Slain Nurse Smeared by Anti-Trans Right, Ballot Test in Washington State, and a Court Victory
Leading Off: Members of the far right shared fake photos purporting to show Alex Pretti in drag, attempting to make a victim who conservatives don’t like seem trans. An invasive subpoena is quashed. And the Council of Europe may ban conversion therapy. The top story lines.
by Assigned Media
Following ICE’s execution of an observer in Minneapolis, the right wing has already begun spinning lies about the victim, Alex Pretti, to fit their narrative of hate, framing his legal carry of a firearm as an intention to escalate presence into violence and outrageously callling him an “assassin.”
Some on the far right took the smear campaign a step further, using the murder to stoke anti-trans hatred by claiming Pretti was trans or frequently dressed in drag, tying the slain nurse to one of their greatest obsessions.*
Actual trans Minnesotans are showing up to protect their neighbors from the federal government’s onslaught. State Rep Leigh Finke told Assigned Media’s Aly Gibbs last week that she was responding to the myriad needs of Minnesotans under siege
“One of them is helping locate people who have been detained; it's often the case that people don't know how to find a loved one once they have been arrested or detained, Finke said in an interview. “The second part is being responsive to the needs that come to me ... that looks like a lot of things: I get text messages that people need supplies, or that there's ICE coming into the district and to let folks know, it's all kinds of things and it's different a little bit every day.”
Anti-trans activists have pushed through a petition in the state of Washington that aims to ban trans kids kindergarten through grade 12 from participating in school sports and allow parents to opt their children out of courses that would discuss LGBTQ+, religious or political topics.
The initiatives, which seem likely now to be decided by voters in the November general election, stem from a signature campaign led by the right-wing group Let’s Go Washington. The secretary of state announced late last week that it had certified the signatures.
The Democratic majority leaders in the state legislature have publicly stated they will not hold hearings on the initiatives. “I am certain that we will not be passing either,” Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen said.
The decision means, though, that the initiatives will go directly to voters in November.
Opponents have noted not only the bias behind the initiatives but also the risk of abuse and the forced outing of trans athletes. Demands that only cis athletes be allowed to participate in sports have, in the end, often been paired with enforcement measures such as invasive physical examinations and expensive genetic testing.
Let’s Go Washington has been pushing legislation over the last two years that would harm at-risk minorities, including a previous bill that would have limited student privacy, and another that would have expanded law enforcement’s ability to pursue suspects with little cause.
The Department of Justice has dropped its subpoena demanding the private medical records of all transgender youth patients at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. This subpoena was one of 20 it issued last year to hospitals that provide gender affirming care to minors.
The subpoena’s withdrawal comes as a result of a lawsuit filed by parents of six patients at the children’s hospital, who argued that it was an invasion of privacy beyond the government’s scope to investigate.
The withdrawal of this bald-faced attempt to intimidate trans kids, families and care providers is the most recent in a series of court actions that reflect the administration’s efforts have been crumbling when met with pushback.
The Council of Europe is set to vote this week to ban the abusive anti-gay practice of conversion therapy, following a committee vote earlier this month where it was unanimously supported.
The language of the resolution lays out the many harms of conversion therapy, describing the practice as commonly involving “verbal abuse, coercion, isolation, forced medication, electric shocks, physical and sexual abuse.” It also states, in no uncertain terms, that conversion therapy has no basis in science and likens it to “torture.”
In a campaign to stop the ban, the anti-trans organization, Sex Matters, one of the groups responsible for pushing the 2025 Scotland ruling that amended the 2010 Equality Act to define sex purely based on assignment at birth, has launched an email campaign to pressure the Council members to vote against the resolution. In response, the Good Law Project has launched its own email campaign, urging members not to listen to the flood of messages based on hate.
A slew of bigoted measures are being proposed in Utah this term but “possibly the most egregious anti-trans bill” was the subject of a rally at the Capitol last week.
The recently introduced House Bill 183 aims to replace legal language using ‘gender’ with ‘sex’, do away with anti-discrimination laws that protect people based on gender identity, block birth certificate changes, restrict trans healthcare workers from working with children, and favor non-supportive parents in custody battles over trans children.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story claimed that Libs of TikTok spread photos purporting to show Alex Pretti in drag. The posts in question included false claims about a different white, bearded anti-ICE Minnesotan wearing drag; the account doesn’t seem to have participated in this smear campaign.
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