely steep penalties if anyone is caught fighting, doing drugs, or having sex,” she wrote. “It's like a little village in here, and the guards are much more problematic to us than the other detainees, who mostly like to make delicious cakes and soups and other recipes with what's available on the commissary and share with their neighbors.”
January 13, 2026 at 6:14 PM
transnews.network
Trans people face horrifying rates of incarceration and mistreatment in prisons and jails around the country. This latest crackdown also combines with escalating authoritarianism.

The Prairieland defendants are political prisoners.

Article edited by @madycast.com and @davidforbes.bsky.social
Ari Shaw, senior fellow and director of international programs at the Williams Institute, agrees. With his research primarily specializing in Hungarian authoritarianism, he told Trans News Network that “attacks on LGBTQ people can be an early indicator of a more fundamental erosion of democratic norms and institutions.” When asked about the Prairieland case, he drew a comparison to his prior work. “We certainly see in our research cases where LGBTQ and trans people in particular are scapegoated within the context of rising authoritarianism,” Shaw said. “In many cases we see public officials weaponizing homophobia and transphobia for political purposes, whether to mobilize voters or to distract from domestic, social, or economic crises.”
January 13, 2026 at 12:21 AM
transnews.network
We have published the following update to our article following an email response from the New York Times.

Trans News Network has a policy against platforming bigotry. As such, we have declined to publish the Times' statement which included blatant transphobia.
Editors' Note, 1/4/26: A spokesperson from The New York Times emailed Trans News Network the Sunday after publication, disputing various parts of the interview. We reject their disputes as unsubstantiated, nitpicking or willful misreads. We have added minor clarifications at two points in the interview alongside the transcript, which remains as published. We stand by our reporting of the interview with Sweeney, former editor and 11-year veteran of the Times. The Times also provided TNN a statement responding to the interview, which we have declined to publish due to its inclusion of overt transphobia (such as framing the existence of trans people as “fiercely contested medical and legal debates”). Even in their PR, it seems that the Times can't stop denigrating our lives and communities. We do not have an obligation to publish damage control on the behalf of a news outlet undergoing a legitimacy crisis because of their own actions.
January 5, 2026 at 2:05 AM
transnews.network
Closer and closer. Thank y'all so much!

Please share and support as you can, and help us get the rest of the way.
A screenshot of TNN's winter fund drive, showing $8,772 of $10,000 raised.
January 3, 2026 at 6:09 PM
transnews.network
Y'all we are so, so close. Please help us get there.
A screenshot of Trans News Network's fundraiser, showing $8,542 of $10,000 met.
January 3, 2026 at 4:50 PM
transnews.network
Trans communities warned for years about the NYT's transphobia, but the specifics of how this was ordered were often shrouded behind corporate hierarchy.

No more. Sweeney lays out specifically how the highest ranks of the NYT rigged coverage in favor of anti-trans bigots.
You've talked about the paper's treatment of the pretty infamous Cass report, especially from your spot at the international desk. What happened in that case? It wasn't on my radar as much as it ought to have been. I was starting to wind down my time. I left the Times at the end of May of that year. There was an awareness that [Hilary] Cass was coming out with a report. The day before it officially came out, there was a lot of coverage in the BBC and UK media. Cass was already talking about it before its official release. The day editor's counterparts are in Seoul and London. My counterpart in London — who was actually filling in that day, but did so on a regular basis — assigned a UK reporter to do a story. That was standard practice, to be clear. [Chuckling] There’s so many examples of how standard it was. She assigned it to a UK correspondent, who wrote it in the context of UK politics, talked about it being very contentious, talked about the criticisms of its findings. Cass was talking about them herself, this isn't jumping to any conclusions at that point. It really put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document. When I saw it, because we're a few hours behind, there were 600, 700 words written. I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to turn out. But within a few hours the story was to the top New York editors, and I don't know who exactly it was who did that. I assume it was Carolyn or her intermediary. They said ‘oh no, we want the science desk to do that,’ specifically that was Azeen [Ghorayshi], who had been a key reporter in a lot of the other anti-trans coverage. Some of what you just described, that's just outright bigotry from these reporters. Yes, but the stories are also edited too. Somebody had to approve that lede. I don't know if it was Carolyn, who was known to be directly, hands-on involved in the line editing of stories. I don't know if she was or made known her preferences. Those stories had editors. Certainly there are plenty of reporters that were fully on board with this, and others who do it out of ambition because this is what the bosses want and they want to get ahead so they insert what the bosses want.
January 1, 2026 at 6:45 PM
transnews.network
We're glad this powerful piece is drawing way more attention to how dubious some of these oft-invoked tropes from Chenoweth's writings are.

