Friday, February 13

Center Aging Monthly Luncheon With Yoga will be at noon at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. Email Mac at [email protected] if you require ASL interpreter assistance, have any dietary restrictions, or questions about this event.

Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Happy Hour Meetup” at 7 p.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar and Restaurant. This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite. 

Women in their Twenties and Thirties will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a social discussion group for queer women in the D.C. area. For more details, visit the group on Facebook. 

Saturday, February 14

Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation.  Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.

The DC Center for the LGBT Community will host a screening of “Love and Pride” at 1:30 p.m. This event is a joy-filled global streaming celebration honoring queer courage, Pride, and the power of love. It’s a bold celebration of courage and community — a fearless reminder of what we’ve overcome, how love is what makes us unstoppable, and how we have always turned fear into fierce. For more details, visit the Center’s website. 

Sunday, February 15

LGBTQ+ Community Coffee and Conversation will be at 12 p.m. at As You Are. This event is for people looking to make more friends and meaningful connections in the LGBTQ community. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite. 

Monday, February 16

Queer Book Club will be at 7:00p.m. on Zoom. This month’s read is “Faebound” by Saara El-Arifi. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website. 

“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).

Tuesday, February 17

Center Bi+ Roundtable will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is an opportunity for people to gather in order to discuss issues related to bisexuality or as Bi individuals in a private setting.Visit Facebook or Meetup for more information.

Wednesday, February 18

Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.

Thursday, February 19

The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. To be fair with who is receiving boxes, the program is moving to a lottery system. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245. 

Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.  

The Council for Global Equality and Physicians for Human Rights have filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department for PEPFAR-related data and documents.

The groups, which Democracy Forward represents, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday.

Then-President George W. Bush in 2003 signed legislation that created PEPFAR. UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima last March said PEPFAR has saved 26 million lives around the world.

The Trump-Vance administration in January 2025 froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for at least 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later issued a waiver that allowed PEPFAR and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the freeze.

The Washington Blade has previously reported PEPFAR-funded programs in Kenya and other African countries have been forced to suspend services and even shut down because of gaps in U.S. funding. HIV/AIDS activists have also sharply criticized the Trump-Vance administration over reported plans it will not fully fund PEPFAR in the current fiscal year.

The lawsuit notes the Council for Global Equality and Physicians for Human Rights have “filed several FOIA requests” with the State Department for PEPFAR-related data and documents. The groups filed their most recent request on Jan. 30.

“On Jan. 30, 2026, plaintiffs, through counsel, sent State a letter asking it to commit to prompt production of the requested records,” reads the lawsuit. “State responded that the request was being processed but did not commit to any timeline for production.”

“Plaintiffs have received no subsequent communication from State regarding this FOIA request,” it notes.

“Transparency and inclusion have been hallmarks of PEPFAR’s success in the last decade,” said Beirne Roose-Snyder, a senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality, in a press release that announced the lawsuit. “This unprecedented withholding of data, and concurrent ideological misdirection of foreign assistance to exclude LGBTQI+ people and others who need inclusive programming, has potentially devastating and asymmetrical impacts on already marginalized communities.”

“This data is vital to understanding who’s getting access to care and who’s being left behind,” added Roose-Snyder.

“We filed this lawsuit to seek transparency: the administration’s PEPFAR data blackout withholds information the public, health providers, and affected communities need to track the HIV epidemic and prevent avoidable illness and death, obscuring the true human cost of these policy decisions,” said Physicians for Human Rights Research, Legal, and Advocacy Director Payal Shah.

The State Department has yet to respond to the Blade’s request for comment on the lawsuit.

The United States and the world are waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down its decisions in two cases (Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ) that would rule on whether young trans women can play women’s sports at their schools. As trans journalist Erin Reed explained, these two cases are not just about transgender sports. These cases are litmus tests for trans rights at the nation’s highest courts and will have wide-reaching implications for the rights of trans and nonbinary people in the United States.

And these cases will impact cis women. As Orien Rummler reported for the 19th and them, anti-trans legislation and rulings threaten the rights of all women, especially cis women of color. The best example is the allegations that woman boxer Imane Khelif faced at the last Paris Olympics.

The gender policing that Khelif faced shows how sports bans that police who are considered a man or woman legitimize and mandate invasive medical testing, a form of medical abuse, against all women and girls who want to play sports. And let’s be clear — there is historical precedence for this.

The Nazi regime did use genetic screening in order to police who could have children as part of their “racial hygiene” programs, including marriage partner hereditary testing that flagged anyone with “tainted” genetic lineages. While prisoners in concentration and detention camps were subjected to horrifying medical experimentation, Nazi officials experimented with their own followers, facilitating reproduction only among people with desirable characteristics — notably those with blonde hair and blue eyes — and sterilizing those with undesirable genetics.

