Local
Reeves Center to host Capital Trans Pride
Progress, setbacks provide backdrop to annual event
The ninth annual Capital Trans Pride will take place at the Reeves Municipal Center in Northwest D.C. on May 17, 2015. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)
The ninth annual Capital Trans Pride will take place on Saturday at the Reeves Municipal Center in Northwest D.C.
A number of workshops on a variety of topics are scheduled to take place during the daylong event. These include legal name and gender changes, trans people living with HIV, access to health care and employment, incarceration, immigration and asylum and gender variant youth.
Participants are scheduled to march from the Reeves Center at the intersection of 14th and U Streets, N.W., to Dupont Circle at 4 p.m. in what organizers have described as a “Trans Visibility Walk.” An after party is slated to take place at the Gryphon on Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
The D.C. Center for the LGBT Community, Whitman-Walker Health, the D.C. Office of Human Rights, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, SMYAL, Kaiser Permanente and La Clinica del Pueblo are among the sponsors of this year’s event.
“Capital Trans Pride is an important part of the Pride celebration,” said Ryan Bos, executive director of the Capital Pride Alliance, in a press release. “D.C.’s transgender community is an integral component of the broader LGBTA community and we are committed to making sure that Capital Pride’s programming reflects inclusion and recognition of our transgender brothers and sisters.”
First held in 2006, this year’s Capital Trans Pride will take place against the backdrop of increased visibility of trans-specific issues at the local and national level.
D.C. Police Sgt. Jessica Hawkins in March became the first trans supervisor of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit. Then-D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray last October walked Casa Ruby CEO Ruby Corado down the aisle at her wedding.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter in February spoke favorably of allowing trans servicemembers to serve openly in the armed forces. Then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder late last year announced that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bans gender-based discrimination also includes gender identity.
The White House in March held a briefing that focused specifically on trans women of color, but serious challenges remain for this historically disadvantaged and marginalized group.
Lamia Beard of Norfolk, Va., is among the more than half a dozen trans women of color who have been reported killed across the country so far this year.
Hundreds of people in January marched through downtown Washington to honor Leelah Alcorn, a trans Ohio teenager who took her own life late last year on an interstate outside of Cincinnati. A D.C. judge in March sentenced a Maryland man to 56 months in prison after pleading guilty to assaulting a trans teenager at the Fort Totten Metro station last July.
District of Columbia
Mayor Bowser signs bill requiring insurers to cover PrEP
‘This is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS’
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on March 20 signed a bill approved by the D.C. Council that requires health insurance companies to cover the costs of HIV prevention or PrEP drugs for D.C. residents at risk for HIV infection.
Like all legislation approved by the Council and signed by the mayor, the bill, called the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act, was sent to Capitol Hill for a required 30-day congressional review period before it takes effect as D.C. law.
Gay D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) last year introduced the bill.
Insurance coverage for PrEP drugs has been provided through coverage standards included in the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. But AIDS advocacy organizations have called on states and D.C. to pass their own legislation requiring insurance coverage of PrEP as a safeguard in case federal policies are weakened or removed by the Trump administration, which has already reduced federal funding for HIV/AIDS-related programs.
Like legislation passed by other states, the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act requires insurers to cover all PrEP drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Studies have shown that PrEP drugs, which can be taken as pills or by injection just twice a year, are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.
“I think this is a win for our community,” Parker said after the D.C. Council voted unanimously to approve the bill on its first vote on the measure in February. “And this is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
District of Columbia
Blade editor to be inducted into D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame
Kevin Naff marks 24 years with publication this year
Longtime Washington Blade Editor Kevin Naff will be inducted into D.C.’s Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame in June, the group announced this week.
Hall of Fame honorees are chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter. Naff and two other inductees — Seth Borenstein, a Washington-based national science writer for the AP and Cheryl W. Thompson, an award-winning correspondent for National Public Radio — will be celebrated at the chapter’s Dateline Awards dinner on Tuesday, June 9, at the National Press Club. The dinner’s emcee will be Kojo Nnamdi, host of WAMU radio’s weekly “Politics Hour.”
“I am tremendously honored by this recognition,” Naff said. “I have spent a lifetime in the D.C. area learning from so many talented journalists and am humbled to be considered in their company. Thank you to SPJ and to all the LGBTQ pioneers who came before me who made this possible.”
Naff joined the Blade in 2002 after years in print and digital journalism. He worked as a financial reporter for Reuters in New York before moving to Baltimore in 1996 to launch the Baltimore Sun’s website. He spent four years at the Sun before leaving for an internet startup and later joining the mobile data group at Verizon Wireless working on the first generation of mobile apps.
He then moved to the Blade and has served as the publication’s longest-tenured editor. In 2023, Naff published his first book, “How We Won the War for LGBTQ Equality — And How Our Enemies Could Take It All Away.”
Previous Hall of Fame inductees include luminaries in journalism like Wolf Blitzer, Benjamin Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, and Edgar Allen Poe. The Blade’s senior news reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. was inducted in 2015.
Maryland
Supreme Court ruling against conversion therapy bans could affect Md. law
Then-Gov. Larry Hogan signed statute in 2018
By PAMELA WOOD, JOHN-JOHN WILLIAMS IV, and MADELEINE O’NEILL | The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ kids in Colorado, a ruling that also could apply to Maryland’s ban on the discredited practice.
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide whether it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court’s majority, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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