How SF became the heart of the trans rights movement
The big picture: SF is believed to be the first U.S. city to officially observe the commemorative month. It began doing so in 2021 after activist Jupiter Peraza led an effort to celebrate the city's rich history of trans pioneers.
Between the lines: While trans people in the U.S. continue to face disproportionately high rates of violence, suicidal ideation and homelessness, advocates say these realities do not define the community.
Catch up quick: August was designated Transgender History Month to honor the legacy of the Compton's Cafeteria Riot in August 1966, when a trans woman resisted police harassment by throwing a cup of coffee at an officer at Gene Compton's Cafeteria in the Tenderloin.
The move sparked a revolt, marking "the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment" in the country — years before the Stonewall Riots, historian Susan Stryker said in a 2015 episode of the "Code Switch" podcast.
Flashback: SF has also been the heart of several other pivotal moments in American trans history:
In 1965, the San Francisco Department of Public Health established the Center for Special Problems. Led by doctor Joel Fort and trans activist Wendy Kohler, the center provided mental health counseling and hormone prescriptions.
It also issued ID cards, signed by a public health doctor, that matched trans people's gender instead of their sex assigned at birth, allowing them to open bank accounts and seek employment in alignment with their identity, per Stryker's book"Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution."
Trans activists Jamison Green and Kiki Whitlock, among others, worked with San Francisco's Human Rights Commission to publish a landmark report in 1994 documenting human rights abuses against the trans community.
The investigation found that trans people faced significant barriers to obtaining medical and social services, securing stable employment and accessing rape crisis resources and homeless shelters.
The document served as the basis for a 1995 city ordinance banning discrimination against trans people.
Theresa Sparks made history in 2007 when she was elected president of the San Francisco Police Commission, becoming the first openly trans city department head as well as the highest-ranking trans official.
In 2017, three Black trans women — Honey Mahogany, Janetta Johnson and Aria Sa'id — founded Compton's Transgender Cultural District, now known as The Transgender District, the first of its kind in the world, KQED reports.
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Boston Globe
21 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Claiming to fight waste, Trump administration slashes potentially cost-saving research
Harvard researchers had spent five years and some $3.8 million from the National Institutes of Health trying to answer this question when Mueller heard that the study might never yield results. In May, amid a feud with the university, the Trump administration abruptly terminated the grant that was funding it with one year and some $734,000 still to go. Without that time and money, pulmonologist Mary Berlik Rice and her team couldn't collect the final bits of data or analyze what they'd found. The clinical trial needed outcomes from a minimum number of participants to be able to conclude anything with any statistical significance. Advertisement 'It's a waste,' said Mueller — of taxpayer money, of everyone's time, of blood and tissue samples. N. Mueller sat beside the air purifier he was loaned as part of the study, which may or may not be functional. Lucy Lu for STAT That alone might seem to conflict with President Trump's stated goal of fighting 'waste, fraud, and abuse.' But scientists and participants like Mueller see another irony. The entire premise of this sort of study is that it might curb future waste. Advertisement It's a pillar of public health: Healthier people cost less. Figure out what could keep them well, and the government money spent on the discovery may well be dwarfed by the amount saved in hospitalizations and prescriptions averted. One of the most famous examples involves central venous catheters, thin tubes that intensive care doctors put into a patient's neck, chest, or groin to give fluids and medications or to draw blood. Those lines allow access to the bloodstream — but also pose an infection risk, creating a conduit that bacteria can take from the outside world into the veins. Such complications were both scary and common. In the early 2000s, they killed some 28,000 American ICU patients and cost $2.3 billion dollars every year. But then in 2006, a paper came out showing that the infections were avoidable. Led by intensive care specialist Peter Pronovost, a team of researchers tried out a simple solution in Michigan hospitals, instituting a checklist of risk-reducing hacks. These included clinicians washing their hands before inserting central lines; cleaning the patient's skin with a disinfectant called chlorhexidine; wearing sterile hair-coverings, masks, gowns, and gloves; using blood vessels in the neck or chest rather than the groin; and taking out catheters when they were no longer needed. Duh, you might say. But the infection rate fell dramatically. Within 18 months, it was near zero, and the intervention was estimated to have saved $100 million and 1,500 lives. 'I don't know how to describe how jaw-dropping this was,' said Leora Horwitz, a hospitalist in New York who studies how health care can be improved. 'This was like a shockwave of a paper.' Advertisement Pronovost says none of that could have happened without a grant of $500,000 a year for two years from a federal bureau called the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is dedicated to improving the delivery of medical care to patients and represents about 0.04 percent of the government's spending on health care. 'AHRQ pays for itself over and over again with studies like that,' said Horwitz. But the agency hasn't been spared in the Trump administration's slashing of federal research funding and the employees who administer it. Over a third of its employees were laid off in April, and the administration said it would be merged with another office within the Department of Health and Human Services. The effects of such cutbacks have been felt in the last few weeks. 'As a result of recent reduction in force at HHS, AHRQ's grants management staff were separated from Federal service on July 14, 2025,' one of the agency's directors wrote in an email to recipients of a grant for training new researchers, 'We are currently unable to process grant awards.' Signage for the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters was seen on April 2 in Washington, D.C. