Metro Weekly magazine: 2019-01-10 edition (PDF)
By Metro Weekly Contributor
on
January 11, 2019
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued his first vetoes since the state legislature's 2025 session ended last month, rejecting 21 bills ā including one that proposed pro-transgender updates to the state's health education standards, which Republicans had urged him to block.
Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill 86, a technical measure that would have updated language in the state's K-8 health education standards to align with the curriculum framework adopted by the state Board of Education in 2019.
According to the Sacramento Bee, Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-Santee) sent Newsom a letter criticizing the bill for "introduc the theory that reproductive anatomy does not necessarily determine a person's gender."
In a historic but under-the-radar move, South Korea's Ministry of Data and Statistics has updated its digital registration system for the 2025 Population and Housing Census to recognize "spouse" or "cohabitating partner" as valid responses for same-sex households.
The change fixes a long-standing issue from previous censuses, when same-sex partners who selected "spouse" saw their answers flagged as errors -- forcing them to instead list themselves as "other cohabitants," according to TimeĀ magazine.
The system's failure to accept "spouse" from same-sex couples effectively erased them from the data, rendering LGBTQ households invisible to government agencies and civic organizations that rely on census information to allocate resources and funding.
Ten people are on trial in France, accused of engaging in sexist online harassment of First Lady Brigitte Macron by spreading false and malicious claims about her.
The posts alleged that the French president's wife is transgender and was born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux -- the name of her older brother. Some also equated the 25-year age gap between the 72-year-old first lady and her 47-year-old husband to "pedophilia," according to Agence France-Presse.
The Macrons first met in 1993, when Brigitte was a 39-year-old married teacher at LycƩe La Providence in Amiens and Emmanuel Macron was her 15-year-old student -- and a classmate of her daughter. (The age of consent in France is 15.) They reconnected years later after Macron graduated from LycƩe Henri-IV in Paris and married in 2007.
