LGBTQ

Commentary: Balancing safety and fairness with inclusivity in girls’ sports

Bidal Duran, Minnesota House 2A — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 11:50:00 GMT

The question of whether biological males should be allowed to compete in girls' sports has sparked a national debate.

Transgender advocates are calling for the inclusion of transgender women (biological males who transition to female) in women’s sports, while opponents argue that allowing biological males to compete against females in sports compromises fairness, creates safety concerns, and reduces opportunities for women.

This is a complex issue, but I believe there are compelling reasons why we must consider the distinct physical differences between men and women when it comes to athletic competition.

The most obvious argument against allowing biological males to compete in girls’ sports revolves around the undeniable physical advantages that males have over females. After puberty, men tend to have larger muscle mass, greater bone density, and more efficient cardiovascular systems, which contribute to superior strength, speed, and endurance.

Yes, hormone therapy can reduce testosterone levels, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully erase the physiological changes that occur during male puberty.

These biological factors provide a significant advantage in most sports, especially those that rely on speed, strength, and endurance. With this in mind, it’s hard to deny that allowing a transgender individual to compete in women’s sports creates an unlevel playing field where biological females are at a significant disadvantage.

Safety has become a top priority in every sport, and allowing biological males to compete against females puts female athletes at greater risk of injury.

It’s important to acknowledge that these concerns aren’t rooted in a desire to exclude but in ensuring that competition remains safe and fair for everyone who competes.

Another concern raised by those who oppose biological males in girls' sports is the potential loss of opportunities for biological females. For all athletes, high school and college sports are a critical part of athletic development and can even provide scholarship opportunities.

When male athletes compete in women’s events, they tend to dominate the competition, limiting the chances for female athletes to succeed, earn scholarships and receive recognition.

In many sports, even a small physical advantage can make the difference between winning and losing. This is especially true in track and field, swimming and powerlifting, where the differences in strength and endurance are highly impactful. This was highlighted by "JayCee Cooper v. USA Powerlifting" right here in Minnesota.

For many female athletes, the chance to compete at a high level is not just about achievement; it's about scholarships, career opportunities and the ability to pursue a passion they’ve dedicated their entire lives to.

When males are allowed to participate in these events, it limits those opportunities, and that’s a significant concern.

Title IX, a landmark federal law passed in 1972, was designed to ensure gender equality in education and school-associated athletic programs. Title IX opened doors for women in athletics by providing equal access and opportunities to compete.

Prior to Title IX, many schools and universities had minimal opportunities for female athletes, and women’s sports were underfunded and undervalued. Even today, professional women’s athletics are struggling to obtain the recognition and respect they deserve.

I believe that allowing biological males to compete in girls’ sports undermines the painstaking progress made under Title IX. The law was created to ensure that women’s sports would be given equal resources and recognition and that women would have the same chances to compete and succeed as men.

Introducing biological males into these competitions threatens the very principles that Title IX was intended to protect, as it reduces opportunities for women and girls who have worked tirelessly to level the playing field.

The goal should be to create a system that respects the rights of everyone while also preserving the same standard of competitive integrity and safety for female athletes that are afforded to male athletes. However, I feel this debate doesn’t have an easy answer that will satisfy everyone, and I think that’s something we may have to accept for the time being.

Some have proposed the creation of separate categories for transgender athletes or allowing transgender athletes to compete in leagues based on their gender identity, as long as they meet certain criteria, such as specific hormone levels.

This opens a whole new can of worms and ethical questions that are yet to be addressed.

At its core, sports should be about fairness and providing athletes with an opportunity to compete at the highest level.

For female athletes, that means respecting their right to compete on a level playing field.

As society moves toward greater inclusion, it’s important that we find workable solutions that don’t compromise the integrity and safety of women’s athletics.

Bidal Duran is a Republican from Bemidji representing Minnesota House 2A.]]>

NIH cuts funding for Minnesota research on vaccines, health equity

Dené K. Dryden — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:13:13 GMT

ROCHESTER — Some Minnesota researchers' grants from the National Institutes of Health were abruptly canceled last week.

"NIH notified us via an email that basically said, 'This project no longer reflects the priorities of NIH, and so funding is terminated immediately,' " said Michael Bronstein, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Bronstein's study on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among people with severe mental illness is one of at least 209 projects that had their NIH awards terminated since late February, via a list released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System.

The bulk of the terminated grants on the TAGGS list had to do with vaccine hesitancy, HIV, Black or Latino communities, and/or sex, gender and LGBTQ+ identities.

Nearly half of the terminated grants were connected to Columbia University in New York City. On the social media platform X, NIH said those cuts follow "directives from the Trump Administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism."

The terminations affect three projects at the University of Minnesota, including Bronstein's, and two projects at the HealthPartners Institute.

The list did not include any cuts to NIH funding related to Mayo Clinic research.

In addition to Bronstein's study, the canceled Minnesota grants focused on the COVID-19 vaccine and lactation, HPV vaccine promotion by dental providers, and disparities in parenting stress and well-being during the pandemic across gender, sexual identity, race and ethnicity.

Bronstein — a psychologist — and his team were one year into their four-year study, which he said was inspired by Minnesota's COVID-19 vaccine rollout in 2021, when certain vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, were prioritized for vaccine distribution. The vulnerable groups list did not include those with severe mental illness.

"We already knew that people with severe mental illness are about three times more likely to die from vaccine-preventable diseases like influenza or COVID-19," Bronstein said. "So, I wanted to do something about that."

Bronstein, two research assistants and a team of graduate students recruited participants into their study to see if different factors, such as prior experiences with the mental health care system, influenced people's willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

His lab received $187,261 in 2024, per the project's NIH page. But on March 10, NIH canceled the award.

"This is already after investment of taxpayer money," Bronstein said, "already after investment of a significant amount of time on behalf of my staff and myself, and time for our participants, who trusted us to talk about their mental health experiences."

Now, Bronstein and his team are in the process of applying for new funding to support this project — and to keep their staff and students employed.

"That's been quite a scramble," he said. "And then just trying to reassure my employees that, 'Hey, we're going to do everything we can to ensure the longevity of this group and to ensure that this research still continues.' "

In addition to the NIH email's reasoning that Bronstein's project no longer reflected the agency's priorities, Bronstein said it also claimed the project would not "benefit the American people or their well-being," which Bronstein said is "quite disrespectful of people who will and have lost loved ones to vaccine-preventable diseases."

"(That) part is blatantly and factually incorrect and directly contradicts what our expert reviewers said about the project," he said.

