Assigned is a daily trans news website, founded by journalist Evan Urquhart. [email protected] Masto @e_urq@journa.host [email protected]

USA
Joined September 2022
Goddamnit, you all called my bluff. Reach/engagement here is absolutely anemic compared to Bluesky, but we'll start posting again for you holdouts who never made the switch.
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Sorry I haven't been posting as much - we did have a big story yesterday with some big names including Lanae Erickson from from Third Way and Rep Sarah McBride weighing in on Democrats' midterms strategy and potential missteps. Link in next post b/c algorithm 🤡
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Antisemitism cannot be tolerated on the left, and the harassment of Scott Wiener at a Trans Pride March in San Francisco last week is an example of antisemitism.
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That's what our founder, Evan Urquhart argues in a new essay on Assigned Media this morning. We hope you'll read it, and we hope you'll agree that the poison of antisemitism needs to be purged, even if it's not nearly as bad as right-wing neo-Nazism. assignedmedia.org/breaking-n…
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Assigned Media retweeted
What's it like being in prison while trans or LGBTQ? Our reporter, B Speaks, reports on life behind bars. This month he wrote about queer inmates' experiences with the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The Trump administration has removed protections for trans inmates under the act.
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Everyone telling you it's not that bad is lying. Stop waiting for the moment when everyone wakes up, go out and shake them awake yourself.
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What's it like being in prison while trans or LGBTQ? Our reporter, B Speaks, reports on life behind bars. This month he wrote about queer inmates' experiences with the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The Trump administration has removed protections for trans inmates under the act.
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Ever feel like this?
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Learn about the everyday impacts of microaggressions in this new piece on Assigned Media. It's the most recent entry in our monthly Journal Club column where therapist Veronica Esposito writes about papers or research you should know. assignedmedia.org/breaking-n…
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The right-wing website Rowling links to was founded by a group that first billed itself as Women for Judge Thomas. It is explicitly anti-feminist by any normal definition of feminism
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The role of the Governor is to protect Californians, and to stand between them and danger. That's a role I take very, very seriously, particularly when it comes to trans youth.
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Prior to transition, trans women have brains that makes them want to become women; ciis men do not It is also likely that over time, through a combination of hormonal exposure, and female – type experiences and interactions, that the brain becomes more female typical with the passage of time
The claim that trans women “have female brains” is not supported by the evidence. One of the most persistent problems in this literature is the failure to disentangle “gender identity” from sexual orientation. Several findings interpreted as evidence of a “female-typical” neuroanatomy in trans women closely resemble patterns previously reported in homosexual males. This is precisely why Savic & Arver (2011) restricted their sample to gynephilic trans women (natal males attracted to women), despite the expectation of feminisation, they actually found that major sexually dimorphic neuroanatomical characteristics remained male-typical and explicitly rejected a simple feminisation account. The sexual-orientation confound is particularly important because some of the most widely cited “sex-atypical” findings in trans women are not unique to trans populations. Berglund et al. (2006) reported that homosexual women exhibited hypothalamic responses to putative pheromonal compounds that resembled those observed in heterosexual men, while Savic & Lindström (2005) found that homosexual men displayed female-typical patterns of hypothalamic activation. Similar findings have subsequently been cited as evidence of feminised neurobiology in trans women (Burke et al., 2014), despite the fact that the study cohort were predominantly homosexual relative to natal sex. Any interpretation that attributes these neural characteristics specifically to “gender identity” must therefore explain why comparable effects are observed in homosexual individuals who do not experience gender dysphoria. Cross-sex hormone exposure introduces an equally serious interpretive problem. Estradiol and anti-androgen treatment have been shown to alter cortical thickness, grey matter volume, white matter microstructure, hypothalamic morphology, and patterns of functional connectivity within months of treatment initiation. Hulshoff Pol et al. (2006), for example, observed measurable structural brain changes following hormone treatment, promoting a “sex-atypical” phenotype. Consequently, studies examining participants after years of hormone therapy cannot reliably distinguish pre-existing developmental characteristics from treatment effects. Yet many highly cited papers either include hormonally treated participants or compare treated and untreated individuals in ways that make causal inference difficult. These issues are compounded by small sample sizes, inadequate control for developmental stage, and the fact that male and female brains are not discrete categories but highly overlapping distributions. The most defensible conclusion from the current evidence is that *some* neural features MAY be associated with gender dysphoria, but causality cannot be implied. The much stronger claim that trans women simply “have female brains” remains unproven and is not the consensus finding of contemporary neuroscience.
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In Seattle, trans activists are calling on the mayor to declare a state of emergency. The reason? Community nonprofits and mutual aid groups are strained to breaking due to the influx of refugees fleeing oppression in red states.
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Reporter Evan Urquhart spoke with local organizers as well as a recent arrival from Utah to get the full story of a community straining to help internal refugees whose dreams of safety are crashing against high costs of living and a lack of jobs. assignedmedia.org/breaking-n…
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Assigned Media is your trans news site, but the algorithm is against us here. If you see this and care about trans news, try to help us beat Elon Musk, the wicked billionaire who hates our community and wants to break us by suppressing our news.
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It's hard to get excited about Democrats, writes Aly Gibbs for this week's TWIBS. Assigned Media is your independent trans news site. We publish daily, and we're not going anywhere until all of us are free.
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(You should really follow us there, where we've got 64K followers now. bsky.app/profile/assignedmed…)
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