For example, most folks taking these at face value probably aren't aware that their views on anti-Nazi resistance amid the Holocaust are...not good.
they state with grave, offensive inaccuracy that a failure of the oppressed to consider nonviolent resistance failed to stop the Holocaust. “The claim that nonviolent resistance could never work against genocidal foes like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin is the classic straw man put forward to demonstrate the inherent limitations of this form of struggle,” Chenoweth and Stephan scold. “Collective nonviolent struggle was not used with any strategic forethought during World War II, nor was it ever contemplated as an overall strategy for resisting the Nazis. Violent resistance, which some groups attempted for ending Nazi occupation, was also an abject failure.” Chenoweth, of course, fails to consider the numerous examples of successful violent resistance that led to detainees escaping from concentration camps and sabotaging the Nazis from inside. Or the ultimate defeat of the Nazis came from a literal massive war; only a single sentence mentions World War Two as context. No serious historian of that war considers the many, many armed anti-Nazi resistance movements to have played no role in their defeat. For a tangible example, one only needs to look at the Bielski Partisans, a group of several hundred Jewish radicals known for their violent revolt against the Nazis. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum they saved over 1,200 people. This is through a variety of different tactics, including covert missions to liberate people from ghettos, creating permanent base camps deep in the swampy regions of Naliboki Forest, and relying on armed guards to protect the more vulnerable members of their survivor group. Readers interested in learning more about Holocaust resistance groups are advised to read works such as Serafinski’s Blessed is the Flame, a historical work examining how these means of resistance are effective even in concentration camps. Many prisoners were not only able to fight back against guards with mass resistance, but they were also able to escape death and live full lives. Of course, many others failed, but to blame this on the usage of violence when their lives were threatened by overwhelming odds is nothing short of grotesque.
December 23, 2025 at 5:50 PM
transnews.network
Stonewall was, as the saying goes, a riot. In fact, the working class queer and trans people who fought the police defied demamd by the moderate Mattachine Society and other more establishment groups to "maintain peaceful and quiet conduct."

The reality of that struggle is still important today.
Shortly after the Stonewall riots, according to Susan Stryker’s Transgender History, moderate cisgender gays and lesbians broke off from their queer siblings and formed the Gay Activists Alliance. While they started off more militant than the “homophile” movement that preceded Stonewall, by 1973 the leadership veered away from radicalism in favor of currying favor with the establishment. They pushed out militant activists in favor of working with the political status quo in elections, political campaigning and drawing all their resources towards the gentry. GAA went on to influence the first Pride march years later. Stryker dishearteningly noted how in 1973 trans activist Sylvia Rivera was “forcibly prevented from addressing the annual commemoration of Christopher Street Liberation Day.” While GAA disbanded a year later, their legacy lives on through efforts to whitewash Stonewall and the utilization of the riots’ name to endorse political candidates. This is all in spite of Stonewall’s reality as not a protest, but a violent riot that was widely supported by people in the local community. “Bottles, rocks, and other heavy objects were soon being hurled at the police, who began grabbing people in the crowd and beating them in retaliation. Weekend partiers and residents in the heavily gay neighborhood quickly swelled the ranks of the crowd to more than two thousand people, and the outnumbered police barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn and called for reinforcements,” Stryker wrote. “Outside, rioters used an uprooted parking meter as a battering ram to try to break down the bar’s door, while other members of the crowd attempted to throw a Molotov cocktail inside to drive the police back into the streets.” “Minor skirmishes and protest rallies continued throughout the next few days before finally dying down. By that time, however, untold thousands of people had been galvanized into political action.”
December 18, 2025 at 10:52 PM
transnews.network
Article edited by @davidforbes.bsky.social

These tropes have spread due to bad social science (backed by the U.S. government and establishment) and bad history, especially a whitewashed version of the civil rights movement.

The reality of liberation struggles is more complicated, and instructive.
“The claim that armed self-defense was a necessary aspect of the civil rights movement is still controversial,” Cobb, a legendary journalist and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary, wrote. “However, wielding weapons, especially firearms, let both participants in nonviolent struggle and their sympathizers protect themselves and others under terrorist attack for their civil rights activities. Their willingness to use deadly force ensured the survival not only of countless brave men and women but also of the freedom struggle itself.” He lays out a multitude of examples, like the heavily-armed Deacons for Defense and Justice group that mobilized against segregation and worked closely with civil rights organizers. “If we had a picket line, these guys were standing on the corner, on both sides of the street,” CORE organizer Fred Brooks recalled. “Wherever we went it was like a caravan; these guys in their pick-up trucks with their high-powered rifles.” Renowned radical civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer put it bluntly: “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom, and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” Cobb wrote his history to counter the ongoing sanitization of the realities of that struggle. He’s honest about divisions within the movement over the use of armed force, but also emphasizes that fears that armed demonstrations and defense would lead to overwhelming retaliation proved unfounded. Instead, in plenty of cases local segregationist governments folded in the face of them. “It may be that ‘nonviolent’ is simply the wrong word for many of the people who participated in the freedom struggle and who were comfortable with both nonviolence and self-defense, assessing what to do primarily on the basis of which seemed the most practical at any given moment,” Cobb concluded.
December 18, 2025 at 10:46 PM
transnews.network
We're a worker-run trans newsroom that's done *a lot* with your support over the past six months. Every dollar we get goes to journalism and paying journalists fairly.
We’ve done so much since our launch, just six months ago. We played a key role in bringing public pressure to stop the trans medicaid ban, reported on anti-trans bills moving under the radar in congress, investigated queer and trans creators kicked off Itch, delved into how N.C. Democrats passed anti-trans laws, rallied our communities to survive genocide, analyzed pro-trans bills making their way to California’s anti-trans governor, revealed a trans protesters’ harrowing experiences in jail and reported on Catholic bishops’ sweeping attack on trans healthcare. We have much, much more on the way.
December 4, 2025 at 6:05 PM
transnews.network
We have a slew of great gifts — from stickers to a canvas print — as our way of saying thank you for your support of trans journalism.
$10+: Receive one of our newly designed TNN stickers in the mail $42+: Two unique TNN stickers in the mail, plus a signed thank you letter $100+: Two of each TNN sticker design, plus a wristband delivered to your door $250+: A 8”x10” canvas print of the TNN banner image above delivered to your door This gift is valued at $30, and you must deduct from your tax-deductible amount if you receive it.
December 2, 2025 at 7:23 PM
transnews.network
Radaskiewicz-King was charged under hate crime statutes meant to deter violent symbolism such as nooses or swastikas--implying that a trans symbol is hateful or violent against Catholics. Those charges were dropped.

