First Lieutenant Brian Femminella is that he looks exactly like the kind of soldier the Army has long celebrated. Square jaw. Close-cropped hair. Solid, muscular physique. The posture of someone accustomed to carrying weight over long distances and standing motionless during inspection. In photographs from the 82nd Airborne Division, the patch sits cleanly on his shoulder, and the silver wings on his chest mark him as a paratrooper, someone who has stepped out of military aircraft into open sky.
A three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit overturned the lower court's ruling in its judgment on the case, arguing that the military has a "rational basis" for maintaining medical standards within the US army. The judges wrote in the ruling: "In this case, the military has articulated its need to have fit service members who can fulfill its military mission without complications from medical conditions that could compromise deployment functions, contribute to conflicts with foreign nations during deployment, and add costs over those generally necessary to maintain fit service members."
Data on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) are essential for understanding the characteristics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations in the United States. However, on the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that declared it was official policy of the administration that transgender, nonbinary, and intersex identities would not be recognized by the federal government.
Under the guise of addressing a non-existent voter fraud problem, this bill would create onerous restrictions. The coalition wrote, warning the proposal would impose new financial and bureaucratic hurdles. They described the measure as a "21st-century poll tax."
In a ruling that reasserts broad judicial deference to the U.S. military and delivers a major setback to HIV and LGBTQ+ advocates, a federal appeals court on Wednesday reinstated the Pentagon's long-standing ban on people living with HIV enlisting in the armed forces, undoing a lower-court decision that had briefly opened the door to qualified recruits with undetectable viral loads.
"bring together youth of every race, religion, gender, ethnic background, and economic status in programs to develop character, citizenship, and fitness." "It is the philosophy of Scouting to welcome all eligible youth ... who are willing to accept Scouting's values and meet any other requirements of membership," the organization says on its website. "Prejudice, intolerance and unlawful discrimination are unacceptable within the ranks of Scouting America."
In 2026, the words "don't ask, don't tell" live in infamy, reminders of a discriminatory policy that has rightly been consigned to the dustbin of history. But when the policy was enacted, it was actually supposed to make life better for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people serving in the military. Here's how the policy came to be, how it affected service members, and how it was repealed.
Over half of LGBTQ+ workers (57.4 percent) with employers that ended or scaled back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reported experiencing stigma and bias at work. This stigma appears to be increasing in all areas, as 51.1 percent of queer adults report being less visible than last year, and 40.1 percent of LGBTQ+ parents with school-aged children report being less visible at schools.
An estimated 724,000 Americans in this age group identify as transgender, the institute notes. Of these, 382,800, 53 percent, live in one of the 29 states that has enacted one or more laws banning access to gender-affirming care, participation in sports, use of bathrooms and other sex-separated facilities, or gender affirmation through pronoun use. Thirty-six percent - 262,700 - live in one of the 16 states that has enacted all four such restrictions.
