Iowa
Iowa may have picked the first transgender Iowan to be an elector at the Electoral College, Iowa Public Radio reports:

Last Saturday, Democrats held conventions in all four of Iowa’s congressional districts and chose their national delegates and electors. (Delegates choose the party’s nominee, electors represent Iowa’s votes in the electoral college.) One of those electors is Jack Schuler, a English teacher at Lincoln High School in Des Moines who may be making history. While the Democratic party has had transgender delegates previously, it’s possible that Jack…is the first transgender elector in Iowa, and in the nation.
“I really didn’t realize in the moment how much attention I would be getting. I’m still kind of overwhelmed,” Schuler says. “As surreal as some of it feels, I think it’s a great opportunity for me to represent, and also a huge responsibility. I feel like now I can be someone who can be a representative for the transgender community.”

A student at a Catholic school says he’s being blocked from talking at graduation about an LGBTQ scholarship he was awarded; the school says they changed the rules but not because of him. WHO TV reports on the controversy:

A local graduating high school student says his scholarship won’t be properly acknowledged by his school because it deals with his sexuality.

Dowling Catholic senior Liam Jameson says a scholarship he earned worth $40,000 won’t be recognized at the school’s senior awards ceremony Thursday afternoon.

Jameson is gay, and just years ago, he says he fought to overcome suicidal thoughts in an environment where he felt “lost and alone.”

The teenager says he was able to overcome those destructive feelings when he chose to lead by example and help other LGBT students feel safe and welcome.

Jameson was one of four students who organized a walkout at Dowling last spring after an openly-gay substitute teacher had a full-time job offer retracted by the Catholic school because his sexuality did not align with the church’s teachings. This effort, along with Jameson’s leadership in starting a Gay-Straight Alliance group at the school, formally dubbed, “One Dowling Family”, earned him the 2016 Matthew Shepard Scholarship from the Eychaner Foundation, a local non-profit dedicated to encouraging tolerance and non-discrimination in the LGBT community.

But Rich Eychaner, founder of the Eychaner Foundation, says Dowling has repeatedly changed its policies since learning Jameson would receive this year’s award. The policies were changed in a way so that his group could not present the student with the scholarship at the annual senior awards ceremony.

Rehka Basu, a columnist for the Des Moines Register, penned a piece calling out anti-transgender legislation:

These ill-conceived and inhumane measures reflect baseless fears of transgender people simply wanting to live their lives in a way that feels authentic. But while the morality police are on witch hunts, what actual crimes are they ignoring? Penn State Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky probably got away with 15 years of sexually abusing boys in his charity for underprivileged youth because adults looked away. The former university president and athletic director were charged with failure to report suspected child abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.

Transgender former Polk County inmate Meagan Taylor was arrested because a West Des Moines hotel receptionist suspected she was a prostitute. (Photo: Register file photo/Whitney Curtis)
Yet in West Des Moines last year, Meagan Taylor, who is transgender, attracted the attention of a hotel receptionist where she was staying, who called police saying she must be a prostitute.

Sometimes the monsters are the people we’re most likely to trust. A slew of CEOs has had to leave their positions in recent years because of improprieties toward women. They include Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, who was charged with sexual harassment; Starwood Hotels CEO Steven Heyer, who was fired for sending inappropriate messages to a female employee; and American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, fired over claims of sexual harassment and defaming an employee.

Wisconsin
A student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is fighting back against gender-based discrimination, Think Progress reports:

Justine Kramer, a nonbinary trans woman who is a student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, became the center of a controversy when she wanted to use the women’s locker room in January, but it looks like the fight over access may be over soon.
After she was kicked out of that space by a student employee who said her supervisor, Heath Powell, associate director of Klotsche Center, wanted to “verify” her gender. After seeing her driver’s license still said “male,” he decided she would not be allowed back into the locker room, Kramer said. The UW legal team then told the university they had to change their rules to be more inclusive.
The university then introduced a new policy. However, under the drafted policy, trans students are allowed to be in the locker room corresponding to their gender but can’t change in locker rooms lest it be considered sexual harassment. Although administrators said the family locker room would be the best option, it doesn’t have access to the pool and sauna, Kramer pointed out.
Kramer told ThinkProgress she’s very aware of not doing anything that could possibly be deemed “suspicious” given stereotypes pushed by conservatives recently about trans women being predatory in locker rooms and bathrooms. For the most part, Kramer said most of the student body has been supportive.
“A substantial majority of students are supportive but there are some who aren’t. It happens less often now that I’ve been using the locker room the whole semester so over the time the dirty looks I’ve gotten have gone down, because people think, ‘Hey I recognize this person. They’re not going to rape me. They’re just using this place same as we are,’ but there are times when I get the death glare like they’re hyper-alert, and I’m just trying to do my thing and leave,” Kramer said.
Kramer has filed a Title IX complaint with the school. The Student Association voted 24-0 against the proposal to limit what trans people could do in the locker room, saying that the drafted policy stigmatized and discriminated against trans people. Dr. Cary Gabriel Costell, also spoke out against the policy. Costell wrote to the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for LGBT+ Advocacy, “As someone who was born genitally and gonadally intersex, and who gender transitioned in adulthood from the sex I was assigned at birth, I find them insulting and harmful. I’m frankly shocked that they are being proposed as ‘inclusive’ procedures, and have been vetted by Legal.”

The saga of a Marquette University professor who was reprimanded for anti-LGBTQ speech continues as the professor filed suit last week, Christian Today reports:

A professor sued Marquette University, a Catholic school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for suspending him and then terminating his tenure in 2014 over a blog post questioning an instructor’s stand in favour of gay rights.
Prof. John McAdams and the Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty (WILL) filed the lawsuit on Monday before the Milwaukee County Circuit Court against the university for breach of contract for suspending him and banning him from the campus.
McAdams’ suspension stemmed from a blog post he made in November 2014 in which he presented an incident between Marquette instructor Cheryl Abbate and an undergraduate student over gay rights.
Abbate told the student that when it comes to gay rights, “everybody agrees on this, and there is no need to discuss it.” However, the student disagreed.
“In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated,” said Abbate who then told the student to drop out from the class.