An appeals process exists for terminated NIH grants, Bronstein said, but he expects that process to be difficult, as "they've decided to de-prioritize this work and their initial email indicates that they don't actually care about the facts related to the work."

In a statement, HealthPartners told the Post Bulletin it is not participating in interviews on this topic at this time. The Post Bulletin reached out to the University of Minnesota and the NIH but did not receive responses.

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Two Minnesota women escaped prison and hid for months as ‘husband and wife’

Tracy Briggs — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:36:00 GMT

SHAKOPEE, Minn. — They didn’t hit the road in a convertible and most likely didn’t pick up a charming drifter who looked like Brad Pitt. Nonetheless, Edna Larrabee and Beulah Brunelle might be the closest thing Minnesota has ever had to Thelma and Louise.

The two women were the bane of existence for law enforcement authorities in the 1940s.

Between 1946 and 1949, the pair broke out of Minnesota’s Shakopee State Reformatory for Women not once, not twice, but five times.

Most of their flights to freedom ended within days, but their fourth attempt was the charm — a cross-country adventure during which they evaded law enforcement for eight months by posing as husband and wife.

Edna and Beulah

Getting the lowdown on Edna Larrabee isn’t easy. Searches on Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com proved challenging. A prison record from Washington State spells out her many aliases, including Edna Larrabee, Edna Schoenborn, Lee Myers and Gail Norcross. However, it seems pretty certain that Edna Larrabee was born in Peever, South Dakota, in 1921.

After two years of high school, she married Elmer Schoenborn in Mahnomen, Minnesota. He was 24, and she was 18.

The marriage was short-lived. Edna had plans for another kind of life.

Following her divorce, her life of crime began. At 19, she and an accomplice stole a car in Perham, Minnesota, and were later arrested in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Larrabee was also convicted of grand larceny for writing bad checks.

During her first prison stint, from 1940 to 1942, she gained notoriety for her “boyish mannerisms” and relationships with other inmates.

In a paper titled “Homosexuality at the Shakopee State Reformatory for Women and St. Peter State Hospital,” researcher Lizzie Ehrenhalt and writer Sarah Pawlicki concluded: “Edna could be a thorn in the side of the reformatory staff. One frustrated staff member wrote that Edna was a ‘spoiled brat’ decidedly willful who has grown up with the idea that she is ‘different’ therefore is answerable to no laws, no authority and will continue in this way, taking every advantage possible as long as she can get by with it.”

Larrabee was also resentful because she believed the parole board paid too much attention to her "tomboy" tendencies and not whether she might be a successful parolee.

When she was sentenced again in 1946, Larrabee, now 25, met Beulah Brunelle, a 20-year-old Ojibwe woman from Belcourt, North Dakota, who was serving time for stealing clothes, shoes and a ring. The two women quickly became partners in crime who refused to stay behind bars.

Breaking free (again and again)

Together, they staged three failed escapes. In their first attempt Nov. 18, 1946, they were joined by a 20-year-old prisoner named Virginia DeRosier. According to newspaper reports, they were captured just two days later in Minneapolis.

They told law enforcement officials they escaped from Shakopee because there wasn’t enough recreation at the reformatory and they didn’t like that they were only allowed to smoke two cigarettes a day.

In January 1947, Brunelle and Larrabee tried again. Larrabee was eventually caught in Minneapolis and Brunelle in Chicago. They were recommitted to the Shakopee reformatory.

In November 1948, they escaped a third time, slipping out of the reformatory’s religion class and out a restroom window. They were captured again in Des Moines, where they posed as a married couple.

After the botched attempt in 1948 left Larrabee in despair, she tried — unsuccessfully — to take her own life. When that didn’t work, she took out her frustration on the prison, flooding her cell and smashing a window. Her rebellion landed her in St. Peter State Hospital for electroshock therapy and psychiatric evaluation.

That hospital stint only strengthened her resolve. Her fourth escape with Brunelle launched them into a fugitive road trip straight out of a Hollywood action film.

On Feb. 2, 1949, Larrabee and Brunelle donned overalls and farm jackets, pried open a nailed-shut basement window, and disappeared into the night. They hit the road under new identities — Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Farrell.

On the run

Shakopee’s superintendent, Clara Thune, had a hunch that the pair was headed to California, either the northern or southern part of the state.

Historian Ehrenhalt noted in a Minnesota Historical Society publication, “MNopedia,” that during World War II, Larrabee had worked as an arc welder in San Francisco, and Thune stated that Larrabee was “acquainted with the colony of homo sexuals [sic] in Los Angeles” and could show up there as well.

Thune reached out to law enforcement officials from San Diego to San Francisco. But the pair threw authorities off the scent, heading first to Sacramento, where Larrabee’s sister sheltered them. From there, they drifted to Seattle, where they settled for a while, Larrabee running a gas station, Brunelle sewing in a dress shop.

It could have been their happily ever after, but visiting an old friend in Minneapolis spelled their downfall. The friend tipped off police, who traced their black 1936 Plymouth coupe — hubcap missing — to Sioux City, Iowa. On Oct. 3, 1949, their road trip ended abruptly as officers swooped in, sending them back to Shakopee.

A final bid for freedom

They gave it one last shot later that year, but their fifth escape was short-lived. After being recaptured once more, they finally resigned themselves to finishing their sentences. By 1952, they were both paroled and heading in different directions — Larrabee to Washington, Brunelle to Minnesota, where she married a man named George Venne.

But their story didn’t entirely end there. In 1953, Brunelle made one final, defiant move — leaving her husband behind in St. Paul and driving more than 1,600 miles to Seattle, where she and Larrabee found each other once again.

Records indicate that the couple lived together there and later in Minneapolis.

It’s difficult to tell whether Larrabee and Brunelle stayed together after the 1950s. They couldn’t be legally married, and detailed census records after 1950 are not readily available online. (According to the National Archives, 1960 Census records will not be released until 2032.)

However, several newspaper stories throughout the 1960s show Larrabee once again running afoul of the law on charges of writing bad checks. Records indicate Larrabee died in 1995, while Brunelle appears to have survived well into the 21st century.

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Minnesota hospitals still offering gender-affirming care amid federal challenges

Dené K. Dryden — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMT

ROCHESTER — As a handful of U.S. hospitals suspend certain medical services for transgender youth following an executive order on gender-affirming care, Minnesota hospitals appear to be staying the course.

The Jan. 28 executive order by President Donald Trump states that "it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist or support" gender-affirming care for minors. The order is being challenged by a federal lawsuit.

