Getty Images / Saul Loeb

Under President Bill Clinton, 10 universities applied. Under President George W. Bush, two schools sent applications. And during the first few years of President Barack Obama’s term, there were none.

But within the past few years, according to records the U.S. Department of Education provided to BuzzFeed News, 60 religious universities have applied for exemptions from a 1972 federal law that bans publicly funded schools from discriminating on the basis of sex in regards to hiring, admissions, and other issues.

Forty-three of those applications were filed this year, and 22 have already been approved. The rest are pending, but no request for an exemption has ever been rejected by this or any previous administration.

Not only are the number of requests for waivers and approvals spiking, schools are now seeking a different type of exemption than under previous administrations.

A Department of Education official — who spoke to BuzzFeed News on the condition the official not be named — said waivers in past decades usually concerned matters like only allowing men into seminary schools, abortion, pregnancy, or banning unmarried faculty.

Under the Obama administration, however, the official said applicants have overwhelmingly sought to ban or discriminate against LGBT students or faculty — while the schools continue to receive federal money.

“It is the University’s position ... that a person cannot change his or her birth sex."

The uptick in applications, and their shift in focus, is an apparent response to the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, which bans federally funded schools from sex-based discrimination. In April 2014, the Education Department issued guidance — reinforcing a stance the government had asserted in previous settlements with individual school districts — stating that Title IX also bans anti-transgender discrimination as a form of sex discrimination.

Since then, the Justice Department filed a brief in federal appeals court to support a transgender student in Virginia who suing his school district for access to the boys restroom. Just this month, the Education Department worked to reach a settlement with an Illinois school district to grant a transgender girl access to the girls locker room.

Encouraged by Christian legal advocacy groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, schools then took advantage of a largely unused provision of the 1972 law that allows exemptions for “an educational institution which is controlled by a religious organization” if the law violates the school’s religious tenets.

“[G]iven [the Education Department]’s application of this unwarranted understanding of Title IX in other contexts,” ADF senior counsel Greg Baylor told BuzzFeed News in a statement, “the schools have reasonably concluded that they are quite likely to become the next target of [the department’s Office of Civil Rights] if they follow their religious convictions on these matters. These schools have thus exercised their legal right, established by Congress in 1972, to an exemption from applications of Title IX that would violate their shared religious convictions.”

Among 11 applicants in 2014 was Spring Arbor University President Brent Ellis, who contacted the Education Department two months after the administration announced the guidance on Title IX.

“It is the University’s position, based upon its religious beliefs taken from Biblical principles and the Doctrine of the Free Methodist Church, that a person cannot change his or her birth sex,” he wrote in a June 2014 application.

“The University is requesting exemption on religious grounds from Title IX,” he continued, “to allow the University religious freedom to discriminate on the basis of sex, including gender identity, and sexual orientation, in regard to housing, living arrangements, restrooms, locker rooms, and athletics.”

Like other schools, Spring Arbor University also noted its opposition to abortion.

The school received $23 million during the 2013–2014 school year in Pell grants and federal student loans combined, according to the Education Department's National Association for Education Statistics.

The Education Department was unable to identify exactly how much federal discretionary grants were given to the schools with waivers. However, an official noted that the records for Pell grants and federal student loans represent the major federal funding sources for the schools.

In 2015, the applications for waivers appear to become increasingly similar in their language and formula, citing the portions of the law they seek waivers from and excerpts of the religious group’s beliefs. The applications seek the right to discriminate largely in admissions and hiring, but also housing, athletics, and financial aid.

The letters tend to focus on gender identity and sexual orientation — in the latter case, citing their belief that marriage is limited to one man and one woman — but the groups also state their opposition to premarital sex, abortion, and pregnancy.

The exemptions extend only to the specific issues sought, not blanket permission to be exempted from the requirements of Title IX.

The most recent waiver granted was to Hannibal LaGrange University, on Oct. 30. The Southern Baptist school, which received $6 million in federal student loans and Pell grants in the 2013–2014 school year, said in an August letter said it was a “biblically-based Christian environment” and referred to a Baptist statement on the family that said God made people “male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation.”

As such, the application from university president Anthony W. Allen said, the school could not reconcile its faith and Title IX if it prohibited the university from “recruiting, admissions, and financial assistance, under a policy which called for the consideration of an applicant for admission’s sexual orientation, gender identity (including but not limited to transgender status), marital status, past and present practices regarding marriage, and sex outside marriage … and prohibited the institution from treating that person differently as a result of that consideration.”

“If schools want to engage in sex discrimination, the federal government should not be funding it with taxpayer dollars."

Catherine E. Lhamon, the Department of Education’s assistant secretary for civil rights, replied to the Hannibal-LaGrange’s request and the other similarly worded requests confirming the waivers.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Lhamon acknowledged the dichotomy of granting waivers while enforcing Title IX at other schools.

“We in the Department of Education vigorously enforce Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex, including gender identity, in every applicable school,” she said. “Congress did exempt from Title IX’s protection institutions that are controlled by religious organizations, to the extent that Title IX conflicts with their religious tenets. We are committed to protecting every student Congress gave us jurisdiction to protect, to the fullest extent of the law.”

But issuing the waivers has also led to criticism from those who say the department must be more transparent and the religious loophole should be closed.

Larry French / Getty Images for SiriusXM

Ian Thompson, legislative representative for the American Civil Liberties Union, told BuzzFeed News that Congress should pass “legislation to narrow the kind of carte blanche discrimination that Title IX’s sweeping religious exemption permits.”

“If schools want to engage in sex discrimination, the federal government should not be funding it with taxpayer dollars,” he said.

ADF’s Baylor, however, defended the exemption as a key congressional decision to protect religious freedom.

“The Title IX exemption reflects the undeniable fact that in a diverse country, Americans will inevitably disagree about foundational issues, including on matters of religious belief and practice,” he said in his statement. “Reflecting the best traditions of our nation, Congress declared that these differences ought to be respected and accommodated, even as it sets baseline requirements for educational institutions whose students benefit from tuition assistance programs.”

Given the current law, Thompson at the ACLU said, officials should at least publish all of the waivers the department approves and show what the specific waiver it allows the colleges to do.

“LGBT students and their families have a right to know the discrimination they can be subjected to by their school based on their sexual orientation or gender identity,” he said.

A total of 187 exemptions were granted by previous administrations. Many of those were from universities applying in the 1970s. But the Education Department official said that after the Education Act was passed, government took little action to grant them until the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when many were approved in a burst. Those primarily concerned pregnancy, sex, divorce, abortion, and sex outside of marriage.

In order to get approved for a waiver, a religious school must be preparing students to be ministers or for a religious vocation; require faculty, students, or staff to be members of their faith; or be controlled and significantly funded by a religious organization.

Education Department spreadsheet of all of the waiver requests granted or pending under the exemption:

One of the most recently granted waiver requests:

The Education Department letter granting the waiver:

Podgoals.

For starters, just look at how majestic this pod is.

Angel Philips / angeleyezphotography.com From left to right: Mermaid Storm (purple tail), Mermaid Merley (Pink Tail), Brittany Boehme,

Merman Amor / From left to right: Merman Amor, Merman Yari,

Corey Staver / From left to right: Finley the Mermaid, Mermaid Jenna, Maressa Fox, and

This pod and their glam squad.

Jim Ward / SeeThroughSea.com / Left to right: Lyrique the Mermaid, Hannah Mermaid, and Aradia Sunseri.

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AP / Jacquelyn Martin

Led by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, eight U.S. senators sent a letter to the Department of Education on Friday calling for officials to be more transparent about religious schools that receive permission to ban LGBT faculty and students — while still taking federal money.

"We are concerned these waivers allow for discrimination under the guise of religious freedom," said the letter sent to to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

BuzzFeed News first reported on the full scope of the trend on Thursday.

The lawmakers said the Education Department should maintain a public, searchable website that shows the schools that are being granted waivers from a 1972 federal law that bans publicly funded schools from discriminating on the basis of sex in regards to hiring, admissions, and other issues.

Sixty religious universities have applied for exemptions from the law under the Obama Administration, BuzzFeed News found. That's a sharp uptick from the two previous decades.

