My Dear Friends:
Today, the first day of June, marks the beginning of the FIRST Pride Month under the Convicted Felon, Donald Trump's authoritarian rule.
the White House
pronounces, only two sexes...
trans youth trapped
between black-and-white Kansas
and rainbow-colored Oz
the echo, echoing
of rainbow stars shattering
my gay son's kaleidoscope
Chen-ou Liu
Paisley Currah, The New Yorker, May 27, 2025: Donald Trump’s War on Gender Is Also a War on Government
Amid Donald Trump’s recent attacks on transgender people, many critics of his Administration have cited the German pastor Martin Niemöller, whose 1946 poem “First They Came” describes Nazi Germany’s progressive targeting of maligned groups. Indeed, on the first day of Trump’s second term, he signed an anti-trans executive order decreeing that the federal government recognize only two sexes, male and female; since then, his Administration’s pursuit of groups that it deems enemies—immigrants, college protesters, white-shoe law firms—has progressed rapidly. But Trump’s anti-trans actions are not just opening moves in a battle against vulnerable groups. Nor are they simply fanning the flames of right-wing moral panic. The push to eradicate so-called “woke gender ideology” is also part of the assault on the government itself. The right understands this. It’s time the left did, too...
Trump Empire, Inc, XXXII
for 238 Venezuelan men who were "disappeared" into a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador known as CECOT
at the steps
of the Statue of Liberty
each of these names
of the disappeared read out loud...
a breath, a wound, and a warning
Trump’s executive order—titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—instead declares that sex is binary and immutable, “grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” Female “means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Males belong, at conception, to the sex that produces the small one. That definition—nonsensical because there are no distinguishable reproductive cells at conception—applies to all agencies and programs of the federal government...
A deluge of policy reversals has followed. The Administration prohibited trans girls and trans women from participating in women’s sports, banned transgender people from serving in the military, reverted to putting sex at birth on federal identity documents, tried to transfer trans women to men’s prisons, and began requiring federal employees to use the bathrooms aligned with their birth sex, among other actions. “Gender” was replaced with “sex” on federal forms, and references to trans people on federal websites (including the National Park Service’s page about the Stonewall Uprising) were removed....
The assault on administrative flexibility is most visible at the National Institutes of Health, where rigid definitions actively prevent scientists and researchers from carrying out the work Congress mandated them to do...
By mid-May, the N.I.H. had cancelled more than six hundred million dollars in research grants related to transgender health. Even grants that included small numbers of transgender patients were affected. Jason Flatt, a researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, lost funding for a study that would have analyzed the medical records of two hundred thousand people in the course of ten years to understand more about dementia. “Of those two hundred thousand, only four thousand were L.G.B.T., but that was enough to have the award cancelled,” he said. “Basically, they’re saying all my grants are cancelled because they also include trans people.”...
Scientists and researchers understand that sex is a multidimensional category; in their research, they choose whichever dimension of sex and gender—chromosomes, reproductive organs, genital phenotype, hormones, or psychological or social factors—best suits their purpose. The diktat defining sex obliterates the nuanced, purpose-driven tools that allow agencies to support this work effectively...
Trump’s order is like a tornado, crashing unpredictably into departments, reports, standards, forms—and now scientific practice. The goal appears to be not just making villains out of gender and sexual minorities but, by dismantling the health, safety, and welfare infrastructure of the administrative apparatus, targeting the same women that Trump’s “Defending Women” purports to protect...
And The Guardian, May 31: Four queer business owners on Pride under Trump: ‘Our joy is resistance’
don't say gay bill ...
behind thunderclouds
the sun coming out
Chen-ou Liu
black and white
paintings on the pot
the transgender
searches the streak of colors
to fill the gap of the emptiness
Pravat Kumar Padhy
(FYI: HuffPost, June 18: Supreme Court Deals Another Major Blow To Transgender Rights
the Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for minors in a 6-3 ruling)
shadows on the church wall
love thy trans neighbor painted
over sin is everywhere
Chen-ou Liu
people debate
the ways I should be
allowed to exist --
a rainbow forms outside
the social construct of gender
GRIX
Pride Parade --
searching the colours
inside me
Kishor Matte
summer twilight
at the Stonewall Inn
he slides his hand
over the man beside him
murmuring, "for real this time?"
Chen-ou Liu
To conclude today's post, I would like to share with you my response tanka:
Trump Empire, Inc, XXXIII
the Convicted Felon
alone at a White House window ...
from down the street
across the country, around the world
protesters dressed in rainbows
FYI: Ls 3&4 allude to the commencement speech by Harvard president Alan Garber, who has remained defiant as President Trump demands changes at the school:
Members of the Class of 2025 from down the street, across the country, and around the world.
Around the world, just as it should be.
And “First They Came,” 1946, written by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, whose 1946 poem
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
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