Dr. Asa Radix, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, responded to the executive order in a statement, saying "policies that restrict or ban access to necessary medical care for transgender youth are harmful to patients and their families."

Last week, hospitals in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Colorado announced that they had suspended some gender-affirming care services for patients age 19 and younger, the Associated Press reported. Some child patients at NYU Langone Health in New York City had their gender-affirming care appointments canceled, the New York Times reported, prompting New York Attorney General Letitia James to warn hospitals that refusing that service could break state anti-discrimination law.

In Minnesota, multiple hospitals confirmed that they are still offering gender-affirming care, and no hospitals in the state have publicly announced any cuts or pauses that would affect transgender-specific medical services.

Gender-affirming care is an umbrella term for various medical treatments for transgender and nonbinary individuals. Gender-affirming care can include puberty-blocking medications, psychotherapy, testosterone or estrogen hormone therapy and plastic surgery. Surgeries are rarely performed on transgender minors.

In 2023, in response to a wave of anti-transgender legislation across U.S. states, Minnesota passed new laws that protect access to abortion and gender-affirming care. As a "trans refuge" state, Minnesota law shields trans youth, their guardians and their medical providers against legal actions by states that restrict or ban gender-affirming care for minors.

The majority of health systems in Minnesota that offer gender-affirming care — for youth, adults or both — are clustered in the Twin Cities metro. Two exceptions are Mayo Clinic in Rochester and Essentia Health in Duluth.

Mayo Clinic did not respond to the Post Bulletin's request for comment.

There are no changes to gender-affirming care services at Essentia at this time, a spokesperson said.

Spokespeople for M Health Fairview, Allina Health and Children's Minnesota told the Post Bulletin that services at those health systems have not changed. Children's Minnesota specified that it does not offer gender-affirming surgeries.

Likewise, North Memorial Health said in a written statement that it "is not planning any changes to its gender-affirming care approach at this time."

"Access to gender-affirming care hasn’t changed at Hennepin Healthcare," that health system said in a statement to the Post Bulletin. "As Minnesota’s largest public safety net hospital and healthcare system, we remain committed to serving anyone seeking care."

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Two Spirit Advocacy opens in McKenzie Place complex

Daltyn Lofstrom — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:37:15 GMT

BEMIDJI — While the nature of his work transcends brick and mortar, Leech Lake Band member Arnold Dahl-Wooley has long sought a physical location dedicated to LGBTQ2S+ advocacy.

After years of dreaming, his vision would be realized as Two Spirit Advocacy.

The new facility, located at 802 Paul Bunyan Drive in Suite 16 of Bemidji’s McKenzie Place complex, was commemorated with a grand opening with honored guests on Friday evening as well as an open house on Saturday.

The space aims to provide outreach, resources and social groups for the area’s LGBTQ2S+ community and its allies.

“We’re about suicide prevention, anti-bullying and cultural inclusion,” Dahl-Wooley said. “This is the first of its kind in the area, which is groundbreaking.”

Dahl-Wooley previously held support groups at various facilities including the Mewinzha Ondaadiziike Wiigaming — a Native American, female-led nonprofit organization focused on health and wellness — which is also housed in the McKenzie Place complex.

Mewinzha’s Natalie Nicholson, who serves as a family nurse practitioner, has known Dahl-Wooley through martial arts, as the pair both earned their black belts at the same dojo.

“So we became friends,” Dahl-Wooley added, “and she also knew what I have been doing for years with my public speaking. She’s seen my presentations about outreach, intervention and cultural inclusivity, and she goes, ‘Do you want to have your social groups at our facility in Mewinzha?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Their connection would pave the way for Two Spirit Advocacy to open its doors in one of Mewinzha’s former suites. Nicholson expressed appreciation for the work done by Dahl-Wooley and his husband, Matthew.

“We’re happy to have you guys be a part of our organization and that you’ve dedicated this space and worked so hard to put it together to meet the needs of our community,” Nicholson said during Friday’s grand opening. “We’re proud that you’ll lead in terms of Two Spirit advocacy, and we’re proud of the work that you guys do from your heart and your passion.”

‘I am not politics’

While humble in size, Two Spirit Advocacy includes a wealth of resources and character. An inclusive library contains books representing those in the LGBTQ2S+ community and people of color. A “Wall of Fame” displays photographs and biographies of LGBTQ2S+ celebrities and politicians.

“A lot of people may say ‘Where are the LGBTQ2S+ people? Is there anybody on television or anywhere else?’ ” Dahl-Wooley said, “so we have a wall of fame, just a small glimpse that we’re everywhere.”

As one of the guests taking in their surroundings, White Earth member Jan Syverson serves as a tribal liaison for Mahube-Otwa, an organization that aims to eradicate poverty throughout northwest Minnesota.

“When I was a teenager, we didn’t have this kind of stuff,” Syverson said. “We weren’t celebrated. We weren’t talked about, so a lot of shame builds up around these kinds of things. … It just warms my heart to have something like Two Spirit Advocacy.”

Along with dispelling stigma, Dahl-Wooley aims to address politicization of the LGBTQ2S+ community through Two Spirit Advocacy.

“People try to make this some political aspect when it’s not. We exist,” he said. “I am not politics.”

Dahl-Wooley expanded on Matthew’s support and contributions to Two Spirit Advocacy’s opening as well as its future success, which may include expansion.

“One person can’t do this by themselves. It does take a community, and Matthew’s the best part of my community,” he said. “A few years down the road, we’ll see if expansion will be needed. Right now, I’m just ecstatic that we have a space.”

More information can be found on the “Two Spirit Celebration” Facebook page.

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Here's Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's record on health care

Dené K. Dryden — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 13:44:10 GMT

ROCHESTER — From Fargo to Duluth to southern Minnesota, where current governor and now vice presidential candidate Tim Walz got his start in politics, health care is big business. But what is Walz's record on health care-related matters?

As Minnesota's governor since 2019, Walz has advanced many DFL initiatives, from providing free lunches in public schools to legalizing recreational cannabis use. He also oversaw the state's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

In his first speech after being sworn in as governor, Walz spoke about health care access and affordability as priority items for his administration.

"We must also reaffirm our Minnesotan value that health care is a basic human right," Walz said in January 2019. "As Minnesotans, we can figure out how to deliver health care more effectively, more affordably and with better results."

As Walz rises to the national stage as the potential future vice president, here's a look at his record on health care policy.