While such exemptions to Title IX of the Education Act used to primarily concern matters concerning abortion, pregnancy, or banning unmarried faculty, they have shifted in recent years to ban or discriminate against LGBT students or faculty — while the schools continue to receive federal money.

"At a very minimum, we believe that parents, students, and taxpayers have a right to know when institutions of higher education — as recipients of tax dollars — seek and receive exemptions under Title IX as well as the justification of those exemptions," said the letter.

It was co-signed by Sens. Tammy Baldwin, Barbara Boxer, Al Franken, Edward Markey, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray, and Bernie Sanders.

The senators added: "Already, we have seen the same path used in our legal system to undermine benefits for women, and used to facilitate discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity."

The uptick in applications, and their shift in focus, is an apparent response to the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX , which bans federally funded schools from sex-based discrimination. In April 2014, the Education Department issued guidance stating that Title IX also bans anti-transgender discrimination as a form of sex discrimination.

The Column reported earlier this month on nearly thee-dozen such waivers over 18 months. BuzzFeed News reported on all 60 applications under the Obama administration — plus 187 waivers from previous administrations, mostly filed in the 1970s and 1980s — and how waivers to discriminate against LGBT students are spiking in 2015. On Friday, the Human Rights Campaign issued a report on Title IX waivers.

Forty-three of applications were filed this year, and 22 have already been approved. The rest are pending, but no request for an exemption has ever been rejected by this or any previous administration.

Here is the full letter:

We liked this season, Josh. We really did.

When Rose, after seeing Stuart with his wife, attempted to write “cunt” on his lawn but hilariously ran out of paint.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation / Via Twitter: @atbggbf

When Tom, Josh, and Arnold were high AF.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

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Annie Leibovitz; Kevin Winer, Dimitrios Kambouris, Larry Busacca / Getty Images

Caitlyn Jenner, transgender celebrity extraordinaire, finds her comments scrutinized at every turn, and it’s almost always about her penchant for focusing on her appearance. The most recent incident involves Jenner commenting to TIME: “If you’re out there and, to be honest with you, if you look like a man in a dress, it makes people uncomfortable.” Cosmopolitan's Alex Rees proceeded to excoriate Jenner, as scores of trans people and their cisgender allies followed, which prompted Jenner to issue a public apology.

But Jenner’s is not the most egregious form of transphobia in this entire affair. Even more transphobic is Rees – a cisgender man – interpreting Jenner’s comments in the most ungenerous possible way; his was the mostly widely shared perspective to circulate throughout the soundbyte-driven Internet.

At this point, it’s widely acknowledged that Jenner — who has only publicly presented as a woman for less than a year — isn’t developing fast enough as a trans advocate. It’s even more important to note, however, that cisgender people are developing even more slowly as allies. Many progressive cis people have slammed Jenner for her appearance-consciousness even as the society they dominate creates conditions that force Jenner into that position. As Feministing’s Jos Truitt has noted in a series of tweets, cisgender allies are quick to criticize Jenner for her missteps, yet almost always fail to hold transphobic cisgender people to the same standard.

Jenner’s full quote puts her comments about non-passing trans people in context. “I think it’s much easier for a trans woman or a trans man who authentically kind of looks and plays the role. So what I call my presentation. I try to take that seriously. I think it puts people at ease.” Here Jenner makes her comment on not wanting to look like “a man in a dress,” clearly including herself. Then she concludes: “So the first thing I can do is try to present myself well. I want to dress well. I want to look good. When I go out, as Kim says, you’ve got to rock it because the paparazzi will be there.”

Many progressive cis people have slammed Jenner for her appearance-consciousness even as the society they dominate creates conditions that force Jenner into that position.

Rees and a large proportion of online and social media commenters – both cis and trans – reacted strongly to how Jenner seemed to imply that trans people should conform to binary cisgender standards. Lost in this interpretation is the literal truth of her words. The fact is that trans people who look like cis people genuinely do have an easier time, since male-assigned people who don’t conform to gender norms are easily the most despised and marginalized in US society within the transgender umbrella. Seen through a more forgiving lens, Jenner’s comments are more easily read as candid rather than judgmental, especially when she includes herself among the people she’s talking about.

Jenner may operate in the world with an enormous amount of privilege, but this doesn’t protect her from being the object of numerous transphobic memes that loudly proclaim her to be a man. Even while she struggles to conform to a cisgender beauty ideal – still one of the major criteria for transgender acceptability – she continues to be the subject of derision and rejection. Rather than taking Jenner to task when she expresses this reality, it’s much more important to talk about how heteronormative cisgender society produces these conditions.

But while we focus on condemning beauty ideals, more so than Jenner’s part in adhering to them, we still must take Jenner to task for the right reasons: her consistently obtuse and tone-deaf comments about race and class. When we zero in on Jenner’s appearance, we obscure much more substantial issues and overlook Jenner’s most significant shortcomings. She can’t help being a woman who’s been taught to beautify herself for the often-withheld acceptance of straight cis culture, but she can work to be less oblivious. Though Jenner is far from an ideal trans role model, cis people who are quick to criticize her should first stop and consider why prominent cisgender figures can get away with so much worse.

In November, Jenner said in a BuzzFeed interview, “The hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear.” Actor and director Rose McGowan consequently lambasted her. Apart from seemingly not taking the time to watch the accompanying video, in which Jenner goes on to say, “But it’s more than that,” and expounds on how she’s still searching for the vital aspects of womanhood that go beyond the cosmetic. McGowan’s comments are more explicitly transphobic than anything Jenner has ever said — yet a swarm of people on social media did not react too angrily (they reserved that anger for Jenner herself).

McGowan wrote in a since-deleted Facebook update: “You want to be a woman and stand with us — well learn us [sic]. We are more than deciding what to wear. We are more than the stereotypes foisted upon us by people like you. You're a woman now? Well fucking learn that we have had a VERY different experience than your life of male privilege.”

Plenty of feminists applauded McGowan's statement, and a number of news reports even noted that she apologized for her comments. Yet McGowan's supposed apology led with “Let me take this moment to point out that I am not, nor will I ever be, transphobic,” a line that is recognizable to members of marginalized groups as a majority person’s classic defense against charges of prejudice.

More substantially, while McGowan stops short of calling Jenner a man, she clearly doesn’t see Jenner as a genuine woman — and sees herself as an arbiter of Jenner’s womanhood. Moreover, McGowan explicitly uses Jenner’s supposed “life of male privilege” to discredit her. While there’s a clear possibility that some of Jenner’s actions, as well as her affluence, have been impacted by her history of being perceived male, this doesn’t mean that McGowan can assume that this is why Jenner behaves in ways she objects to.

It is true that, while she’s made some headway in examining trans issues, Jenner has been much slower to engage with feminist thinking and learn about the various ways that women are treated unequally in society, whether cis or trans. While we can cut her some slack for her looks-consciousness, given the fact that her appearance often determines her acceptability as a woman, it would still behoove her to at least engage with the pressures all women undergo to be deemed acceptable. Yet this criticism can be easily leveled at any number of celebrities, including Jenner’s own stepdaughters, and criticizing Jenner while sparing cisgender women who propagate beauty-focused feminine stereotypes is demonstrably transphobic.

Instagram: @marthastewart48

For instance, Martha Stewart recently commented in an Instagram post when she first met Jenner: “Tall and attractive with a very low voice,” pointing out how Jenner’s physicality veers from that of other women. Stewart did not experience the type of blowback that Jenner has. Prominent feminist thinker Germaine Greer has made even more explicit claims about Jenner’s unacceptability as a woman, statements that have been largely met by mainstream press with defenses about preserving her ability to speak.

We have a ways to go in understanding how trans women are constantly subjected to cis women’s standards and judged lacking. Trans women are unfairly criticized by traditional and social media, and left to either defend ourselves or suffer in silence when we are the object of attacks. Being better about intersectional feminism when it comes to the transgender community should start with Jenner herself, who, for better or worse, is that community’s most visible member.

Truth be told, trans people participate in the demonization of Jenner, in part because there are good reasons for criticizing her — particularly with regard to the consistent ways she fails to take her racial and economic privilege into account. Though Jenner says she is compelled to a position of leadership in the trans community precisely because she is so visible, it’s clear that Jenner uses her celebrity to get put in such positions, despite her lack of experience and deep understanding.

