20 reports on crime, law, and justice in LGBTQ+ life. Newest first.
A gay dancer was stabbed at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023 after vogueing to Beyonce. In 2026, a jury called it a hate crime.
PolicyTrackers logged record numbers of state bills targeting transgender people across 2024 and 2025, hitting healthcare, schools, IDs, and bathrooms.
Cold caseA nonbinary Oklahoma 16-year-old died a day after a school bathroom fight; the ruling was suicide, and the district was found in violation of Title IX.
Landmark rulingA 6-3 Supreme Court ruling upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors, holding the law triggers only the weakest form of constitutional review.
In custodyAn Afro-Latina trans woman with epilepsy was put in solitary at Rikers in 2019 and died there. No one was charged.
Landmark rulingA Colorado designer who had never built a wedding website won the right to turn away same-sex couples she had never been asked to serve.
In custodyA Honduran trans woman fled violence, asked the United States for asylum, and was dead within sixteen days of crossing the border.
Landmark rulingAimee Stephens told her boss she was a woman, lost her job, and won a Supreme Court ruling that reshaped federal employment law.
Hate crimeForty-nine people died at an Orlando gay club in 2016; the only person tried over the massacre, the gunman's widow, was acquitted.
Police accountabilityTwo officers returned a bleeding 14-year-old to the man who would kill him, were fired, then won their jobs back with back pay.
Hate crimeA Black trans woman was beaten to death on a Harlem sidewalk in 2013. Her killer served a 12-year manslaughter sentence.
Landmark rulingA decade after the Court guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry nationwide, the 5-4 decision rests on ground its critics still want to move.
Landmark rulingThe Supreme Court ruled for a baker who refused a same-sex couple, but the 7-2 decision turned on one commission's hostility, not a license to discriminate.
Hate crimeA gay student was beaten and left tied to a Wyoming fence in 1998. Federal hate-crime protections for people like him arrived in 2009.
Hate crimeTwo men raped and killed Brandon Teena in 1993; years later, Nebraska's highest court held the sheriff who failed him liable.
Cold caseThree decades after her body left the Hudson River, the woman who helped launch a movement has no answer and no charge.
Hate crimeA Black lesbian teenager was stabbed to death at a Newark bus stop in 2003. The country barely noticed.
Justice, lateHe organized the March on Washington, and a 1953 arrest for consensual sex with men nearly erased him from the movement he built.
Cold caseA 1973 New Orleans fire killed 32 people at a gay bar; the man witnesses named was never charged and died two years later.
Landmark rulingTwo men were arrested in a Houston bedroom in 1998, and five years later their case erased every sodomy law in America.