Abortion access

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2022 ruling that overturned the federal right to abortion, Walz issued an executive order protecting the right to abortion services in Minnesota, particularly for patients traveling from other states, such as North Dakota and South Dakota, which restricted or banned access to abortion care.

Abortion is legal under the Minnesota Constitution, but in January 2023, Walz signed a bill that codified abortion access into law.

"Today, we are delivering on our promise to put up a firewall against efforts to reverse reproductive freedom," Walz said in a statement at the time. "No matter who sits on the Minnesota Supreme Court, this legislation will ensure Minnesotans have access to reproductive health care for generations to come."

In April 2023, Walz signed the Reproductive Freedom Defense Act, which protects out-of-state patients and abortion providers from legal and criminal repercussions from other states — turning the protections laid out in his executive order into state law.

That spring, Walz also signed legislation that ended the state-funded Positive Abortion Alternatives program, increased payment rates for family planning and abortion services, and repealed some portions of Minnesota Law concerning abortion that, in July 2022, Ramsey County District Judge Thomas Gilligan ruled unconstitutional.

Minnesota Republicans characterized these bills as the "most extreme pro-abortion legislation in the U.S."

"As Democrats keep pushing this dangerous and extreme agenda through, they continue to vote down reasonable protections for women and children — including guardrails like limits on late-term abortions or providing parental notification or consent," Mike Longergan, executive director of the Republican Party of Minnesota, said in 2023.

With most of Minnesota's neighboring states restricting abortion access, Minnesota has become an abortion care hub since the fall of

Roe v. Wade.

In 2023, 20% of abortion patients in Minnesota did not live in the state, per the Guttmacher Institute.

COVID-19 pandemic

As COVID-19 began spreading around the world, Walz declared a peacetime state of emergency on March 13, 2020. He periodically — and controversially — extended the peacetime emergency until it ended on July 1, 2021. Through an executive order, Walz also enacted a stay-at-home order beginning on March 25, 2020, closing non-essential businesses. That order lifted on May 18, but restaurants could only operate at partial capacity through the summer of 2020.

A statewide face mask mandate went into effect on July 22, 2020.

"This is the way — the cheapest and most effective way — for us to open up our businesses, for us to get our kids back in school, for us to keep our grandparents healthy and for us to get back that life that we all miss so much," Walz said.

The statewide mask mandate ended in May 2021.

When COVID-19 cases spiked in November 2020 — causing an influx of patients in Minnesota's hospitals — Walz implemented a four-week "dial back" plan to limit the spread of disease, restricting gatherings and temporarily closing restaurants and other non-essential businesses to indoor services.

During the pandemic, the state of Minnesota established free COVID-19 testing sites in major metro areas, created a financial incentive program for COVID-19 vaccination and rolled out a housing assistance program using federal CARES Act dollars.

The state also purchased a $5.5 million refrigerated warehouse in May 2020 in order to store dead bodies in case the number of COVID-19 deaths overwhelmed morgues and funeral homes. The warehouse was never used for that purpose, and the state sold it in 2022 for $5.65 million, a difference that reflected the roughly $140,000 in renovations made to the building while owned by the state.

State Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, who chairs the Minnesota House Health Finance and Policy Committee, said Walz handled the COVID-19 pandemic well despite the uncertainties leaders at the local, national and global levels faced during that time.

"He listened to the experts, he was pretty steadfast and focused on keeping Minnesotans safe and he made the tough calls," Liebling said. "He had a great commissioner of health, Jan Malcolm, and he really took her advice."

Walz told Politico in 2021 he knew his pandemic policies, such as the mask mandate, were unpopular: "I got to the point where I was saying ‘Please, just wear the mask so you live long enough to vote against me,’" he said.

Walz's use of his executive powers as governor drew criticism from Republicans, who in 2021 attempted to limit those powers. One attempt was a bill authored by Sen. Carla Nelson, R-Rochester, that would have prohibited the closure of schools during a state of emergency. It did not become law.

"It was so devastating what happened that we have to make sure that our children are never put in this type of risk again," Nelson said after the then-Republican-controlled state Senate passed the measure. "We must prevent a governor from using emergency powers for nearly a year to keep our kids out of school."

LGBTQ+ health care

In June 2021, Walz signed an executive order that restricted "conversion therapy," a practice aiming to change one's sexual or gender identity that has been discredited and opposed by several medical organizations, including the American Medical Association.

Since 2022, several U.S. states have restricted or barred access to gender-affirming care, particularly for minors. Gender-affirming care refers to interventions — medical, psychological, behavioral and social — "designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity," as defined by the World Health Organization.

In response, Walz signed an executive order in March 2023 directing the state's agencies to protect gender-affirming care providers and patients.

"Every single day is a risk to these children and the people involved,” Walz said in signing the executive order. "And while we're waiting for the process to work its way through the Legislature, we're making sure that we put up … the protections that we can offer now."

Walz would sign both the protections for gender-affirming care and the conversion therapy ban into law in April 2023.

As with abortion, gender-affirming care providers in Minnesota have seen a substantial increase in demand since other states, such as Florida and Texas, began restricting access.

Charity care and medical debt

A 2022 Post Bulletin investigation found that Mayo Clinic had sued several patients over unpaid medical debt when those patients could have qualified for the hospital's financial assistance, or charity care, policy to forgive part or all of their medical bill.

In 2023, Walz signed into law a bill that requires hospitals to preemptively screen patients to see if they are eligible for charity care before taking action to recoup their medical debt. That law went into effect in November 2023.

In 2024, Walz signed the Minnesota Debt Fairness Act, which prevents hospitals from withholding medical care due to unpaid debt, removed the automatic transfer of medical debt to a patient's spouse upon their death and prevents medical debt from being reflected on credit scores.

"Life-saving cancer treatments or a trip to the emergency room shouldn’t cause a tanked credit score or a lifetime of debt," Walz said.

Both bills were authored by Rochester Sen. Liz Boldon and Eagan Rep. Liz Reyer, both DFL. Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose office is investigating Mayo Clinic and Allina Health over their medical debt practices, also played a key role in the bills.

Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act & Mayo Clinic

During Minnesota's 2023 legislative session, state lawmakers advanced two potential laws: the establishment of a Health Care Affordability Board, and a requirement for hospitals to create specific committees to set minimum nurse staffing levels, which was part of the Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act (KNABA).

Before those bills hit Walz's desk, a Mayo Clinic lobbyist sent an email to Walz and other state leaders threatening to move a "significant" investment out of Minnesota if those two "extremely problematic" proposals were made law.