Though her TIME comments received the lion’s share of attention, it’s actually her recent video appearance with Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., that demonstrates the reasons why Jenner cannot be currently relied upon to represent the transgender community in political and policy matters. The fact that she didn’t cede the opportunity to speak on worldwide trans issues to a more experienced trans advocate – or at least share that spotlight if it was thought that her celebrity would bring more attention to the video – speaks to the ways in which Jenner continues to believe that she can represent these issues herself despite her inexperience.

There are many ways and reasons to criticize Jenner while still accounting for her precarious position as a trans woman.

Jenner’s first, most substantial comment in her exchange with Power demonstrates the degree to which she is out of touch not just in terms of the lives of trans people in the U.S., but also the rest of the world. “If you look at issues on a worldwide basis, I’m pretty comfortable with the issues here in the United States," she says. "We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. But If you look at this on an international level, these issues are huge. I mean, people are murdered, killed, hung over this issue, and it just doesn’t have to be that way.”

Dawn Ennis from the Advocate pointed out the potential insensitivity of Jenner’s comments in light of the vast amounts of discrimination and violence transgender people experience in the U.S., yet characterizes her use of “comfortable” to describe the American situation as “a slip of the tongue,” especially in light of the fact that she discusses trans suicide and murder rates later in the video. Though one would imagine that a person who is closely involved with transgender violence and discrimination on a day-to-day basis, the type of person typically called upon to speak to policymakers regarding such issues, wouldn’t make such a slip, and it would have been a better choice to allow such voices to be heard in the context of a U.N. video.

But more substantially, Jenner’s statement demonstrates her lack of understanding about transgender issues in an international context. Transgender people have been allowed to legally change their genders in Sweden since 1972, and the Netherlands has a well-known history of respect for transgender people. And even in so-called Third World countries, there are many indigenous traditions that respect and even valorize transgender people, and intolerance against trans people in these contexts can often be traced to Western colonial influence. So presenting the American situation as the superior example of transgender acceptance does not hold up even under cursory examination.

As the year of Jenner’s transgender debut comes to an end, it’s vital for everyone – cis and trans people alike – to closely and continually examine their biases whenever they scrutinize her comments or actions. There are many ways and reasons to criticize Jenner while still accounting for her precarious position as a trans woman, by focusing on issues that substantially affect the transgender community rather than devolving into squabbles about appearance and beauty.

The thing about looks is, as she’s said herself, Jenner is still learning what it means to live as a woman in public, even as she spent most of her life feeling herself to be one. Cis women have an entire lifetime to adjust to that role, and major trans celebrity figures like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock transitioned out of the public eye, which allowed their thinking to be already well-developed by the time they became representatives for the trans community. A lot of what Jenner's doing and saying reflects both common behavior from and reactions to newly-transitioned trans women — except for Jenner, it's happening on the grandest of scales.

At the same time, it’s also important for Jenner to be more cognizant of her position as a newly-transitioned transgender woman who enjoys enormous racial and economic privilege, not just at the level of apology but of action. She can do this by giving more opportunities to people who have both experience and expertise on the large swath of the trans population who do not enjoy her status – key thinkers like Julia Serano and Susan Stryker, or longtime activists like Monica Roberts and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. This would mean Jenner not just giving these women supporting roles as part of her entourage, but treating them as equals. This is how, in 2016, we can chance escaping The Jenner Effect: Jenner’s every small misstep becoming fodder for a media and broader public that are subject to the encompassing forces of transmisogyny, while the worst perpetrators of transmisogyny continue to go unchecked.

Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

BuzzFeed Yellow / Via youtube.com

Getting messaged by a childhood bully on a gay dating app. Navigating the dating scene as a black trans woman. Aspiring to motherhood. Saying goodbye to historic queer spaces. These, and more, are the powerful reflections in BuzzFeed LGBT’s favorite essays of 2015.

Michelle Rial/BuzzFeed News

Expensive, Exhausting, And Deeply Unsexy: Babymaking While Queer — Lindsay King-Miller

Trying to conceive can be difficult and emotionally draining for anyone. Lindsay King-Miller discovered that when you're part of a queer couple, the path to parenthood is all the more complicated.

Jenny Chang for BuzzFeed News

Coming Out To My Exes As A Gay Trans Man — Anonymous

This writer chose to publish his essay anonymously "to protect the innocent, the guilty, and the terminally clueless" — that is, all of the men he'd been involved with, who then learned that he was not the straight girl they'd always thought he was.

Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

Finding Happiness As A Trans Woman Of Color — Kai Cheng Thom

Growing up, trans women of color like Kai Cheng Thom are taught to expect nothing but violence, rejection, and early death. In this essay, she finds gender euphoria against the odds through trans sisterhood — and by redefining her idea of happiness.

Ping Zhu for BuzzFeed News

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Pepperdine University website

Via pepperdine.edu

WASHINGTON — The federal ban on sex discrimination in education includes a ban on sexual orientation discrimination, a federal judge in California ruled this past week.

U.S. District Court Judge Dean Pregerson's ruling appears to be the first time a federal judge has made this ruling as it pertains to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal ban on sex discrimination in education.

Without much fanfare, advocates and federal officials in recent years, with support from some courts, have undertaken a significant effort to expand the reach of existing federal anti-discrimination laws — primarily Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX — to cover lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from discrimination.

The California case was brought by two women who allege that Pepperdine University "discriminated against and harassed them" because of their perceived sexual orientation.

Discussing "the line between discrimination based on gender stereotyping and discrimination based on sexual orientation," Pregerson wrote, "the Court concludes that the distinction is illusory and artificial, and that sexual orientation discrimination is not a category distinct from sex or gender discrimination."

Haley Videckis and Layana White, two former members of Pepperdine’s women’s basketball team, allege in the lawsuit that they faced discriminatory treatment after the team's "[coach] and others on the staff of the women’s basketball team came to the conclusion that Plaintiffs were lesbians and were in a lesbian relationship," as Pregerson wrote. The alleged actions of Adi Conlogue, an athletic academic coordinator for the team, are highlighted in the complaint, as detailed by Pregerson in his ruling.

Via assets.documentcloud.org

The decision allows Videckis and White's lawsuit to proceed.

Explaining his reasoning, Pregerson wrote that "claims of discrimination based on sexual orientation are covered by Title VII and IX" — "not as a category of independent claims separate from sex and gender stereotype," but instead because "claims of sexual orientation discrimination are gender stereotype or sex discrimination claims."

Via assets.documentcloud.org

A series of agency rulings, administration moves, and court fights in recent years have sought to expand the definition of "sex" in those laws to include gender identity, aimed at anti-transgender discrimination. More recently, the moves have also sought to expand that definition of "sex" to include sexual orientation, aimed at anti-LGB discrimination.

Over the course of the past four years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has led on these issues. In several rulings, beginning in early 2012, the agency has established its view that the sex discrimination ban in Title VII covers anti-transgender discrimination and other discrimination based on gender identity.

Once that was established, at least within the EEOC, the agency ruled — in July of this year — that the same ban also covers anti-gay discrimination and other discrimination based on sexual orientation. Pregerson cited that decision in the ruling allowing the lawsuit against Pepperdine to proceed.

Via assets.documentcloud.org

In addition to the EEOC decisions binding federal agencies, the EEOC, as BuzzFeed News reported early this year, also is working to ensure these rulings are being enforced in all its field offices across the country — offices that investigate and attempt to settle discrimination complaints in the private industry.

The Justice Department formally supported the EEOC's position as to gender identity at the end of 2014. Since then, it has taken that position in a handful of court cases, through the filing of statements of interest or amicus curiae briefs in cases from Texas to Virginia.

The Justice Department has not, however, weighed in yet on the sexual orientation question at issue in the lawsuit against Pepperdine University.

Although advances in gay rights might make it seem like the sexual orientation-based argument would have moved before the gender identity-based argument, there were many court rulings explicitly holding that sexual orientation discrimination is not protected by sex discrimination bans, particularly before the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws as unconstitutional.

Now, however, with sodomy laws struck down and equal protection principles invoked in protecting LGB people's same-sex relationships, agencies and courts have begun rethinking the question — first under Title VII and now under Title IX.

At the same time, the gender identity-related question is proceeding in a case that could reach the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as this fall.