In fact, trans and gender non-conforming people were some of the first targeted by Nazi violence, with one of the first book burnings occurring in 1933 when Nazi youth and members of the Sturmabteilung ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science and burned one of the largest libraries of medical texts about gender affirming care. Nazi officials first exerted control over gender before extending this to race and religion.

And this was not confined to Nazi Germany. As I’ve written about before, the United States has used eugenics to justify the forced sterilization of women of color, disabled women, poor women, and incarcerated women. Forced sterilization was one part of forced or coerced medical testing that targeted Black and Indigenous women.

This medical violence, along with non-consensual experimentation including Dr. James Marion Sim’s gynecological experimentation on enslaved Black women, was rooted in systemic racism and medical abuse, and has contributed to legacies of mistrust and health disparities in medical institutions and practitioners.

When sports organizations, like the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, require women to undergo “sex verification,” they set a precedent of forced genetic testing that violates everyone’s privacy and could very well exclude many cis women from sports if they fall outside the bounds of what is defined as a “woman.”

The best example is cis women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Some people with PCOS have hyperandrogenism, an excess of androgen, or experience hirsutism (i.e. the development of more traditionally masculine features like increased muscle mass and more pronounced facial hair.) Mandatory sex verification may diagnose or “out” women as intersex without their consent. Differences of Sex Development, another term used to describe intersex experiences, is more common than most people would expect.

Would women with PCOS not be considered women? What about women with more pronounced facial hair or greater muscle mass because of natural variation? It’s important to note what is considered American standards of womanhood are rooted in White supremacy — one of the reasons why women of color have been and will be targeted by anti-trans violence.

The very people making these decisions are also beginning to ask these questions. According to Erin in the Morning, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is even worried about the implications of these two Supreme Court decisions. As Alejandra Carabello, a Harvard Law educator, told Erin in the Morning, a decision supporting anti-trans sports bans “could result in the segregation of women in a host of other areas of public life under the rationale that biologically, men are different and they need to be segregated.”

Barrett, a conservative justice who was appointed by Trump in 2020, seems to acknowledge these risks, saying “your whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences.”

There is not. According to science, gender is not a strict binary but a spectrum determined by biological, psychological, and social factors, including cultural norms surrounding gender.

The best indication of this is that intersex people exist. Intersex people are individuals born with sex hormones and characteristics that differ from a strict male to female binary. Some people are born with atypical genitalia, specifically external genitals that don’t look male or female or are underdeveloped. Some are born with phallia, a condition where a baby is born without a penis, some born with a “mismatch” between their internal and external organs.

In all of these cases, the idea of normal, mismatched and properly developed genitalia and bodily presentation is conditional upon a male and female binary reinforced by the medical establishment — and to be clear, this gender binary has hurt people. For decades, intersex babies have suffered medical abuse because doctors perform unnecessary surgeries to “fit” these children into a female/male binary. These medically nonessential surgeries performed on children who cannot consent are a form of medical assault.

To be clear, this is not the same as gender affirming care performed on consenting individuals who are receiving hormone therapy and surgery to align their gender presentation with their identity. As major medical and mental health organizers assert, gender-affirming care is medically necessary and lifesaving healthcare for trans and nonbinary people.

And the vast majority of children who are having gender affirming surgery are cis ones. A June 2024 study found that the vast majority of minors undergoing gender-affirming surgeries were cis children. This did not include intersex people who underwent surgery or people who received surgery for an illness or injury. About 97 percent of 150 cases where minors received gender affirming surgery in 2019 were chest reduction surgery performed on cis boys. This surgery is commonly performed on boys with gynecomastia, or develop enlarged breasts due to a hormone imbalance.

So for many, the decisions expected on these Supreme Court cases may seem confined to sports but in actuality, they have profound ramifications not only for cis women but also amid the growing escalation and legitimization of eugenics in the United States.

It’s no mistake that earlier this month, Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, president of the Lemkin Institute, stated that the U.S. is in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.” Dr. Gregory Santon, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, flags “a hardening of categories” surrounding gender in a “totalitarian” way.

Stanton argues that this is rooted in Nazi ideology’s surrounding gender — this same regime that killed many LGBTQIA individuals in the name of a natural “binary.” As Von Joeden-Forgey said, the queer community, alongside other “minority groups, tends to be a kind of canary in the coal mine.”

Even the fact that discussions of the trans sports ban foreground its potential implications for cis women (or that this is the primary concern voiced by Barrett) showcases whose bodies take priority. 

This framework reflects how members of the feminist movement have used and presently do use the movement to justify the very anti-trans exclusion that will harm them. Some call themselves trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs); these women believe that codifying and protecting trans women’s rights threatens the rights of cis women and have even partnered with some conservative groups because of their commitment to enforce what it means to be a “biological woman.” 

As history can show us, it’s exactly the opposite — first, feminism is rooted in equity for all people, all women, not just cis women. Because protecting trans women from medical violence like sex verification testing and challenging people and organizations that police who a woman is, protects all women.

Emma Cieslik is a museum worker and public historian.