That significant investment turned out to be Mayo Clinic's $5 billion "Bold. Forward. Unbound. in Rochester" expansion, which involves the construction of five new buildings in downtown Rochester by 2030.

The Legislature ultimately did not send the Mayo-opposed proposals to Walz's desk, but Walz did sign a narrowed-down version of KNABA that established a student loan forgiveness program for nurses and directed the state to conduct a nursing workforce report to see why nurses are leaving the profession.

The Minnesota Nurses Association, the nursing union that backed KNABA, criticized Walz's role in the downfall of that bill.

"Nurses denounce Gov. Tim Walz for his abdication of good government and acquiescence to anti-democratic and anti-labor corporate bullies," Mary Turner, the former MNA president, said in a statement. "By allowing corporate executives to dictate our public policy behind closed doors, Gov. Walz has made clear to Minnesotans that their democratic process does not work for them, but for the wealthy and powerful few."

At Mayo Clinic's official announcement of the Unbound expansion in November 2023, Walz said Mayo's plan is "going above and beyond."

"It’s not lost on myself, our administration or the people of Minnesota — you choose to make that investment in Rochester, Minnesota," Walz said. "You made a conscious effort as you looked elsewhere, where you could go, you said 'No, this is the best place.'"

Drug costs, health privacy and other highlights

At a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday — Walz's first appearance as Harris' running mate — Harris highlighted Walz's health care policy record. In addition to abortion access, Harris touted the passage of paid family leave in Minnesota in 2023. (It goes into effect in 2026.)

During Walz's time in Congress, Harris said he "cast one of the critical votes to pass the Affordable Care Act" in 2010, "which of course gave health insurance to tens of millions of Americans."

Other health care policies enacted under Walz's governorship include:

The creation of the Minnesota Insulin Safety Net Program, which provides low-cost insulin for diabetic Minnesotans in need; Granting permission for state agencies to study and develop a MinnesotaCare public enrollment option (a proposal did not advance during the 2024 legislative session); The ability for undocumented Minnesotans to enroll in MinnesotaCare, the state's public health insurance option for low-income payers who do not qualify for Medical Assistance; Extra funding for nursing homes; Additional state oversight of health care mergers.

Liebling said a place where progress could be made is on deprivatizing Minnesota's public health insurance programs, which she said is one of her goals as a legislator.

"To my knowledge, the governor hasn't opposed that, but he hasn't been involved in it," she said. "His administration, I think, is warming up to that idea, but it's been a long haul."

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Before he was a Minnesota gay rights leader, he was thrown out of college. Whatever happened to Thom Higgins?

Hannah Shirley — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 12:01:00 GMT

GRAND FORKS — Even among 1970s activists, the practice of “pieing” opponents of the gay community was controversial.

Detractors described the pie-throwing practice as “bad guerilla theater,” and claimed it cheapened the growing gay liberation movement in the U.S. Some added that it garnered sympathy for those targeted, and also that it risked alienating the general public.

Proponents, however, believed there was power in turning bigots into a spectacle and a laughing stock. By 1977, at least three anti-gay activists had already received pies in the face from members of the Minneapolis-based LGBTQ+ group Target City Coalition. Anita Bryant was, perhaps, the inevitable next target.

In the 1970s, Bryant was, to many, the face of anti-gay sentiment in America. She was a popular singer-turned-spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission and the face of its well-known orange juice ads. She was also a woman on a mission to end “the disintegration of the American family.”

In 1977, Bryant organized a successful and highly-publicized campaign to repeal a Dade County, Florida, law that made it illegal to deny job and housing opportunities to LGBTQ+ people. She called her platform the “Save Our Children” campaign, and hoped it would be the beginning of a movement.

On Oct. 14, 1977, during a live national television press conference in Des Moines, Iowa, where Bryant planned to speak about her recent political victories, came a reckoning: Thom Higgins, a young gay activist from the Twin Cities, aimed for a spot four inches behind Bryant’s nose and threw a banana cream pie into her face.

There were gasps and shutter clicks as cameras spun to face Higgins, who stood with his hands in the air.

“Well,” Bryant quipped, wiping cream filling from her eyes, “at least it’s a fruit pie.”

The singer began to pray, and then began to sob.

As Higgins left the room, he turned to Bryant.

“Thus always to bigots,” he declared.

The next day, the moment was splashed in headlines across the country.

“Anita hit: Singer gets a pie in the face, then prays for the thrower,” said The Houston Chronicle.

“Anita Bryant runs out of town after protests,” read the New York Post.

“The Gaycott Turns Ugly,” The Nation reported.

“Is a Pie-in-the-Face Really Violent?” the TV Guide asked.

“This is the year of the pie,” Higgins told reporters after the incident. “I saved her a bullet. The pie thing relieved a lot of anger that gays feel towards her. … It left another bigot with a sticky face.”

The moment seems to be widely regarded as the beginning of the end of Bryant and her crusade. She continued her press tour across America, but never really achieved the same momentum. She was fired from her lucrative Florida Citrus Commission contract in 1978, and fell further out of public favor two years later when her husband divorced her. She filed for bankruptcy in 1997, and since then has faded to the footnotes.

In 2024, LGBTQ+ history appears to remember the pieing of Anita Bryant favorably.

But for Higgins’ friends from his days at the University of North Dakota, any cultural or political impact the pieing may or may not have had isn’t really what they remember about the incident.

“We just thought it was funny,” said Mike Jacobs, Higgins’ former classmate at UND. He and every other person interviewed for this story laughed at the mention of Bryant – several said they had forgotten about “the Anita Bryant thing.”

“Pieing Anita Bryant,” crowed another friend, Pat Carney. “Hilarious!”

When Higgins threw the pie in Des Moines, he had already established himself as a prominent gay rights activist in the Twin Cities. But even during his UND days, the way his friends and classmates remembered it, Higgins had always been a bit of a rabble-rouser.

His love of challenging people he believed needed to be challenged had a tendency of getting him into trouble. He was thrown out of the University of North Dakota as a freshman in 1968 for his involvement in an underground newspaper called the Snow Job, which excoriated Greek Life on campus.

‘He liked to be a troublemaker’

In 1967, the war in Vietnam felt very close to Grand Forks. At the time – in Carney’s memory – North Dakota was likely one of the largest nuclear superpowers in the world, due to its large Air Force bases in Minot and Grand Forks. Carney said it resulted in a pipeline to Thai marijuana.

Meanwhile, energies at UND were frenetic.