Gavin Grimm, a transgender male student, sued Gloucester County School District in Virginia after the district enacted a policy that bars him from using the male restrooms at the school. The case, now on appeal — and with the Obama administration backing Grimm — is scheduled to be heard by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals at the end of January.

The losing side there could ask the Supreme Court to take up the case — a move that certainly would raise the stakes of the issue and, undoubtedly, the coverage of it. Already, Sen. Ted Cruz has criticized the administration's position and Hillary Clinton's campaign has announced that she would continue the effort.

Grimm's case, though, only addresses the gender identity-related portion of the argument. Even were that case to be heard by the Supreme Court, the questions raised in the case against Pepperdine University about whether sexual orientation is covered by existing sex discrimination bans would remain unresolved.

Read the court's full order in the case against Pepperdine University:

AP / Toby Talbot

The Food and Drug Administration published a revised policy Monday that eases the United States' outright ban on blood donations from men who have had sex with men — a policy instituted in the 1983 amidst the AIDS epidemic.

The new policy states that men who have been sexually active with another man may give blood — but only if they have abstained from sexual contact with another man for 12 months or more. That condition, in effect, maintains the ban for gay men who are even somewhat sexually active.

The FDA has posted the policy, known as guidance, here.

Peter Marks, deputy director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, said on a conference call with reporters Monday that there is “sound scientific evidence” based on a similar policy in Australia that the new guidelines will not increase HIV transmissions in the blood supply.

Men can donate blood if they have not had sexual contact with another man for 12 months or more.

However, coming after a one-year process involving public comment, the new guidelines still leave critics saying that the FDA is needlessly stigmatizing gay men and the guidance lacks scientific merit.

"The revised policy is still discriminatory," said a statement from the National Gay Blood Drive, which advocated along with the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay Men's Health Crisis, and others for a policy that approved or rejected donors based on their individual risk factors — not their sexual orientation.

"While many gay and bisexual men will be eligible to donate their blood and help save lives under this 12 month deferral, countless more will continue to be banned solely on the basis of their sexual orientation and without medical or scientific reasoning," the statement said.

FDA officials had also examined eliminating the ban altogether, using a deferral period shorter than 12 months, and assessing donors based on their personal risk factors. But Marks said HIV was too prevalent in the U.S. to eliminate the ban altogether, and not enough data existed from epidemiologically similar countries to support a shorter deferral timeframe or a risk-based assessment.

Martin O'Malley, former governor or Maryland, appeared to be the only presidential candidate commenting on the new guidelines, condemning them as "still discriminatory."

Rep. Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado and chair of the House LGBT Equality Caucus Co-Chair, blasted the policy.

“It is ridiculous and counter to the public health that a married gay man in a monogamous relationship can’t give blood, but a promiscuous straight man who has had hundreds of opposite sex partners in the last year can," Polis said in a statement.

"The FDA’s own BloodDROPS survey has found that the prevalence of HIV in male blood donors who reported that they had sexual relations with men is just 0.25%, which is lower than the overall prevalence in the United States of 0.38%," Polis added. "There is no scientific reason to impose a celibacy requirement on gay men before they can donate blood."

The rule also addresses transgender donors. It says the "FDA recommends that male or female gender be taken to be self-identified and self-reported."

But on its own, that change offers little clarity to a policy that some blood banks have interpreted as a ban on all transgender donors.

One national blood donation company — facing two discrimination lawsuits from transgender women who were allegedly turned away — has argued in court records that previous FDA policy banned all transgender women. It is unclear that donors self-reporting gender, as specified by the new guidance, clarifies that issue.

Asked about the ambiguity, Marks said, “There is no ban on transgender donation through this guidance.” However, Marks did not answer a question from BuzzFeed News about how the guidance makes it clear that transgender people are not in fact banned.

Whitman-Walker Health, a health center that serves LGBT people and people living with HIV, said in a statement it was "disheartened that the FDA has failed to give clear guidance to prevent discrimination against transgender individuals, which occurs too often at blood donation centers. The FDA must do better than this slow chipping away at antiquated bans.”

The policy was proposed as a draft in May, with similar language to the final guidance released Monday. Responding to that draft, 82 members of Congress sent a letter to the FDA in July that said they were grateful the FDA was relaxing the ban but the one-year-deferral policy and language about transgender donors remained problematic.

"There is no scientific reason to impose a celibacy requirement on gay men before they can donate blood."

"The draft's proposed policy change would, in practice, leave the lifetime ban in place for the vast majority of [men who have sex with men], even those who are healthy ... Both deferral policies are discriminatory and not based on science, and both approaches are unacceptable," the Congressional Democrats members wrote in July.

The members of Congress also wrote they are “deeply concerned” that medical directors would be given discretion to turn away transgender donors.

“Transgender individuals often face discrimination, unfair stigma, and misunderstanding, including by some medical professionals,” the lawmakers said in the July letter. Leaving discretion to staff at blood banks “increases the chance that a transgender individual will be turned away, and set the stage for discrimination.”

The guidance is non-binding. However, blood donation centers tend to follow the guidance as policy, typically interpreting it conservatively.

Donation centers that move blood products across state lines will need their new procedures approved by the FDA, Marks said, but those operating entirely in-state can implement the new guidelines immediately.

Sen Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, has been among the most dogged members of Congress trying to reform the FDA's blood policy.

In a statement Monday, she called the guidelines "just the first step toward ending an outdated policy that is medically and scientifically unwarranted. This revision doesn’t go far enough – and I expect the FDA to maintain its commitment to work with stakeholders to develop better blood donor policies based on science."

The FDA's Marks said the agency would revisit the policy as more data becomes available to consider risk-based assessments and a shorter deferral period.

France announced in November that it would loosen its ban on blood donations from gay men starting in spring 2016. Men who have abstained from sex with men for one year will be allowed to donate; men who have had sex with just one man, or have not been sexually active, could donate after four months.

Responding to the FDA's final guidance, the Human Rights Campaign called it a step in the right direction that nonetheless fell short.

The LGBT advocacy group's government affairs director, David Stacy, said in a statement, "It simply cannot be justified in light of current scientific research and updated blood screening technology. This new policy prevents men from donating life-saving blood based solely on their sexual orientation rather than actual risk to the blood supply."

I was totally messier than the Barefoot Contessa, but learned a bit about myself and my new marriage.

Andrew Richard / Mathew Jedeikin / BuzzFeed

Hi, I'm Mathew and I got married a few weeks ago.

I've been OBSESSED with Ina Garten and her iconic show Barefoot Contessa pretty much since it debuted on Food Network.

Instagram: @mathewguiver

Food Network

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So you know you’re neurotic, but do you know what kind of neurotic?

Amazon

It won’t hurt forever. You’ve so got this.

You are allowed to be as upset as you need to be.

Acknowledging your emotions instead of pushing them away does not make you weak. Heartbreak is no joke and everyone whose been through it knows that. So don't be ashamed to cry all the damn tears if you need to.

CBS / Via imgfave.com

There is no right or wrong amount of time in which you ~should~ be moved on by.

Every relationship is different, so you can't put a time frame on when you're supposed to be over your ex. Focusing on the when, instead of taking each day at a time, is only going to leave you frustrated and feeling defeated.

instagram.com / Via Instagram: @buzzfeed

Just because you're in pain without them doesn't mean the relationship was right for you.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to think that because you miss someone it means you're meant to be with them. Even a bad relationship can come with a few good memories.

Instagram: @bethlburcham / Via instagram.com

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Put a ~vintage~ ring on it.

Amy Sefton for BuzzFeed

This sparkling 1920's-inspired looker:

From Heidi Gibson, $1,850. Get it here.

etsy.com

This antique-looking tanzanite ring:

From In Our Star, $636. Get it here.

etsy.com

This classic and romantic 14K white gold ring:

From Ben Bridge, $1,495. Get it here.

benbridge.com

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BuzzFeed News

In late October, Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin explained why his group was spending an unprecedented $600,000 to uphold an ordinance in Houston that banned discrimination. It was critical, he said, for the largest LGBT organization in the country to represent the interests of its 1.5 million members and supporters.

"These are grassroots folks who give to us so that we can fight these battles, wherever they are," Griffin told BuzzFeed News at the campaign headquarters, where he’d just flown in from Washington, D.C.

