This month, I’ve been so focused on self-care, revving myself up for new marketing efforts for this newsletter in May and June. Slowly, piece by piece, I’m rebuilding habits and routines that absolutely crumbled in 2020. I’ve been spending more time in silence, putting more effort into movement. At home, we spent several long weeks worried about water and the possibility of having to move, but last night, finally, after two months without, we heard the glorious sound of our cistern filling.
Amidst the many horrors, persisting and resisting also means nourishing. My partner and I are headed to Zipolite at the end of the month for our 17th anniversary — my favorite place on earth, and the reason I moved to Mexico in the first place. We haven’t been since 2019. Seventeen years together feels worth marking on the coast that made this life possible.
Closer to home, the conversations about leaving the US is spreading. Cis people in my vicinity are asking me about trans people fleeing and moving here. Trans people in my life are sending others my way to chat about the possibilities for relocating. My friend Ami is in Mexico City right now, having left the US with only a few hundred dollars in savings to find a place here where he can live and thrive. He's fundraising on GoFundMe to cover the landing — rent, food, travel, healthcare, the thousands of other small costs of starting over somewhere new. If you can spare a few dollars to help him, please share to get him back on his feet.
Federal Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai permanently blocked RFK Jr.'s declaration that gender-affirming care for minors is "neither safe nor effective," writing that "unserious leaders are unsafe" and that Kennedy exceeded his authority and caused "very real harm to very real people." The Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments over whether Children's Hospital Colorado can be forced to resume trans youth care, while families in Wisconsin rallied at the state capitol demanding UW Health do the same. Mother Jones traced the policy infrastructure behind the closures of clinic and hospital programs to Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir and his ties to SEGM. STAT News reported that trans adults in Georgia are being swept up in youth care restrictions as access shrinks across the board.
California's Assembly advanced AB 1930, which would require providers to notify the attorney general before complying with federal subpoenas seeking gender-affirming care records, while Tennessee's Senate advanced SB676, a bill requiring clinics and insurers to compile detailed data on trans patients' prescriptions and treatment timelines, creating a “de facto registry.” The Montana Supreme Court issued a landmark 5-2 ruling declaring transgender discrimination is sex discrimination. Assigned Media reported on squalid conditions at Ace's Place, New York City's trans-focused shelter, while WUNC published a three-part investigation on Black trans women documenting sexual assault and punitive solitary confinement across North Carolina's men's prisons.
Internationally, India's president signed the Transgender Persons Amendment Bill, 2026, stripping self-identification and adding a new offense punishable by up to life in prison for "forcing" someone to assume a transgender identity, while a Mexican court delivered a landmark conviction for the attempted transfemicide of trans activist Natalia Lane — the first time a sex worker obtained a femicide conviction in Mexico while still alive. South Africa's only state gender-affirming surgery clinic can serve just four surgical patients a year against ten new monthly referrals, with waiting times projected at 20 to 30 years, and MambaOnline's March rights watch documented the murder of queer Hammanskraal resident Tshepang Phokobye, a Grindr-gang robbery in Johannesburg, and a delayed "corrective rape" trial in the Eastern Cape.
Learn about the HRT underground. However you feel about DIY HRT, it is the only way some trans people survive in this world, and you should understand it so you can adequately treat patients who are accessing it. Lucy in Naarm reports that HRTCafe.net went dark last month after the anti-DEI group Do No Harm pressured the FDA, but argues the underground pharmacies supplying trans women with estrogen have financial incentives far beyond HRT to stay operational.
Gender-Affirming Hormone Cycling: Can You Feel More Like a Woman? — Amethysta Herrick, Ph.D. makes the case for HRT cycling protocols that simulate natural hormonal rhythms — exploring whether mimicking cyclical estrogen and progesterone patterns could accelerate feminization and offer trans women more of the physiological experience of cisgender womanhood.
Trans Victories at the State Level — An episode examining where trans rights advocates are actually winning at the state level, even as the federal picture deteriorates.
150 Homes in 10 Years: How the Foster Care System Fails Trans Kids — Uncloseted Media's Sam Donndelinger reports on Hayden Dawson, a 20-year-old nonbinary person who cycled through more than 150 foster homes from ages 8 to 18, roughly 80% of them non-affirming; the piece maps the patchwork of state protections (and non-protections) that leave trans foster youth dependent on the luck of placement.
Post-Op Vaginal Biology — A personal essay from writer and researcher Rachel Saunders exploring the biological realities of post-vaginoplasty anatomy.
Unpacking the Manosphere's Secret Obsession with Trans Women — A trans woman writer for Prism & Pen reflects on being algorithmically fed both red-pill content and queer media simultaneously, using that vantage point to analyze why pre-op trans women occupy a particular fixation in manosphere spaces.
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I am so excited to share this month’s Buy the Book column. This book not only made me cry with hope for a better future but also gave me several ideas for reported features, and I’m very excited to bring them to you in the coming months.
Stay tuned for pieces unpacking trans medication "noncompliance," the shared playbook behind "social contagion" and "drug-seeking" rhetoric, how medicine codes queer and trans identities as risk factors rather than vulnerabilities, and the uneasy analogy between medical and sexual consent.
Weekend Column
Take care of yourselves this week. Rest when you can, reach out when you need to, and find something that nourishes you. I'll see you back here next Monday.
BJ Ferguson
Founder, Well Beings News
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