Higgins, who grew up in St. Paul, arrived on campus as a 16-year-old journalism and theater student, admitted through a program for gifted high-schoolers. The political divide on campus was stark, and Higgins was openly anti-war, but he never identified as a hippie, said Carney, a former photographer for the Dakota Student, UND’s student newspaper. As a teen at UND, Higgins was clean cut, and known for walking around campus in a suit with a vest and ascot. He was involved in Catholic student groups, and had little interest in drinking, at least as far as Carney remembered. Although not exactly out yet, Higgins’ sexuality was never a secret.

Those who moved in Higgins’ circles in Grand Forks agreed that, at a time when there was no shortage of colorful characters on the UND campus, he was memorable.

He was “ebullient,” said Lyn Burton, a former editor of the Dakota Student. He was the kind of person who would breeze into a friend’s kitchen the morning after a party, put on a pot of coffee and start making everyone eggs, she recalled.

“I never knew him to knock on a door, because every door that he opened was always open to him,” she said. “You’d definitely invite him to your parties.”

Jacobs and Chuck Haga – both former Dakota Student editors – stared thoughtfully at each other as they searched for the right words to describe their former classmate. Proud, maybe? Not arrogant, necessarily.

Not everyone agreed.

“He was super arrogant,” Carney said. “And kind of a pain. … He was sure that he was God’s gift to journalism.”

Carney and Higgins were friends and remained in touch until Higgins’ death in 1994. During their shared time at UND, Carney remembered Higgins as an “instigator” and an enthusiastic prankster. Once, Higgins and Carney and other friends sneaked into the hotel of an opposing athletic team in the dead of night to hang an antagonistic banner. Another time, after conservative student groups took issue with the Dakota Student’s anti-war stance and decided to protest by removing the newspapers from campus, Higgins, Carney and others hatched a counteroffensive. The group hid near the students’ van, and as the conservative students loaded papers into the vehicle, Higgins and his friends stole the papers back one ream at a time to redistribute on campus.

During the fallout from the Snow Job, Higgins was the only student who was suspended because, in Jacobs’ memory, he pretty clearly was the leader – but also, Carney said, because Higgins was the only student who admitted his involvement.

“He didn’t fess up — he was proud of what he did. That’s the difference,” Carney said. “If you said, 'who in the hell caused that riot?' He would be the first to say, ‘oh, that’s me.’ He liked to be a troublemaker.”

The Snow Job

Not everyone remembers the Snow Job incident that way.

Based on interviews conducted and documents reviewed for this story, the Snow Job appears to have been universally regarded as in poor taste.

At the time, one school official called the paper “the most vulgar and obscene publication he has seen during his 10 years here,” according to minutes from a UND committee meeting convened to discipline the students involved. But Carney said that today, by modern standards, there aren’t many people who would clutch their pearls over the Snow Job.

“It’s really funny what is scandalous now compared to what was scandalous then,” he said.

Although Jacobs estimated there were probably 30 organizations on campus that could just as well have been the target of the Snow Job, the women of the Alpha Phi sorority were the ones who received the brunt of the satire. Greek Life had reached new heights at UND in those years, and Alpha Phi in particular had a reputation for being self-selecting, Jacobs said. He believes Higgins likely felt like he was punching up.

“They saw themselves as the epitome of Greek Life,” Jacobs said. “They thought that they should be looked up to.”

Official disciplinary proceedings began when the president of Alpha Phi filed a formal complaint with the university.

Meeting minutes show that Higgins said if the Snow Job had been allowed to die a natural death, the scandal would have blown over in days. Jacobs agreed that if the sorority hadn’t pushed back, the Snow Job likely would have become just another outrageous thing that happened at UND in the ’60s.

“But they did push, and they pushed with strength,” he said.

One of the women had a family member who was an important state official with the resources to punish the university. Jacobs said the official did complain, but he doesn’t believe he ever tried to take any action.

“But the Alpha Phis saw themselves as powerful, because they had connections,” Jacobs said. “They saw themselves as powerful enough to take revenge.”

Higgins ultimately admitted to the committee that he wrote two stories for the Snow Job.

There was some argument in favor of expelling Higgins altogether – but ultimately, the committee unanimously voted that Higgins should be suspended for the remainder of the school year and be required to submit evidence of receiving psychiatric counseling before being readmitted.

The committee agreed there wasn’t enough evidence to punish other students who were allegedly involved. There was a motion to suspend a second student – Bruce Pennington, who was allegedly seen stapling copies of the Snow Job in the Dakota Student office but denied his involvement – but the motion did not get a second.

(Pennington, recalled by several sources interviewed for this story as one of the only other known gay students at UND in those years, went on to become an influential gay activist in his own right. His 2003 obituary printed in the Washington Post credited him with founding one of the first gay radio programs in the country.)

In the aftermath of the Snow Job, Higgins was fired from the Dakota Student and the Dakotah Annual. He was openly stung by the severance from both organizations, “his two most important extracurriculars, because his major is journalism,” meeting minutes say. The documents also noted that because he had been invited to stay at the university following his involvement in the program for gifted high school juniors, the now 17-year-old Higgins did not have a high school degree.

According to the documents, Higgins told the committee “he wished he never got involved with the Snow Job.”

A March 17, 1968, Herald article about Higgins’ suspension quoted him saying he was “unjustly suspended” and that he intended to sue the university to force it to reinstate him as a student. It’s not clear if he ever actually attempted legal action against the school.

Following his suspension, Higgins moved back to the Twin Cities. He never returned to UND.

“I mean,” Jacobs said, “why would he?”

Activism

In June 1969, one year after Higgins left UND, the gay liberation movement in America started with the Stonewall Riots in New York City. It was a watershed coming-of-age moment for people of Higgins’ generation, Burton recalled. In a 1977 article in the North Dakota Star – a newspaper published by the UND journalism department – Higgins told a reporter that around the same time, after moving to Minneapolis, he began living openly as a gay man.

After graduating from UND, Carney spent several years traveling the country working as a photographer, but settled in the Twin Cities in 1977. It wasn’t long before he ran into Higgins again.

“First of all, he had come out. And he had had a growth spurt,” Carney recalled. “He was this big, strapping, handsome guy with the biggest laugh you’ve ever heard in your life.”

Since leaving UND, Higgins had found work, at different times, as a copywriter, a staff writer, and as manager at a variety of gay establishments.

At the same time, he had become highly involved in a push for equal protections for LGBTQ+ people. He was a founding member and officer of FREE, an LGBTQ+ activist group. When he was fired from his job at the Minnesota Services for the Blind after telling his supervisor he would appear in a press conference to advocate for gay rights in 1970, FREE organized the first public gay rights demonstration in the state, according to the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union.