After marriage equality was won at the Supreme Court, HRC placed a priority on passing a nondiscrimination law in Congress. To build momentum, they endeavored to pass nondiscrimination legislation in cities and states along the way. Griffin said that when “building momentum across the country, every victory you have is a building block.” So defending Houston’s law was essential.

"This is a big one, it’s an important one, it’s an expensive one,” he said. “But it’s a battle we have got to win."

Six days later, however, voters repealed the law by a 22-percentage point chasm — despite the fact that Griffin and his allies were six and nine points ahead in two early polls. Houston Unites, the name of the central campaign, had raised about $4 million in total, outspending their opponents three to one.

What happened?

Paul Abell / AP Images for Human Rights Campaign

Their defeat can be attributed primarily to one ubiquitous, bumper-sticker-ready slogan: “No men in women's bathrooms.” Anti-LGBT activists ran that message with visceral TV and radio commercials that claimed Houston’s nondiscrimination law would lead to men sexually assaulting young girls in public restrooms. This attack has been raised by conservative opponents virtually everywhere laws like this have been debated in recent years.

The argument is based on an underlying premise that transgender women are actually dangerous men — a claim that has no factual foothold. It’s never been an issue in the 200 cities and 17 states with laws like these on the books. But it’s kryptonite to LGBT nondiscrimination laws.

One day after the Houston defeat, on Nov. 5, Griffin addressed his massive lists of members and supporters with an email titled, “A wake up call.”

"While I know that the loss in Houston is heartbreaking and not something anyone thought would happen, this fight isn't over,” he wrote. “We will refuse to let something like this happen in your hometown.” There was also this fundraising pitch: “We have emptied the war chest for the fight in Houston and we need to replenish now for the battles ahead.”

About a month later, the next battle is here and that same virulent bathroom message, inevitably, is back.

But it’s not clear that HRC got the wake-up call. The organization — the top organization trying to pass and uphold LGBT nondiscrimination policies — is unwilling to say how it plans to address the bathroom attack, or even how its strategy will change in the wake of the Houston vote and other cities.

Within the past year, voters in Springfield, Missouri, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, also repealed nondiscrimination laws after critics warned about men in women’s restrooms, along with concerns about infringements of religious freedoms. A bill that had been moving through the city council in Cleveland, Ohio, stalled in late 2014 after the bathroom attack was raised. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the city council rejected the same sort of bill in March after critics deployed the bathroom attack.

The same message is already resonating on other 2016 battlefields.

Activists filed a petition in Anchorage, Alaska, the day before Thanksgiving to repeal the city's LGBT nondiscrimination law, which was passed by the city council in September.

What’s the primary motivation to overturn the law? “We do not believe that a man should be using the same bathroom as our little girls,” Bernadette Wilson, who filed the application for a referendum, told BuzzFeed News in early December.

Pat Sullivan / AP

Likewise in Indiana, an effort is already underway to block an LGBT nondiscrimination bill — by focusing on the bathroom issue. Eric Miller, executive director of the group Advance America, proclaims in a new video, “The women and children of Indiana are in great danger.”

Millers warns that the Indiana legislature, which convenes Jan. 5, will be considering “dangerous legislation that could give a man — including a sexual predator, a rapist, or child molester — the right to be in a women’s restroom and women’s locker room with your wife, your sister, your mom, your daughter, and your granddaughter.”

LGBT-rights activists are also trying to pass a nondiscrimination law in Jacksonville, Florida — where opponents adopted a rallying cry last month of “No men in women’s bathrooms” — and they are remounting an effort in Charlotte. It’s simmering in Anchorage, where proponents of the repeal effort are currently sparring with the city over petition language.

In short, this is an ongoing problem for LGBT nondiscrimination efforts — perhaps the greatest obstacle to achieving their post-marriage agenda.

BuzzFeed News asked HRC spokesperson Olivia Dalton, a couple times in early November and again early December, how the nation’s leading LGBT advocacy group will deal with the bathroom attack when this comes up again in Anchorage and other locales expected to take up the same sort of law in early 2016.

"HRC will be mobilizing our millions of members, supporters, and pro-equality voters in places where LGBT people are under attack, and we are looking at where our other resources will have the greatest impact," said Dalton, avoiding a direct answer.

HRC did those things Dalton mentioned in Houston — more than it ever had done before, including shipping 34 staffers to work full time on the campaign — and it failed.

"They keep on making the same mistakes over and over."

"They keep on making the same mistakes over and over," said Barbra Casbar Siperstein, a member of the DNC's executive committee and political director of Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey, who spoke to BuzzFeed News in her own capacity and not on behalf of the organizations. “I really don’t see that they have a plan — have they learned from the Houston experience?”

Moreover, she continued, "If LGBT equality laws are being repealed locally, it’s going to make it impossible to do anything nationally."

Presidential candidates have also picked up the issue, particularly in response to the Obama administration interpreting civil rights laws to say transgender students can use single-sex school facilities corresponding with their gender identity. On Nov. 19, Sen. Ted Cruz argued the “federal government is going after school districts, trying to force them to let boys shower with little girls.”

Asked yet again this month how HRC would address the bathroom issue, HRC did not answer.

“They absolutely have a responsibility to figure this out,” Justine Turnage, vice president of Arkansas’s Transgender Equality Network, said in a phone call with BuzzFeed News. “And the thing is, we are telling them how to approach this. If they are going to push these ordinances, and get us hopeful for new protections, then they need to be able to win it and make it stick. That’s going to require heavier emphasis on transgender issues.”

Turnage worked on the campaign to uphold Fayetteville’s LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance, a campaign that failed in 2014 despite HRC’s heavy involvement. Local activists then remounted a campaign to pass and uphold the law in 2015 — this time successfully — without HRC’s prominent hand, she said. Their strategy: putting transgender people and locals out front on the campaign.

BuzzFeed News asked the same question of Freedom For All Americans, another key national player in the Houston campaign, but got no reply.

That group, it bears mentioning, includes many former employees of Freedom to Marry, which is shuttering operations after winning at the Supreme Court. The new group has explicitly aimed to use successful Freedom to Marry strategies in advancing LGBT nondiscrimination work.

But the larger problem, it appears, is that the modern LGBT rights movement was built around opposing anti-gay efforts — at the ballot and within government — and eventually winning on gay issues, particularly marriage equality.

During that time, though, the big national groups invested comparatively little infrastructure or expertise into nurturing transgender issues. Moreover, they conducted less organization-building and education within conservative states — where marriage equality prevailed due to court rulings more than grassroots activism — even though those states lacked anti-discrimination laws.

Now, the remaining battles for LGBT rights are largely focused on those issues and in those conservative states.

It’s particularly unsurprising the bathroom message has returned to Anchorage, where an LGBT nondiscrimination initiative was beaten back just in 2012. This is one of the commercials, which says the law would have allowed a man who identifies as a woman to terrify women in locker rooms.

youtube.com

Although the attacks, as described by critics, are a myth, discrimination against transgender people is verifiably rampant. Study after study shows trans people are refused jobs and housing, physically attacked, and murdered in highly disproportionate rates. According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, homicides of trans women in the United States doubled in the past year.

So the bathroom smear against this population is not just a means to legalize anti-transgender discrimination, it’s a catalyst to promote it.

“The tragedy here is trans folks are the ones who are often harassed and victimized when they visit public bathrooms, because folks across the country are perpetuating this myth,” Andrea Zekis, policy director of Basic Rights Oregon, told BuzzFeed News. “Transgender people visit bathrooms for the same reasons as everyone else — to use it. And when we do, we want privacy, dignity, and respect just like everyone else.”

Grassroots activists have suggested several responses for campaigns. The most obvious is pointing out there have been no incidents of these LGBT nondiscrimination laws being used for nefarious purposes in restrooms in the cities and states where they are currently on the books.

Another defense: In TV ads, campaigns could feature transgender women who familiarize themselves to voters, show they’re not men, and explain that they use the bathroom to pee, not to prey.

“Like in every movement,” Zekis said, “stories are our most powerful tool. That’s how we brought love back to marriage and we can do the same for giving dignity and respect to transgender people in this country. Not addressing this myth feeds this culture of violence and misunderstanding about transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals.”

