Quickies: Bi-Montly HIV Treatment, HERO Fallout, No Such Thing as Straight Women?

• Bi-Monthly HIV Injection as Good as Pills – “A long-acting two-drug injection given once every eight weeks worked as well as three daily pills in suppressing HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to a clinical trial backed by Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline.” This is great news for people in developing nations and those of us who have a hard time remembering to take pills.
• Japan Gets First Officially Recognized Same-Sex Marriage – “Hiroko Masuhara and Koyuki Higashi became the first same-sex couple to have their marriage officially recognized in Japan, when the couple tied the knot at the Shibuya ward office in Tokyo on Thursday.”
• “House of Commons set to get gender-neutral toilets” – “The new toilets are one of several proposed changes by Speaker John Bercow… As well as being more trans inclusive, the changes would also include introducing maternity and paternity leave for MPs.”
• “Late Night TV Takes on HERO, for Better or for Worse” – “If HERO, the Houston anti-discrimination measure that was defeated in a referendum on Tuesday, wasn’t a national story yet, late-night TV just made it so. On Wednesday, both Seth Meyers (Late Night on NBC) and Larry Wilmore (Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show) covered the ordinance, which lost at the polls by a large margin in the wake of a transphobic smear campaign that reduced the law’s standard coverage of 15 different categories of people to the willfully misleading slogan “No men in women’s bathrooms.'”
• Woman Ejected from Women’s Restroom for Looking Like a Boy – With all the trans bathroom panic in the air, it was only a matter of time before a gender-non-conforming woman was kicked out of a restroom. This time it happened in a restaurant in Detroit, and the woman is suing.
• “LGBT Groups Respond to Petition Asking to ‘Drop the T’” – GLAAD and HRC have both rejected the requests voiced in a MoveOn.org petition signed by about 800 people asking LGBT organizations to drop the T.
• “Intersex Person Sues United States in Quest for an Honest Passport” – “It’s a crime to lie on a passport application, so a Navy veteran born with ‘ambiguous external sex characteristics’ has sued the Department of State for a passport with the label intersex or indeterminate.”
• “No such thing as straight women? The real danger behind this study.” – Aoife at Freethought Blogs points out the flaws in the recent study that that claims to have shown that straight women don’t exist.
• Know Your Rights with the Police – “Knowing your rights is the ‘first step towards taking your power back from discriminatory police systems.’ This video, based on the experiences of LGBTQIA+ youth of color in New York City, can help. It covers sexual harassment by police, warrants, inappropriate searches of trans and gender non-conforming youth, and more.”
• Lingerie Boutique Caters to Queer and Trans Market – “I wanted to curate a collection that would appeal to a wide range of styles and also operate an inclusive store where queer- and trans-identified people could have the guarantee of being treated with basic dignity.”

Featured image via Tumblr