WPATH is a few weeks out, and I’m more excited about it every day. I’m especially looking forward to talking with the trans people presenting in Mexico City, and to getting a real feel for what care providers need right now, straight from the people doing the work. If you’d like to help get me there, the fundraiser is still open.

I’m also sitting with a question I can’t shake. As pressure mounts on providers of gender-affirming care to stop doing their jobs, I want to understand the experience of people who hold real power in their profession but are made to feel powerless by the systems in which they work. I asked on X for books, films, and articles about people making impossible choices about how to keep wielding power responsibly under that kind of coercion. If something comes to mind, or you just want to talk about your own experience with this, don’t hesitate to hit reply.

A federal rule barring states from using Medicaid and CHIP dollars for trans youth care took effect last Tuesday, as UPMC and NYU Langone sign DOJ settlements agreeing to end that care and pay the government millions. Oregon will keep covering roughly 600 young Oregon Health Plan members with state funds, but regulators have quietly paused oversight of the state’s landmark coverage mandate, saying that collecting claims data now could expose patients and providers to federal targeting.

Colorado’s Propositions 134 and 135, a school sports ban and a surgery ban for minors on the Nov. 3 ballot, would leave schools to verify students’ sex with no method specified. Washington’s I-638 would require every girl on a girls’ school team to have her sex medically verified by her own provider, with no word on who pays for a $1,310 chromosome test. Washington also settled with a religious couple represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, dropping its requirement that foster parents affirm the LGBTQ+ kids in their care.

Judge Ana Reyes ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to answer written questions about his anti-trans rhetoric in the military ban case, and warned that evasive answers could land him in a deposition.

San Francisco expanded doxy-PEP access beyond CDC guidance to cis women and others assigned female at birth with risk factors, as the city reported a 24% drop in syphilis cases in 2025.

NHS England’s own internal impact assessment warned that its new ward policy could mean delays and corridor care for trans patients, along with forced outing and people avoiding care altogether, which, as I mentioned in my intro, is clearly already happening. Good Law Project is heading to the Court of Appeal over the EHRC’s interim guidance on single-sex facilities, and is backing a separate challenge to the code of practice the NHS now cites.

In Berlin, state police raided Casa Kuà [in German], a Kreuzberg community center working to expand healthcare access for trans and nonbinary people, over alleged unsupervised hormone distribution, seizing medications as roughly 140 people rallied outside under the banner “Hormones for all” (in German). A member of a weekly transfem support group who arrived mid-raid described everyone inside being ID’d and held while police searched the space. Eyewitness reports suggest people were detained, but no arrests have been documented by journalists as of yet.

Human Rights Watch documented mass arrests and forced HIV testing in Senegal’s anti-LGBT crackdown, which has driven people into hiding and led a third of one Dakar doctor’s HIV patients to stop showing up for treatment. South Africa’s Eastern Cape began rolling out lenacapavir, the twice-yearly injectable PrEP, at selected public health facilities.

More than 50 Tasmanian doctors and health workers signed an open letter backing the Greens’ Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill 2026, rejecting opponents’ claims that it would constrain legitimate clinical care.

Talk to your neighbors — LGBTQ+ canvassers in Missouri have spent three years knocking doors to humanize trans people, and with Amendment 3 bundling an abortion ban with a permanent ban on youth gender-affirming care, they’re the only ones besides conservatives talking to voters about trans kids before Nov. 3.

Organize where you work — UAW Local 4121 at the University of Washington is bargaining for trans protections like free replacement ID badges after name changes and a transition fund, and is weighing a strike authorization vote against an administration organizers say wants “transgender” kept out of the contract entirely.