Perhaps most pointedly, scruffy, muscular transgender men have been posting selfies from inside women’s bathrooms — ostensibly where some conservative activists and politicians want transgender men to pee — to show that requiring people to use the restrooms associated with their birth sex actually creates the very problem of “men in women’s bathrooms” conservatives claim to oppose. (Republicans in Florida and other states have introduced bills in the last year requiring people to use the restroom associated with their birth sex.)

But some political experts have suggested LGBT advocates avoid the bathroom debate entirely.

Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice University, oversaw a poll by his college and the University of Houston that gauged persuasiveness of pro and con arguments. The strongest argument for repealing the law was bathrooms, swinging nearly 7% of voters to oppose the measure, he told BuzzFeed News a few days before the elections. But there was an even stronger counter message to uphold the law — focusing on the economic risks of repealing it — and Stein said proponents should focus on that.

But instead Houston Unites spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads that argued the nondiscrimination law made the city more equitable for everyone, particularly focusing on veterans. Indeed, the law banned discrimination on a wide range of characteristics, from race and gender identity to sexual orientation and military status.

In response to critics, one ad showed a former cop saying predatory behavior in bathrooms was unfounded and illegal under the law. But Richard Carlbom, the campaign manager of Houston Unites, told BuzzFeed News he did not know how much they actually ran that ad on TV. It was important to assuage concerns about the bathroom message, he said, and then focus on the benefits of the law.

“I think we have done a good job of providing people a space to lower their anxiety and then find a path to get to a yes vote,” he said four days before the election.

Michael Stravato / AP Images for Human Rights Campaign

But consider the strategy for marriage equality, which ultimately won popular support because people saw images of loving same-sex couples and their families. Maybe that strategy of aggressively putting forward people in the heart of the debate — in this case, transgender women — will persuade voters in some places, and maybe not work in others.

For their part, the American Civil Liberties Union — a major player in LGBT politics nationally — did respond to BuzzFeed News’ request to comment about the bathroom issue. The group’s state affiliate had raised money for the Houston campaign and donated its office to become the campaign headquarters.

Crystal Cooper, a spokesperson for the ACLU, said the group is committed to upholding the law in Anchorage and “to countering deceitful anti-trans rhetoric used to try to repeal it.”

“We will do so by educating voters and helping them understand who transgender people are (i.e., NOT ‘men dressing up as women’), that they are not sexual predators, that they need to be able to use the restroom safely just like everyone else, and that the nondiscrimination ordinance does not give anyone a defense for entering a restroom to harm or harass others,” Cooper wrote in an email.

She continued: “We learned from Houston that we have a long way to go in combatting prejudice against transgender people, and we know we need to focus much more on breaking down those stereotypes, in our work to both pass and defend sexual orientation and gender identity protections.”

But for now, there is simply no cohesive strategy from HRC — despite fundraising pitches that are based on a promise to prevail in the nondiscrimination fights — to deal with the bathroom issue.

Funding for LGBT groups has grown steadily since the recession in 2008, according to a Dec. 3 report by the Movement Advancement Project, which found those groups collectively only took a decline of less than 1% in 2015. Despite that decline, the report found, "Individual donor revenue grew 11% from 2013 to 2014.”

HRC reported $37 million in revenue in 2014, of which $28.8 million came from donations, fundraisers, grants, and other contributions. Tax records show those levels have remained essentially steady from the two years before.

After winning marriage in June, HRC announced their new priority was banning discrimination federally. “Here's the next major fight for the LGBT community,” said the subject line from one of the email blasts, while a July press release declared, "Historic Marriage Equality Ruling Generates Momentum for New Non-Discrimination Law.”

Their aim: Passing the Equality Act, which was introduced in Congress later that month. But as local versions of the same sort of law are repealed, while the bathroom chant gets louder, the Equality Act has has foundered in Congress without a single Republican co-sponsor — let alone a committee hearing.

They are going to fight us tooth and nail in every single one of these battles."

Let’s take a moment to remember the good.

Trans girls were welcomed with open arms into Girl Guides of Canada.

Although they were already permitted to join on a case-by-case basis, in 2015 Girl Guides of Canada released guidelines to ensure trans girls and volunteers could feel at home in the organization.

Girl Guides of Canada

You no longer need to get surgery to change your legal sex in Quebec.

As advocate Gabrielle Bouchard put it, the move is "a huge recognition that gender is very, very diverse."

Courtesy of Gabrielle Bouchard

Alberta added human rights protections for trans people.

“No Albertan should be denied basic services for being true to themselves,” Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley said at the announcement, according to CBC.

Jason Franson / The Canadian Press

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Gov Matt Bevin

AP / Timothy D. Easley

Just weeks after winning his election, Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin fulfilled a campaign promise on Tuesday to accommodate county clerks who hold a religious objection to same-sex couples marrying — a cause elevated to national attention by Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis.

But critics said Bevin has overstepped his authority as governor.

At the heart of the dispute is Davis, who was sued in federal court for refusing to issue marriage licenses after the Supreme Court's ruling for marriage equality. Davis contended that issuing licenses to same-sex couples violated her religious freedom, because Kentucky state law mandates that the name of elected county clerks appear on the licenses — which Davis argued was a form of endorsement of those marriages.

Bevin issued an executive order Tuesday that directs the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives to issue a revised marriage license to Kentucky county clerks. According to press release from his office, "The name of the County Clerk is no longer required to appear on the form."

Gov. Bevin supplied a new marriage license form with his order that includes a field for the name and title of the "official" issuing the licenses. The previous form specifically called for the name of the county clerk under whose authority the license was issued.

Jessica Ditto, a spokesperson for the governor, told BuzzFeed News, "It's a simple solution that ensures everyone's religious beliefs are honored. It removes any form of conflict that may be found by issuing those marriage licenses."

Asked where the governor derives authority to change the licensing form requirements without action from the legislature, Ditto said that legislative action "is simply not required."

But Bill Sharp, legal director of the ACLU of Kentucky, which is representing the plaintiffs in the suit against Davis, disagreed.

In a statement, Sharp said, "The requirement that the county clerk’s name appear on marriage licenses is prescribed by Kentucky law and is not subject to unilateral change by the governor — conceded by the previous administration in court filings. Today, however, a new administration claims to have that authority."

“Governor Bevin’s executive action has added to the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over marriage licensing in Kentucky," he added.

Ditto said a copy of the order was not yet available.

“This is a wonderful Christmas gift for Kim Davis," one of her lawyers said.

Although Davis was briefly jailed this summer for violating a court order to issue the licenses, one of her deputy clerks has since been providing licenses to same sex couples; however, the licenses have lacked Davis's name, raising questions about their validity.

Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, the Christian advocacy law firm representing Davis in court, said in a statement that the executive order was "a wonderful Christmas gift for Kim Davis."

"What former Gov. [Steve] Beshear could have done but refused to do, Gov. Bevin did with this executive order," Staver said. "We will notify the courts of the executive order and this order proves our point that a reasonable accommodation should have been done to avoid Kim having to spend time in jail."

Asked if Gov. Bevin would take further steps concerning marriage licenses or if he would attempt to obstruct the Supreme Court ruling's implementation in the state, Ditto told BuzzFeed News, "He does not believe the government should be involved in the marriage business whatsoever." Ditto declined to elaborate.

Amid the uproar over Davis and Rowan County, two other county clerks in Kentucky — the clerks in Casey and Whitley Counties — have also refused to issue marriage licenses. However, no plaintiffs have come forward to challenge those county clerks in court.

More like Troye Slay-van.

When he launched the Blue Neighbourhood video trilogy and it was amazing and completely heartbreaking.

Universal Music

...and she fangirled over it as much as the rest of us.

Instagram: @taylorswift

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The fatality happened almost exactly five years after President Obama officially repealed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.

View Video ›

facebook.com

One of the six American service members who was killed on Monday by a suicide bombing in Afghanistan is believed to have been the first openly gay service member to die in combat since the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

U.S. Air Force Maj. Adrianna M. Vorderbruggen, a 36-year-old from Minnesota, was among the victims of the attack, which took place at Bagram Air Base in eastern Afghanistan. According to ABC 7 News, Vorderbruggen was from the Bay Area in California and was married to Heather Lamb. The couple had a 4-year-old son.

Vorderbruggen was killed just one day after the five-year anniversary of President Obama officially repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which precluded openly gay and lesbian service members from serving in the military.