Higgins was involved in campaigning for a number of openly gay political candidates. He was also involved in a number of legal disputes on behalf of LGBTQ+ people who claimed they had been discriminated against, and testified in favor of protections for LGBTQ+ people before the Minnesota Legislature. He also worked extensively with the Positively Gay’s Cuban refugee task force, helping to resettle gay refugees.

In his younger days, to the occasional irritation of many of those around him, there wasn’t an argument or a fight Higgins wouldn’t participate in, Carney recalled. As he got older, his energy didn’t subside, but he did get wiser about where he used it.

“He was more businesslike in his activism,” Carney said. “He was always good at pranks – pieing Anita Bryant was one – but he wanted results. … I was always surprised – like, ‘wow, Thom. You’ve grown up.’”

In the late 1970s, Higgins began caring for a neighbor who was terminally ill with cancer, and in the early 1980s, Higgins was inspired to go to nursing school to become a caregiver, the woman’s son, Anthony Trelles, told the Herald.

At the same time, AIDS had begun decimating gay communities across America. Burton said she believes Higgins’ decision to become a nurse and his commitment to his community were intrinsically linked.

“HIV/AIDS was beginning to kill our friends,” Burton said. “It was dreadful. We didn’t have the vaccines. It was horrible. Just absolutely horrible. … It’s hard to explain now, how terrifying HIV/AIDS was in the ’70s.”

Death

Sometime in the twilight of the 1980s, Carney got a call from Higgins.

“I said, ‘hey Thom, how you doing?’” Carney recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, I’m living with my mother, and I’m dying.’ As matter-of-fact as if he had joined a baseball team.”

Higgins approached his death the same way he seemed to approach everything else in life, Carney said.

“It was another project,” he recalled. “The projects were, OK, we’re going to move. We’re going to work on this campaign. I’m going to die.”

Both Carney and Burton said that at the end of his life, more than anything, Higgins seemed nostalgic. Burton said he seemed like he was trying to find meaning by retracing his steps, as if trying to find a way to quantify the impact he had and the difference he made.

Burton recalled the last time she saw him. A few months before his death, they met for lunch. She said she didn’t know he was sick until he told her, but noticed right away that he was very thin, “to the point of almost gone.”

“He wanted to kind of talk about the old days,” Burton said. “You know, did I remember ‘X’ or did I remember ‘Y,’ and he wanted to talk about the Snow Job.”

And he wanted to talk about Anita Bryant.

“It was, in some ways, a celebratory high watermark of his younger days,” she said. “I mean, it was both an act of defiance and an act of courage. And yet, somehow in keeping with that puckish sense of humor. I mean, he didn’t hit her with anything that would hurt her, except her pride, and her designer dress.”

Higgins died on Nov. 10, 1994, at the age of 44, due to complications from AIDS. He would have been 74 last week, on June 17. Before he died, he collected his life’s papers and donated them to the state of Minnesota. They can be viewed at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul.

“I think he made a difference in the life of anyone that came into his orbit,” Burton said. “He was an attractor. People who come within the orbit are touched.”

“I remember him in two ways,” Carney said. “As an annoying little fat kid at the University of North Dakota, and then as this amazing character in the gay community in Minneapolis. He was both of those, and it was a pretty positive remembrance.”

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Leech Lake Tribal College hosts 2nd annual Pride event

Daltyn Lofstrom — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:38:47 GMT

CASS LAKE – An array of color could be seen throughout campus as students, staff and community members celebrated Leech Lake Tribal College’s second annual Pride event on Friday.

As a means to increase visibility of its LGBTQ+ community, LLTC’s Gay, Two-Spirit and Straight Alliance formed in January and has played a key role in planning this year’s event.

“It’s a new group that has been one of the more successful extracurriculars since we’ve gotten out of the pandemic,” the alliance’s co-advisor Joey Riley said. “Really, we just get together to have fun and to celebrate community.”

The result of a two-month planning process and support from the Blandin Foundation, the event kicked off with a drum song followed by a slew of other activities.

Donning pride flags, some attendees embarked on a rainbow walk – departing the LLTC campus in procession before their eventual return. Others opted to stay back for live music provided by Foxby, crafts, kid’s activities and food.

Around 20 informational booths also set up shop to provide resources surrounding several causes.

By the evening, a flag-raising ceremony heralded the start of a drag show, marking the conclusion of LLTC Pride.

Creating community

Though relatively new, organizers expressed optimism about the event’s continued success moving into the future.

Leech Lake Band member Arnold Dahl-Wooley noted his own hopes that Pride events raise awareness that LGBTQ+ members reside in rural areas.

“Sometimes, people think that the community may be small or it’s not worth paying attention to,” Dahl-Wooley said, “but the community is quite large.”

Dahl-Wooley has spoken at several events about the Two-Spirit identity, which serves as an umbrella term for a wide variety of unique identities and social roles found across Native American cultures. Adopted at an international conference in the early 1990s, the term is also used by many LGBTQ+ Native Americans as a part of their identities.

Historically Two-Spirited people combined gender roles in their societies and held a special place in their cultures, oftentimes highly respected or regarded as blessed or sacred.

Pride events are yet another chance for community members to learn about the Two-Spirit identity as well as other identities within the LGBTQ+ acronym, Dahl-Wooley mentioned.

“It’s always nice to share that information with people who may not know and to talk about the history of what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning within Native American culture of yesteryear and today,” he added.

Dahl-Wooley commended the organizations who attended Friday’s event, noting their presence as essential to suicide prevention and anti-bullying efforts.

“We have these outreach resources for children all the way up to elders,” he said. “This is a community for all of us.”

Finding their place

Prior to last year’s inaugural Pride event, LLTC hosted drag shows similar to other area colleges and universities.

“This is where some of our local drag royalty got their start,” Riley mentioned. “I like to think of (the drag shows) as a soft launch and a great place for people to be safe expressing themselves. I’d love to see more queer artists share their work with the community.”

With an emphasis on place, Riley detailed the process of designing the LLTC Pride flag, which required much collaboration and campus input.

“We wanted to have all the elements of the traditional Pride flag and the Two-Spirit flag, but also reflect Leech Lake Tribal College,” he said.

Riley expressed appreciation for other efforts in the area, namely Bemidji Pride, which will host its fourth annual festival on Saturday, Aug. 24, at Rail River Folk ��.