The judge denied her bail for 'public safety,' despite harming no human.
David Jaros, the faculty director of Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the University of Baltimore School of Law, called the use of hate crimes charges in this case “utterly ridiculous.” Law enforcement had other options besides incarcerating Radaskiewicz-King to protect the community, he said, such as asking her mother to surrender her firearms or using pretrial electronic monitoring. “I think it’s sadly a symptom of the public discourse over trans rights and trans issues,” he said, “but this seems like a gross abuse of the law.”
November 22, 2025 at 8:42 PM
transnews.network
AIDS activists included many trans women and supporters of trans rights. Many are sadly passing away in recent years, after fighting AIDS for decades.

Even still, one activist in hospice care became animated when pleading for trans people to take to the streets and fight for our healthcare again.
Kirk W., an AIDS activist who was in hospice care during his interview, became highly animated and passionate on this topic despite his very poor health. Jordan: Kirk was somebody who did drag as part of his identity, but he was not in any way a trans individual. But he was really forceful in believing that trans people needed to be out there. In the streets standing up for their rights. And this was the strongest language he used in an interview while he was in hospice care. He didn't have a lot of energy, but I think we saw the greatest amount of energy and emotion put behind his sentiments about this.
November 11, 2025 at 6:16 PM
transnews.network
Even some Republicans are finally realizing that the single-minded focus on pushing trans hatred as the GOP agenda isn't working. After spending millions on anti trans ads, Virginia Republicans were wiped out. One is speaking out against the focus on hating trans people over addressing the economy.
The economy was the No. 1 issue,” said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, a Republican. “And having people talking about trans rights and the like isn’t what was moving the needle. [The message] needed to address the economy at this point, and I think the administration and Republican Congress need to give that focus to get this midterm under control.” In the final weeks of the campaign, Earle-Sears blanketed the airwaves with ads characterizing Spanberger as being for “they/them”, echoing messaging from Trump’s 2024 campaign. A spokesperson for Earle-Sears did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
November 9, 2025 at 5:26 PM
transnews.network
Trump's attacks on trans healthcare this year reflect the significant escalation in hatred against queer people in recent years.

But the NIH has long denied queer people healthcare. During the AIDS genocides, over 1000 ACT UP members joined the 'Storm the NIH' protest for AIDS healthcare.
AIDS protesters hold flares and signs during a raucous demonstration at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., on May 21, 1990. (Bob Daugherty/AP)
October 30, 2025 at 5:54 PM
transnews.network
In 2020, the margin of the three swing states that allowed Biden to defeat Trump was smaller than the number of trans people in each of those states.

That doesn't even include the countless cis queer allies and family members voting in favor of trans people.

So no, you can't abandon trans people.
Georgia 0.2% margin Arizona 0.3% margin Wisconsin 0.7% margin
October 28, 2025 at 9:06 AM
transnews.network
Many of these colleges are implementing the racist and transphobic DOJ memo that defines trans people out of existence, a massive insult and infringement on basic rights aimed at the significant trans populations at the universities.

www.justice.gov/ag/media/140...
While compelled segregation is generally impermissible, failing to maintain sex-separated athletic competitions and intimate spaces can also violate federal law. Federally funded institutions that allow males, including those self-identifying as "women," to access single-sex spaces designed for females-such as bathrooms, showers, locker rooms, or dormitories-undermine the privacy, safety, and equal opportunity of women and girls. Likewise, permitting males to compete in women's athletic events almost invariably denies women equal opportunity by eroding competitive fairness. These policies risk creating a hostile environment under Title VII, particularly where they compromise women's privacy safety, or professional standing, and can violate Title IX by denying women access to the full scope of sex-based protections in education. To ensure compliance with federal law and to safeguard the rights of women and girls, organizations should affirm sex-based boundaries rooted in biological differences.
October 22, 2025 at 11:47 PM
transnews.network
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October 14, 2025 at 12:15 AM
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(also give us money if you would like us to keep doing reporting like this :3)

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August 13, 2025 at 3:39 PM