While Vorderbruggen was not the first out troop ever to be killed, she appears to have been the first to die since the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Sue Fulton, president of an organization called Service Members, Partners, Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All (SPARTA), reflected on the significance of the repeal in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News.

Many LGBT Americans have given their lives in military service to the nation. Thanks to the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' Major Vorderbruggen's wife will be honored rather than hiding in the shadows. This tragedy is a sobering reminder of why it's important that our service members and their families be recognized for who they really are; gay, straight, transgender, all deserve honor for their sacrifice."

The Military Partners and Family Coalition posted a note to Facebook recalling memories of Maj. Vorderbruggen and her family.

In the post, she is remembered as "one of the most friendly and laid-back people you could ever hope to meet and was an accomplished airman, a great athlete, and most of all, a wonderful mom."

According to ABC 7, Lamb received her wife's flag-draped casket at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Before the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal, she would not have been able to do that.

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ® and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

Employers, landlords, and cops in New York City are now legally required to use people's pronouns of choice when addressing them — and restaurants are no longer allowed to deny service to men just because they refused to wear a tie.

These and other new policies are included in document issued on Monday by the New York Commission on Human Rights. The document is meant to explain the specific ways in which the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio intends to enforce a a 2002 local law designed to protect the rights of transgender people.

The new guidance states the city's official position on a number of issues. It explicitly establishes that it is illegal to deny people access to bathrooms and shelters that correspond with their gender identity, regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth. Here's the relevant passage:

The [New York Civil Rights Law] requires that individuals be permitted to use single-sex facilities, such as bathrooms or locker rooms, and participate in single-sex programs, consistent with their gender, regardless of their sex assigned at birth, anatomy, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on their identification. The law does not require entities to make existing bathrooms all-gender or construct additional restrooms. Covered entities [such as landlords, city agencies, and employees] that have single-occupancy restrooms should make clear that they can be used by people of all genders Some people, including, for example, customers, other program participants, tenants, or employees, may object to sharing a facility or participating in a program with a transgender or gender non-conforming person. Such objections are not a lawful reason to deny access to that transgender or gender non-conforming individual.

The document also states that employers, landlords, and city agencies — including the NYPD — are required to refer to people using the pronoun and name of their choice, even if the person's official identification states a different name. The guidance explicitly allows for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, such as ze and hir, in official city business.

Among other provisions, the guidance states that requiring different dress codes or uniforms for people of different gender expressions is illegal in New York. This means, for example, that restaurants are no longer allowed to require men to wear ties in order to be served. Here's the passage explaining the city's reasoning:

The variability of expressions associated with gender and gender norms contrast vastly across culture, age, community, personality, style, and sense of self. Placing the burden on individuals to justify their gender identity or expression and demonstrate why a particular distinction makes them uncomfortable or does not conform to their gender expression would serve to reinforce the traditional notion of gender that our law has disavowed. Differing standards based on gender will always be rooted in gender norms and stereotypes, even when they may be perceived by some as innocuous. When an individual is treated differently because of their gender and required to conform to a specific standard assigned to their gender, that is gender discrimination regardless of intent, and that is not permissible under the NYCHRL.

Violations of the new policies could result in civil penalties of up to $250,000, according to the guidance document.

You can read the entire guidance document here.

LINK: Why America’s Top LGBT Group Is Losing An Argument Over Bathrooms

SAN SALVADOR — La Cuki Alarcón was late to work on the night that his roommate disappeared, which is why he is still around to tell what happened.

His hair was extravagantly curled, and he matched a long skirt with high boots, a look he hoped hid his legs, which he thought looked too manly to appeal to his clients.

Alarcón was hurrying to the strip they used to work across the street from El Salvador’s national symbol, the Divine Savior of the World monument, a statue of Jesus with his feet planted on a globe perched atop a column about 60 feet in the air. Work was so steady on that corner that Alarcón thought a client might have already picked up his roommate and the other locas they hung out with. Outsiders called them all “homosexuals,” but the sex workers — some who lived as women all the time, others who dressed as women primarily on the job — called each other “crazies” even though some used it as an insult that would roughly translate to “sissy.” (Alarcón asked BuzzFeed News to refer to him using male pronouns.)

As Alarcón reached the opposite corner, he could see his friends were still there. He hesitated for a minute before crossing because the stoplight was out, and that’s when he realized the locas were not alone. Four tall men in ski masks were throwing them into the back of a green truck, clubbing them with the butts of their guns.

Harvey Meston / Getty Images

Alarcón remembers the year as 1980, a time when death squads were using trucks like this one to make people disappear by the hundreds every week. This was the beginning of the civil war that consumed El Salvador until 1992. The United Nations, NGOs, journalists, and scholars have sought to uncover what happened to many of the more than 75,000 who were killed or disappeared during the conflict, but no one has ever investigated what happened to Alarcón’s friends. As far as anyone knows, no one has even recorded their names among the missing.

But Alarcón can still rattle off the names of many of the dozen he remembers being thrown into the truck that night. There was his roommate Cristi, whom he remembers as a gentle 26-year-old who would bring him gifts of coats or shoes from trips she’d frequently make to Guatemala and Mexico. Another was Verónica, from San Bartolo near the Honduran border, who was so pretty that her clients would sometimes insist on having their pictures taken with her. Carolina was so well put together that she’d sometimes get into trouble — she looked “all woman,” Alarcón said, and her clients could get violent when they discovered she was trans as she undressed.

Alarcón is one of the only witnesses to their disappearances who is still alive, but the story of that night is well-remembered. It has been passed down from generation to generation of trans sex workers in the country’s capital, San Salvador. It’s been retold so many times it can sometimes be hard to separate fact from legend, passed down in the same way many families retell the haunting mysteries that still linger from the war. The tale stakes a claim for trans women in a country that often seems to wish they would disappear.

“Maybe there still could be some justice for us, right?” Alarcón said during an interview in San Salvador last December. “Maybe remembering everything that happened to these friends can bring some peace for all homosexuals?”

Patricia Leiva and La Cuki Alarcón in Leiva’s house

J. Lester Feder / BuzzFeed News

I first learned about this story from a 38-year-old Salvadoran trans activist named Karla Avelar in the fall of 2014 while working on a story about LGBT kids fleeing the country to make the dangerous, illegal trip to the United States. El Salvador has some of the highest rates of anti-LGBT violence in the hemisphere, and Avelar recounted waves of unpunished murders over the past several decades. In 2014 alone, at least 12 women and two gay men were killed, according to media reports. There was the “Bloody June” of 2009 in which at least three trans women and two gay men were murdered. Avelar herself survived being shot in the 1990s by a serial killer who had been gunning down trans sex workers.

The ones taken from the Savior of the World were almost mythical to Avelar, who was a baby when the events occurred.

“We don’t even really know much ourselves, but a little while ago one of the survivors told us what happened and said to us, ‘Why don’t you document this, that I was a victim of that attack?’” she said. But the task seemed impossible. “There is no documentation whatsoever, no publication nor record — there is nothing.”

Avelar knew of just one witness who still survived, a woman named Paty who she said was 78 years old, a miracle in a country where violence and HIV are so widespread very few trans women survive to middle age.

“They said that they had dressed them up as soldiers and made them play war”

I flew to El Salvador as soon as I could. Paty’s health sounded fragile and if she died before her memories could be recorded, any hope of documenting the atrocity would die with her. I decided to work with Nicola Chávez Courtright, co-founder of a small organization documenting the history of El Salvador’s LGBT movement called AMATE, hoping she would have ideas on how to start substantiating Paty’s memories.

When we visited Paty — whose full name is Patricia Leiva — shortly before Christmas last year, we learned that much of what Avelar told me was wrong. Leiva was only 60, though it was understandable why Avelar had thought she was much older. Health problems had swollen her stomach like a basketball and made it nearly impossible for her to walk. She also had not been there on the night of the disappearances from the Savior of the World, and years of heavy drinking meant she could only recall bits and pieces of the story, despite having heard it countless times.

Leiva lives in the remains of what used to be a popular beer hall called the Bluegill in a once-thriving red-light district called the Praviana, now subdivided into tenements. The bar had belonged to La Cuki Alarcón, Leiva told us, and he had been there that night.