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Pronovost, now the chief quality and clinical transformation officer for the University Hospitals Cleveland, worries about the agency's decimation. His landmark 2006 paper can seem almost dull. It was partially about handwashing reminders and antiseptic usage. It was neither rocket science, nor a blockbuster drug. Nor, for that matter, does it sound like the 'edge science.' But it worked. When Pronovost sees package-delivery companies providing nearly flawless services, he knows that doesn't happen by accident; it happens through a management system. Every time there's a breakdown in what's supposed to happen — a box falling off a conveyor belt, say — there's a notification and an action taken, and if an action isn't taken, then there's an escalation. That was how he helped reduce his hospitals' Medicare expenditures by around 30 percent in 2023, a model that might save estimated $250 billion if applied nationwide. Advertisement Duke University hematologist Charity Oyedeji is pursuing research into measuring and hopefully preventing the functional impairment of adults with sickle cell disease. It started when she noticed just how dramatically her patients' biological ages outstripped their chronological ones. A 50-year-old reported difficulty getting on and off the toilet. A 20-something told her it was hard to reach up and get cups from the cupboard. She wondered whether tailored-to-your-ability exercise programs that have been shown to reduce frailty in older adults might help these people, too. It could improve quality of life and save money at the same time. 'We're trying to intervene early so we can improve their health span,' said Oyedeji, who was speaking in her personal capacity and not on behalf of her employer. 'We want to increase the number of good years that they have.' Oyedeji was in the second year of five — and had spent $300,000 of the $750,000 the NIH had allotted her — when her grant was terminated in June, years before she'd be able to reach any helpful conclusions. When asked about the cancellation of Oyedeji's grant, an HHS spokesperson wrote that the study has 'value,' but that 'it was funded under an inappropriate and ideologically driven — rather than scientifically driven — DEI program under the Biden administration.' Advertisement Researchers don't want to see their work — and participants' time — go to waste. Rice, the Harvard pulmonologist, has been able to scrape together enough money from the university to answer only a third of the questions that the NIH funded her to address. Spending $3.8 million to study how air purifiers could improve a specific type of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease might sound like a lot — and yet the illness itself costs some $24 billion a year in the US, which includes $11.9 billion in prescription drug expenses and $6.3 billion in hospital stays. 'We're throwing a lot of drugs at this,' said Rice, 'but I've found in my prior work that this group is especially susceptible to air pollution, and that led me to propose this trial to see if we could prevent some of the noxious exposures that trigger this severe disease.' To Mueller, 65, the idea made sense. Regular oil changes are ultimately cheaper than needing to get your engine replaced. He didn't want his breathing to worsen if he could help it, but that wasn't why he'd signed up for this trial. He hoped that by giving his time and nasal tissue, the benefits might be multiplied, spread out among others with the same disease, such that the scarring in their lungs could be held at bay. Of course, there might not be any benefit. That was the whole point, the reason for the trial, for the $3.8 million and five years of work. The researchers would only know at the end — if there was an end.
Newsweek
3 hours ago
- Newsweek
Laura Loomer Blasts Return of FDA Vaccine Chief She Helped Force Out
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Laura Loomer has reacted with anger after a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine chief she criticized returned to the agency. Writing on X, formerly Twitter, the conservative commentator slammed President Donald Trump's administration for rehiring Dr. Vinay Prasad two weeks after he resigned from his role leading the FDA's vaccines and gene therapy division. Why It Matters Loomer is an influential figure in right-wing circles. She was present alongside Trump on the 2024 campaign trail, and she has been tied to his decision to fire National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and other aides, although the president has denied that she was the reason for the sackings. Prasad used to work for the University of California, San Francisco. He has also previously worked at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. Laura Loomer outside the U.S. Capitol on June 12, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Laura Loomer outside the U.S. Capitol on June 12, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images What To Know Prasad, a physician who was first appointed to the role in May, left the FDA on July 30 following pressure from Loomer and other political influencers. Prasad had faced backlash over the agency's handling of a gene therapy linked to the deaths of two teenagers and his decision not to approve certain drugs. Loomer had also repeatedly claimed Prasad was liberal and said he was anti-Trump. "How did this Trump-hating Bernie [Sanders] Bro get into the Trump admin???" Loomer posted on X in July. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary had defended Prasad, who was a critic of vaccine and mask mandates, prior to his resignation. After it was reported he would return, writing on X, Loomer called the decision to rehire Prasad "egregious." She also indicated she would launch critiques of other figures, saying she "will be ramping up my exposés of officials within the HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] and FDA so the American people can see more of the pay for play rot themselves and how rabid Trump haters continue to be hired in the Trump administration." NEW: In another egregious personnel decision under the Trump administration, it is now being reported that longtime progressive Marxist Vinay Prasad who referred to President Trump's supporters as criminals and compared them to drug addicts after saying he stabbed a Trump voodoo… — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) August 9, 2025 What People Are Saying Department Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement to Reuters: "At the FDA's request, Dr. Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research." When he resigned, Prasad said he "did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA" and had "decided to return to California and spend more time with his family." What Happens Next As Trump's presidency continues, it is likely that there will be further personnel changes in government departments.
