The state of the legal challenges to laws banning gender-affirming care is, and will continue to be, confusing. The latest example is particularly striking. Last Friday, there were two major rulings. In Texas, a judge blocked a ban on gender-affirming healthcare, then her decision was paused by the state’s attorney general’s office. In Missouri, a judge ruled that a ban on care could go into effect.

These concurrent decisions add to the mounting anxiety for transgender youth and their loved ones across the country as legal battles are fought. While some hope that courts can halt these bans, it has been unclear what will happen next—and state-by-state decisions could vary. The ban on care in Missouri goes into effect today. Texas will soon follow.

“The courts told the transgender community, parents of gender-expansive youth, and the entire LGBTQ+ community that we do not exist, that we do not have the right to make our own medical decisions or the right to bodily autonomy,” Aro Royston, the board secretary for Missouri LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO, said in a statement following the ruling.

More than a third of transgender youth ages 13 to 17 live in states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care. The first three months of 2023 saw more bills introduced that attacked access than the last six years combined. Judges in some states, like Florida, Georgia, and Indiana, have blocked aspects of these laws or halted the whole measure. Several other states have laws that are not yet in effect or have “grandfather” clauses that could wear off soon.  

Last week’s rulings show how confusing things will be as laws are litigated. In Texas, following district court Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel’s decision to halt the ban, the state attorney general’s office filed an appeal with the Texas Supreme Court, a move that automatically pauses the injunction. This means the Texas ban will go into effect in a few days. It will ban care for transgender youth, revoke the licenses of physicians who continue providing care, and cut off access to care for adolescent minors already receiving treatment. According to Judge Hexsel, the law “interferes with Texas families’ private decisions and strips Texas parents…of the right to seek, direct, and provide medical care for their children.”  

Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a writer in Korea during the thirties, when the country was under the rule of the Japanese empire. His poems, stories, letters, and essays, written in both Korean and Japanese, are celebrated as some of the finest Korean literature of his time, and bear wide-ranging influences: the Chinese classics, the general theory of relativity, and Dadaism and surrealism, both of which he is credited with introducing into the Korean literary lexicon. He wrote during a period when Koreans could be jailed without trial on the basis of mere suspicion of thought crimes, and, shortly after being imprisoned in Tokyo by Japanese authorities in 1937, succumbed to tuberculosis in a hospital at the age of twenty-seven. 

Nearly ninety years after his death, Yi Sang is perhaps best remembered for his intricate poetry, which features striking, complicated images. In the poem “Crow’s Eye View: Poem No. 15,” he writes, “I sneak into a room with a mirror. To free myself from the mirror. But the me-inside-the-mirror always enters at the same time and puts on a gloomy face. He lets me know he is sorry. Just as I am locked up because of him he is locked up shuddering because of me.” Like many of his contemporaries, Yi Sang also contributed guest columns to newspapers. These writings, collected under column titles like “Early Spring Sketches” and “Miscellany Under the Autumn Lamp,” offered incisive, humorous, and compact observations of life in Seoul in the thirties. He captured the grace and chaos of urban existence among anonymous fellow city-dwellers going about their daily routines.

The pieces that follow come from the column “Early Spring Sketches,” which was serialized from early to late March 1936. Encountering Yi Sang through these sketches offers a glimpse into a luminous spirit whose disillusionment with the modernity of his era didn’t culminate in despair but rather, as the poet John Ashbery once wrote, “broke into a rainbow of tears.”

—Jack Jung, translator

Rejoice! The Barclays has delivered again! Marcus, Jim and Luke have got no less than three contenders for barn burner of the weekend to get stuck into on today’s show.

The lads also agree that Jason Tindall would probably thrive on a grown up version of Love Island, discuss how David Moyes and his band of Ferrymen ruined Brighton’s party, and celebrate the fact that a Sunderland player managed to save a dog's life. Woof!

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Refugees and migrants in Greece are facing off against the “two great injustices of our times”, Amnesty International has said, as it linked wildfires and scant access to legal migration routes to the deaths of 19 people believed to be asylum seekers.

As wildfires continue to rage across swathes of Greece, authorities in the country said they were working to identify the charred remains of 18 people found this week in the dense forests that straddle the country’s north-eastern border with Turkey.

Given there were no reports of missing people in the area, officials said it was possible the victims, who include two children, were asylum seekers who had entered the country irregularly. One day earlier, the body of another person believed to be an asylum seeker was found in the same area.

In recent days the fires have ripped through an area that had increasingly become a crossing point for thousands of refugees and migrants, Amnesty International said in a statement. Their arrival on EU soil had been “systematically” met with “forced returns at the border, denial of the right to seek asylum and violence”, it added.

Donald Trump’s mugshot has powered a historic fundraising blitz for the former president.

Trump’s campaign says it has raised $7.1 million since he was processed at an Atlanta jail on Thursday night for attempting to overturn the Georgia election, according to figures first reported by Politico. On Friday, Trump raised $4.18 million—more than any other day of his campaign.

The fundraising haul has been fueled in part by the campaign’s sale of mugshot-adorned T-shirts, mugs, and more that read, “NEVER SURRENDER.”

Following his arrest on Thursday, Trump returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, for the first time in more than two years, posting his mugshot and directing supporters to his campaign website. “What has taken place is a travesty of justice and ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” the site claims. He asked his supporters donate to the campaign to “evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House and SAVE AMERICA during this dark chapter in our nation’s history.”

The haul demonstrates Trump’s success in turning his four indictments into fundraising ammo. Over the past three weeks, during which Trump was indicted in Washington, DC, on charges related to his role in the January 6 riot and arrested in Georgia on charges of attempting to subvert the election, the campaign has brought in nearly $20 million—more than half of what it raised during Trump’s first seven months in the 2024 race.

Luke and Andy check in after Chelsea’s routine win against Luton Town, but are left with more questions than answers.

Are Chelsea actually good? Are they a cohesive team or just a collection of sparkly individuals? And how doomed are Luton? At least Mauricio Pochettino has decided to go Full Redknapp…

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July 2 – August 27, 2023

July 6 – August 26, 2023