Alarcón is now retired and lives in the suburbs, surviving with help from his children who live in the United States. Alarcón doesn’t routinely go by “La Cuki” (a Spanish spelling of Cookie) anymore, preferring his male name. But he asked that we not publish his legal first name because he was worried about his safety for talking about the war. Besides, he said, “La Cuki” had been “my nomme de guerre — my homosexual one.”

Alarcón hid from the men rounding up his friends that night by throwing himself to the ground in a small garden. He tried to slink away after watching the men pile his friends into the truck, but more armed men were patrolling the surrounding streets. He remembered making it to the La Religiosa funeral home up the block, where he tried to take sanctuary, but he said the guard wouldn’t let him in because there was a lavish wake underway — “There are only famous people in there,” the guard told him. So he waited out the raid crouched between the cars parked outside.

When the coast was clear, he went back to work on the corner. Within minutes, a client had come and picked him up. Alarcón figured he’d see Cristi in a day or two, which is how long the cops usually held sex workers after a routine vice raid.

But Cristi never came home. None of them did.

Alarcón went to the police stations to try to find her. He even hired a lawyer. But the cops made fun of him and hinted that his friends were already dead.

“They said that they had dressed them up as soldiers and made them play war,” he remembered.

“Maybe there still could be some justice for us, right? Maybe remembering everything that happened to these friends can bring some peace for all homosexuals?”

El Salvador’s 12-year civil war had its roots in political battles that had been going on for half a century. In 1980 it blew up into one of the last and bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War. That year, military leaders ousted moderates in the ruling junta while paramilitary squads aligned with the regime hunted down government critics. The war vaulted into international headlines in March, when the head of the country’s Catholic Church, Archbishop Óscar Romero, was shot through a church doorway while he was celebrating mass.

The U.S. government threw tremendous weight behind the military leaders even as the body count grew, and a rebel force called the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front fought back with a little support from Nicaragua and Cuba. Echoing the early days of Vietnam, Washington sent in military advisers, contributed tens of millions of dollars in military aid, and trained Salvadoran troops at an installation in Panama known as the School of the Americas. The U.S. continued this support even after reporters for the Washington Post and New York Times uncovered that a U.S.-trained battalion was responsible for one of the war’s most infamous atrocities, the extermination of an entire farming village called El Mozote in 1981.

The shallow grave of U.S. nuns exhumed in 1980 in front of 15 reporters and the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White.

Christine Spengler / Sygma / Corbis

The two sides were locked in a stalemate as the Cold War came to an end with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Peace accords signed on Jan. 16, 1992, made uncovering the crimes committed during the war a cornerstone of rebuilding the nation, creating a Truth Commission run by the United Nations to gather witness statements and write a definitive account of the war’s greatest atrocities.

Because many of the war’s abuses were so extensively documented in that process, we thought we might find some record of the disappearances from the Savior of the World. But we came up empty. Our best hope was the archives of the two human rights offices run by San Salvador’s Catholic Archdiocese — the most active human rights monitors during the war — but they could locate no records matching the case. They might have been able to search more if we could provide the victims’ legal names, but Alarcón and the others we spoke with only knew them by their female names.

We had hoped that El Salvador’s oldest gay rights organization, Entre Amigos, would be able to help us substantiate these memories. When it organized the country’s first pride march in 1997, the group declared it as a commemoration of another event said to have happened during the war years: the abduction of a number of trans women from the heart of the Praviana red-light district by a U.S.-trained battalion in June 1984. This is the one document believed to exist that records crimes against LGBT people during the war.

Entre Amigos’ co-founder William Hernández told us in an interview that he had found it while he had a job processing the archive of an organization called the Nongovernmental Human Rights Commission after the war ended, though he said the account was so confusing and incomplete that, when examined “from a legal point of view, it wouldn’t give me anything that argues that this was real.”

He initially said that he would be glad to dig it out of the group’s files for us, but he grew increasingly combative when we attempted to follow up. Finally, he sent us a note saying his lawyers did not “trust how the information will be managed” and requested that we remove reference to Entre Amigos from this story.

So we went directly to the Nongovernmental Human Rights Commission, and they told us they could not locate any such testimony in its archives. None of the people we interviewed said they’d witnessed an abduction as described by Entre Amigos or knew of anyone who had. If the testimony existed and it was as mixed up as Hernández described, there’s the possibility that the person was describing the disappearances from the Savior of the World and some of the details got scrambled in the retelling, including the year.

And we could never pin down the date of the disappearances for sure. It’s not uncommon for people to have difficulty remembering dates from the war years — even when loved ones died, the violence was so unrelenting that the number on a calendar seemed like a fairly meaningless abstraction in daily life, other reporters who covered the conflict told us. Calendar dates might even be especially hard for the trans women we interviewed, most of whom didn’t finish elementary school because they were thrown out by their families once their femininity became apparent.

The witnesses we interviewed mostly gave dates ranging from 1978 to 1980, but the fall of 1980 seems likeliest. One person who lived in the Praviana at the time told us she remembered they were still searching for the missing when one of the most notorious killings of the war took place: the rape and murder of three American nuns and a laywoman by the National Guard on Dec. 2, 1980.

U.S. nuns killed by members of the Salvadoran National Guard on Dec. 2, 1980 during the civil war.

Jose Cabezas / Reuters / Corbis

This timing may be confirmed by something we found while paging through three years of newspapers from the period, held in dusty binders in the collection of San Salvador’s Museum of Anthropology. The only announcement for an event at the La Religiosa funeral home we found was published by both major dailies, El Diario de Hoy and La Prensa Gráfica, on Oct. 1, 1980. It was for a man who had died in Los Angeles, California, whose remains had been shipped home for burial, suggesting he may have been from a wealthy or important family. Alarcón remembers the wake where he tried to hide from the raid as being especially fancy, so there’s a possibility this was it.

That’s not a lot to go on, but two days later, El Diario de Hoy reported that police were leading sweeps to “purge those elements that are undesirable to society” in response to recent thefts. The operation was reportedly focusing on a park about two miles away from the Savior of the World — though close to the Praviana — but the next day La Prensa Gráfica quoted police saying the effort was expanding to target “other sites known as refuges for criminals.”

It may be hard to imagine a dozen people could disappear without attracting some attention. But at that point in the war, unexplained deaths had become so routine that it was remarkable when anyone raised a fuss. (And these were sex workers — trans ones at that — the kind of people whom many would probably have been happy to see cleared off the streets if they noticed them at all.)

Bodies were being dumped at a rate of more than 150 a week, which the U.S. Embassy would tally in regular “Violence Week in Review” cables, even as the U.S grew closer with the El Salvadoran regime. Remains were found scattered around the capital every morning, sometimes with their faces destroyed so they could not be identified or left in a spot where vultures could be counted on to scatter their bones. Trucks like the ones Alarcón saw at the Savior of the World were icons of the inescapable violence.

The death squads’ victims were “killed in the usual fashion,” reported a cable from the U.S. Embassy to Washington of the 179 people who died in the week ending Nov. 28, 1980: “Kidnapped by a group of armed men who appeared as civilians, taken away in the ubiquitous pick-up trucks, shot or strangled or both, and then dumped along roadsides.” Six of that week’s murders included top opposition leaders that attracted some outcry, the cable noted, but their deaths were “unusual in that they have gone noticed.”

If news of the death of a group of sex workers had reached officials at the U.S. embassy or human rights organizations, it could have easily been ignored as an extreme vice raid rather than as a political crime.

But those who lost their friends believe they died because of politics. The most intriguing part of the legend of the disappearances from the Savior of the World — and the part that is probably the most impossible to pin down — is that they were killed to cover up a government secret.

They were taken that night, the story goes, in a hunt for two sex workers who had evidence of a crime. Evidence they had stolen from an American.

El Salvador's Monument to Memory and Truth.

J. Lester Feder / BuzzFeed News

Some of the locas thought the American was a diplomat, while others believed he was a reporter. No one really knew why he was in the country, but they all knew what he looked like. The ones we spoke to who had seen him recalled that he appeared to be in his fifties with close-cropped white hair and a mustache or a goatee. He was a big spender who always hired two at a time — “one for him to make love to while the other made love to him,” one person told us.

They were taken that night, the story goes, in a hunt for two sex workers who had evidence of a crime. Evidence they had stolen from an American.