Vox
5 hours ago
- Vox
Can't commit to vegetarianism but want animals to suffer less? You've got options.
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It's based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I typically eat vegetarian, and have considered going fully vegan out of concern for animal welfare. But lately my on-again, off-again gastrointestinal problems have been acting up, and I've had to go back on a more restricted diet to manage my symptoms — no spice, no garlic or onions, nothing acidic, and nothing caffeinated. Sticking to a 'bland' diet is hard enough, but doing so while vegetarian is very difficult when things like tomatoes and onions and grapefruits are off the table. I know a lot of people with these issues eat fish or meat, and some medical professionals recommend drinking chicken bone broth to soothe flare-ups. I don't want to abandon my commitment to animal welfare while my gut sorts itself out, but my food options are limited right now. How should I approach this? Dear Would-Be Vegetarian, You're not alone in finding it hard to stick to a purely vegetarian diet. Only 5 percent of American adults say they're vegetarian or vegan. What's more, one study found that 84 percent of people who adopt those diets actually go back to eating meat at some point. And most of them aren't even dealing with the gastrointestinal problems you face. So, it speaks to the depth of your moral commitment that you're really wrestling with this. I'll have some concrete suggestions for you in a bit, but first I want to emphasize that how you approach the question of meat-eating will depend on your underlying moral theory. There's a classic split in moral philosophy between deontologists and utilitarians. A deontologist is someone who thinks an action is moral if it's fulfilling a duty — and we have universal duties like, 'always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.' From that perspective, killing an animal for food would be inherently morally wrong, because you're treating the animal as a means to an end. Meanwhile, a utilitarian is someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and behaving morally means producing the most happiness or well-being possible, or reducing the most suffering possible. Utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we should be reducing, and ideally eliminating, the suffering that animals endure at our hands. Deontologists and utilitarians are often pitted against each other, but they actually have one big thing in common: They both believe in a universal moral principle — whether it's 'always treat others as ends in themselves' or 'always maximize happiness.' A lot of people find that comforting, because it offers certainty about how we should act. Even if acting morally requires hard sacrifices, it's incredibly soothing to think 'If I just do X, then I'll know for sure that I'm being a good person!' But these moral theories assume that all the complexity of human life can be reduced to one tidy formula. Can it, really? Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! Another school of philosophy — pragmatism — says we should be skeptical of fixed moral principles. Human life is so complicated, with many different factors at play in any ethical dilemma, so we should be pluralistic about what makes outcomes valuable instead of acting like the only thing that matters is maximizing a single value (say, happiness). And human society is always evolving, so a moral idea that makes sense in one context may no longer make sense in a different context. To a pragmatist, moral truths are contingent, not universal and unchanging. I think one pragmatist who can really help you out is the University of Michigan's Elizabeth Anderson. In a 2005 essay applying pragmatism to the question of eating meat, the philosopher points out that for most of human history, we couldn't have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn't really exist on a mass scale until recently (although certain non-Western societies did ascribe moral worth to some animals). 'The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals (other than our pets),' Anderson writes, 'has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.' In other words, Anderson doesn't think there's some universal rule like 'eating animals is inherently morally wrong.' It's our social and technological circumstances that have made us more able than before to see animals as part of our moral circle. She also doesn't believe there's a single yardstick — like sentience or intelligence — by which we can judge how much of our moral concern an animal deserves. That's because moral evaluation isn't just about animals' intrinsic capacities, but also about their relationships to us. It matters whether we've made them dependent on us by domesticating them, say, or whether they live independently in the wild. It also matters whether they're fundamentally hostile to us. Killing bedbugs? Totally fine! They may be sentient, but, Anderson writes, 'We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests…would amount to surrender.' Anderson's point is not that animals' intelligence and sentience don't matter. It's that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive. With this pragmatic approach in mind, you can consider how to balance your concern for animal welfare with your concern for your own welfare. Instead of thinking in terms of a moral absolute that would force you into a 'purist' diet no matter the cost to you, you can consider a 'reducetarian' diet, which allows you to ease your own struggle while also taking care for animals seriously. The key