Texas’ transgender student athletes will be restricted from playing on K-12 school sports teams that align with their gender identity under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Monday.

House Bill 25, authored by state Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, will require student athletes who compete in interscholastic competition to play on sports teams that correspond with the sex listed on their birth certificate at or near their time of birth. It is set to go into effect Jan. 18.

The legislation goes further than current rules from the University Interscholastic League, which governs school sports in Texas. Under current UIL rules, a student’s gender is determined by their birth certificate. But UIL also accepts legally modified birth certificates in which someone may have had their sex changed to align with their gender identity.....

Ricardo Martinez, CEO of Equality Texas, opposed the bill and said the organization’s most immediate focus is providing healing to transgender children and advocates who have returned session after session to speak out against anti-transgender legislation

Texas’ transgender student athletes will be restricted from playing on K-12 school sports teams that align with their gender identity under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Monday.

House Bill 25, authored by state Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, will require student athletes who compete in interscholastic competition to play on sports teams that correspond with the sex listed on their birth certificate at or near their time of birth. It is set to go into effect Jan. 18.

The legislation goes further than current rules from the University Interscholastic League, which governs school sports in Texas. Under current UIL rules, a student’s gender is determined by their birth certificate. But UIL also accepts legally modified birth certificates in which someone may have had their sex changed to align with their gender identity.....

Ricardo Martinez, CEO of Equality Texas, opposed the bill and said the organization’s most immediate focus is providing healing to transgender children and advocates who have returned session after session to speak out against anti-transgender legislation

Republicans in Congress are outraged at Twitter after the social media website suspended Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) for violating the site's rules against hate speech.

Banks intentionally misgendered Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking openly transgender official in U.S. history. Levine is a highly respected public health expert who served as Pennsylvania's physician general from 2015 to 2018 and as the state's secretary of health from 2018 to 2021.

Last Tuesday, Banks posted a tweet mocking the news that Levine had been sworn in as a four-state admiral for the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

"The title of first female four-star office gets taken by a man," Banks wrote.

The Senate voted Monday to confirm voting rights advocate Myrna Pérez as a judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, making her the only Latino on the court and its first Latina since Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed for the Supreme Court.

Pérez was confirmed on a 48-43 vote as the country is gripped in a struggle over voting rights.

"She's an exceptional lawyer that has demonstrated throughout her career that she has the experience, intellect, and temperament it takes to be an extraordinary judge of the U.S. appeals court," Carlos Bollar, national president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, said in a statement.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., praised the confirmation, calling Pérez an amazing person.

"You say he's representing himself?" asked Maddow. "Serving as his own lawyer? You don't say. Whatever else has happened in your life today, I bequeath you this, little warm fuzziness, the Nazis are representing themselves in court, acting as their own lawyers. That always works out great. Good for them. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch."

She noted that another Charlottesville person is being forced to find other legal options after his lawyers quit because he started spewing anti-Semitic threats against one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs.

Other neo-Nazis involved in different cases have been able to hold onto their lawyer, Maddow said, because the lawyer "agrees with them because he himself wants to 'oppose Jewish influence in society.'"