LLTC President Helen Zaikina-Montgomery emphasized the college’s commitment to supporting the LGBTQ+ community, further exemplified with Pride events that show no signs of stopping.

“Hopefully, the fact that we’re having this event shows our existing and future students that this is something that’s important to us. The rights of that community are human rights,” Zaikina-Montgomery said. “Our slogan is ‘Come find your place,’ and I hope that people can find their place here.”

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Bill would bar LGBTQ+ panic defense from Minnesota courts

Mark Wasson — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 17:00:00 GMT

ST. PAUL — Less than four months ago, Savannah Ryan Williams was killed in Minneapolis after performing a sex act on a man during the early morning hours of Nov. 29, 2023.

According to police reports, Damerean Kaylon Bible, 25, told law enforcement that he became “suspicious” of Williams, a transgender woman, before he shot her point blank in the head.

Bible reportedly confessed the murder to a parent in a phone call recorded by police and claimed that he "had to do it.”

He is now charged with felony second-degree murder, and his lawyer notified the court earlier this month that his defense includes acting in the defense of self and/or others. Bible’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Williams’ death and the ensuing self-defense claim is a familiar chain of events to the LGBTQ+ community. A bill introduced by Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislators represents an attempt to change that.

The legislation is a continued push by legislators to provide more protections for the LGBTQ+ community, partially in response to the death of Williams, according to Rep. Brion Curran, DFL-Vadnais Heights, who said that statements made by Bible were about Williams' identity.

Curran recently introduced a bill in the House that’s a companion piece to legislation introduced last year in the Senate. If passed, it would bar a defendant from using someone’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or expression as a defense for committing a crime.

“Just by using that defense in the courtroom, it gives a platform to that rhetoric that LGBTQ+ individuals have a reason to be harmed or a reason to be feared or that there’s some sort of excuse for violence against us,” said Curran, who identifies as nonbinary.

The legal strategy is called the LGBTQ+ panic defense, meaning that someone is so shocked by the sexual orientation or gender identity of a sexual partner that they are driven temporarily insane, which absolves them of any responsibility regarding the assault or murder of their partner.

“It’s using a piece of someone’s identity as an excuse to harm, and that doesn’t make sense, it’s not moral,” Curran said.

While a criminal defendant may use it in Minnesota, it is currently barred in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Many advocates who push for the defense to be banned cite the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard over two decades ago and the ensuing trial as a reason to pass this type of legislation.

Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, was tied to a fence and violently beaten in a field outside of Laramie, Wyoming, where he was left to die.

During the trial to bring one of his killers to justice, a sheriff’s deputy said Shepard’s face was covered in blood, except for where his tears had fallen down his face. Shepard died about six days after the assault.

His killer, Aaron McKinney, attempted to claim in court that he was driven temporarily insane after alleged sexual advances by Shepard. A judge refused to allow that defense in court after McKinney’s girlfriend said McKinney and his accomplice, Russell Henderson, pretended to be gay to lure Shepard into a truck so they could rob him.

Both men were convicted of murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

Shepard's murder and court trial received national attention, though laws regulating the LGBTQ+ panic defense have only picked up steam since 2019, when only eight states had banned the defense. The first of those was California in 2014. Wyoming, where Shepard was murdered, still allows the defense.

While the movement is gaining momentum, about 56% of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States live in a state where someone accused of their murder can use a self-defense claim based on their victim's sexual orientation or gender identity during trial.

The LGBTQ+ communities in those areas have a good reason to be fearful, said Courtnay Avant, legislative counsel for Human Rights Campaign, an organization focused on ending discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community.

"We're in a moment where anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is on the rise, and so we've seen an explosion in really violent and hateful rhetoric targeting LGBTQ+ people and we're seeing that it is leading to a horrifying elevation of physical violence against the community," she said.

According to 2022 hate crime statistics from the FBI, incidents targeting gay men and women have recorded their highest totals in the last five years and anti-transgender incidents increased nearly 40% from 2021 to 2022.

"It's been 25 years since the death of Matthew Shepard, and we are still talking about LGBTQ+ panic defenses," Avant said. "So there's a lot of work to be done."

The American Bar Association has also called for government entities to take legislative action to curtail the availability and effectiveness of the LGBTQ+ panic defense since 2013.

"It is harrowing that currently, one's sexual orientation or gender identity can still provide even an inkling of a legal defense in their murder trial. Help to end this discrimination by supporting legislative bans on the gay/trans panic defense," an ABA member wrote in a 2019 OP-ED for the association.

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Minnesota bill would bar schools, local governments from removing pride flags

Dana Ferguson / MPR News — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 01:11:50 GMT

Minnesota schools, colleges and local governments would be barred from removing rainbow pride flags, banners or posters under a bill moving through the state Legislature.

The proposal advanced through the House Local Government Finance and Policy Committee on Tuesday, March 5, and is set to move to a full floor vote after LGBTQ+ advocates said it would provide support for the community. GOP lawmakers said it was an overstep.

“The bill does not require anyone to display rainbows, nor does it supersede policies that prohibit the display of all banners, flags or posters,” said bill author Rep. Leigh Finke, DFL-St. Paul. “It just prohibits rainbows from being singled out and banned in schools, libraries and other government spaces.”

Several states are weighing bills that take the opposite approach and would prohibit pride flags from being flown in classrooms and other settings.

“The rainbow is a sign of hope and affirmation to the 2SLGBTQIA community — my community,” Finke continued. “For those outside of the queer community, it may seem trivial to legislate the definition and presence of rainbows. But in our community, depending on the circumstance, the value of a publicly-visible rainbow on a doorway or window or classroom is literally impossible to overstate.”

The bill’s supporters said the proposal could prevent situations like one in Worthington where the school board voted to remove a Latino teacher’s LGBTQ+ pride flag from the classroom. Other school districts are mulling policies that bar rainbow pride flags or banners in schools.

“In Minnesota, we’re not immune to efforts to target trans and LGBTQ youth for discrimination,” Gender Justice Director Monica Meyer said. “Let’s encourage our communities across the state to counter these efforts to censor educators and schools and silence communities’ support for inclusion.”

Republicans on the panel raised concerns about the measure bringing what they said are political issues into the classroom and they tried unsuccessfully to send the bill to an education committee for additional vetting.

“I think this bill needs a lot more work because it does infringe on some of those areas that we uphold for education to be independent of political activities. And so (I have) a lot of concerns here,” said Rep. Jon Koznick, R-Lakeville.

The proposal would not prevent school or local government leaders from banning all flags, posters or other displays.

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