thing to realize is that some types of animal consumption cause a lot less suffering than others. For one thing, if you're eating meat, try to buy the pasture-raised kind and not the kind that comes from factory farms — the huge industrialized facilities that supply 99 percent of America's meat. In these facilities, animals are tightly packed together and live under unbelievably harsh and unsanitary conditions. They're also often mutilated without pain relief: Think pigs being castrated, cows being dehorned, and hens being debeaked. Oh, and chickens have been bred to be so big that they're in constant pain; they live miserable lives from start to finish. A pasture-raised label doesn't mean an animal has been spared all of the harms of modern agriculture — it doesn't guarantee that pain relief is used for painful procedures, and farm animals across different production systems have been bred to maximize production, which can take a toll on their welfare. And of course they'll ultimately meet the same fate as those raised on factory farms — slaughter. But your goal here is to meaningfully reduce, not 100 percent eliminate, the harms. And at least pasture-raised animals have gotten to roam around in a field and engage in natural behaviors up until the end. It's a similar story for fish, by the way. More than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms, which are basically just underwater factory farms. Wild-caught fish is not perfect — slow, suffocating deaths are common — but it's better than farmed. The caveat here is that a lot of the welfare labels you'll see on animal products are basically a con. And some certification schemes have similar names, so you have to pay close attention. If you see the label 'Certified Humane,' that's genuinely higher-welfare — but don't mistake it for 'American Humane Certified,' which is really not. And be wary of putting much stock in labels like 'cage-free' or 'free-range.' They're better than nothing, but because the terms are often ill-defined and unenforced, they're not as meaningful as you might think. Here's a good guide to separating the real deal from the advertising spin. Another classic recommendation among animal welfare advocates is to eat bigger animals — in other words, go for beef rather than chicken. That's both because of how miserable chickens' lives are on factory farms and because, as Vox's Kelsey Piper has written, it just takes way more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are huge, producing about 500 pounds of beef apiece, while a chicken yields only a few pounds of meat. So, every year, the average American eats about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow. That said, cows take a heavier toll on the climate than chickens do, so you don't want to eat tons of beef either. The environment is also one of the key values at stake in our consumption choices, so that has to factor in, too. Of course, another possibility — to the extent that this works with your gastrointestinal issues — is to reach for low-fiber plant-based foods like tofu, seitan, and the smorgasbord of newer products now available (like Beyond and Impossible burgers). But assuming you're going to eat meat, it's a good idea to set some clear parameters and standards around your reducetarian diet. A lot of reducetarians — myself included — have fallen into the trap of saying, 'I'll reduce how much meat I eat,' but forgetting to quantify what that means. That can lead you to eat more meat than you'd intended. So it's probably better to commit to something like 'weekday vegetarian' or 'vegan before six' — you can check out the Reducetarian Foundation for suggestions. At the end of the day, remember that there's a plurality of values at stake here, and no one of them necessarily trumps all the others. If you feel that eating some meat is important for your well-being right now, and you try to do that in ways that keep suffering for animals to a minimum, I don't think you need to feel bad about that. That's because you won't be shirking your values: You'll be recognizing that your values are plural, and you're doing your best to balance between them. That may be the best any of us can really do. Bonus: What I'm reading The blogger Bentham's Bulldog recently published a piece titled ' How to cause less suffering while eating animals .' It contains some of the same recommendations I mentioned above, but the underlying ethical framework is different and it makes one recommendation I didn't: 'offsetting' your meat consumption by donating to highly effective animal charities . I worry that offsetting might create a moral hazard, as with people offsetting their carbon emissions and then potentially feeling free to fly more. But it's worth considering, particularly if you pair it with clear parameters around your reducetarian diet. This Aeon essay answers a question I've often wondered about: Why haven't other animals — say, birds — developed complex civilizations like we humans have? Why don't they build rocket ships, argue about economic policy, and play canasta? I'm grateful to the evolutionary biologist who wrote this piece for finally giving me a satisfying answer. I can't stop thinking about this post on how AI companies may have designed chatbots to play an underspecified 'helpful assistant' character who, due to being underspecified, looks to the internet for examples of how to play that role, finds tons of science fiction about cheesy robots, and thus starts to behave like a cheesy sci-fi robot (ChatGPT will say things like, 'Gee, that really tickles my circuits!'). This post is mega-long, deeply trippy, and worth reading.
