Mere moments after his swearing in Monday, President Donald Trump made a proclamation to attendees of his inauguration: "It shall henceforth be the policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female." Trump then signed an executive order disparaging what the White House called "gender ideology" and claiming that a person's sex is "not changeable and [is] grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality." Trump's order, which was widely seen as an unscientific attempt to roll back the rights of transgender and gender-expansive people, also instructs federal agencies "to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder's sex," rather than their gender identity. It was one of 78 orders signed on Monday, some of which were part of Trump's attempts to end Biden-era policies that "socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life." While the executive order only affects federal policy, the broader implications are vast.

The public appetite for moderating toxic speech on social media depends on the type of person being targeted, researchers have found, with billionaires being seen as in least need of protection. Content moderation is a hot-button issue, with social media platforms taking drastically different approaches. Elon Musk bought Twitter, since renamed to X, in part because of his concern about over moderation infringing the right to free speech. Others feel platforms don't do enough to protect users from hate and harm. ChatGPT can tailor political ads to match users' personalities

There aren't enough games with queer characters and themes -- and GLAAD, the world's largest LGBTQ media advocacy group, has the statistics to prove it. GLAAD's first annual report on the video game industry found that nearly 20 percent of all players in the United States identify as LGBTQ, yet just 2 percent of games contain characters and storylines relevant to this community. The report highlights three critical truths: Representation matters a lot to LGBTQ players, the remaining gaming audience largely welcomes these themes, and new generations of gamers are only becoming more open to queer content. GLAAD has the numbers, so let's take a deeper look alongside a few bits of gaming news from the past week: Xbox is preparing to address a bunch of rumors on Thursday about the company's plans to bring its exclusive games to PlayStation, Switch and other platforms. The rumors have centered on major releases like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Starfield, but according to The Verge's Tom Warren, the first titles scheduled to make the leap are Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment.

And for LGBTQ people, often marginalised by traditional systems, we need to be wary of how AI could filter us out. Indeed, one expert in the field, anthropologist Mary L. Gray, believes AI will "always fail LGBTQ people." She believes it will be up to us, to forever make sure AI not only reflects us, but the way we want our world to look too. So to understand why AI is, at least currently, set up to fail LGBTQ people, it's essential to take a step back and understand that – like in all things – it sits within a system. In Amsterdam people gathered Sunday night during a rally which was a call-to-action to all to members and allies of the trans, LGBQIA, black and brown resistance, immigrant and social justice movements to stand side by side with trans men, trans women and non-binary & intersex people, and to send a message of resistance and strengthen around the world.

Beijing – Browsing the internet as a young policeman in China, Ma Baoli recalls the sheer volume of web pages telling him he was a pervert, diseased and in need of treatment -- simply because he is gay. "I felt extremely lonely after I became aware of my sexual orientation," says Ma, at the time a newly minted officer in a small coastal city. Two decades later, the softly spoken 43-year-old now helms Blued, one of the world's largest dating platforms for gay men. The app went public last July with an $85 million debut on Nasdaq, a remarkable tech success story from a country that classified homosexuality as a mental illness as recently as 2001. Parent company BlueCity's sunlit Beijing campus teems with young and casually dressed programmers who hold meetings in rooms named after Oscar Wilde and other prominent LGBTQ figures from around the world.

Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet this population's health-related needs. Social media sites like Twitter provide new opportunities for transgender people to overcome these barriers by sharing their personal health experiences. Our research employs a computational framework to collect tweets from self-identified transgender users, detect those that are health-related, and identify their information needs. This framework is significant because it provides a macro-scale perspective on an issue that lacks investigation at national or demographic levels. Our findings identified 54 distinct health-related topics that we grouped into 7 broader categories. Further, we found both linguistic and topical differences in the health-related information shared by transgender men (TM) as com-pared to transgender women (TW). These findings can help inform medical and policy-based strategies for health interventions within transgender communities. Also, our proposed approach can inform the development of computational strategies to identify the health-related information needs of other marginalized populations.

The person who uploads a particular video to, say, YouTube doesn't even need much of a following in order for the video to garner enough attention to be shared over and over and attract people to leave so many comments (both negative and positive) that one person cannot simply sift through them fast enough. Last May, this happened to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, also known as GLAAD. The organization posted a video of actress Debra Messing accepting GLAAD's Excellence in Media Award for her work in helping push an agenda for equality in the film and television industry. In her speech, Messing pushed for the Trump administration to "do right" by the LGBTQ community by removing certain staff members and focusing on laws that reflect equality. After posting the video on its YouTube channel, GLAAD received an outpouring of comments from people who had something negative to say about Messing and her speech.

Detecting sexual orientation might not be a pertinent issue when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), but scientists are working on it, according to a study published last week. Ever since the study came to the fore, it has been facing stiff opposition from LGBTQ groups. The study says that it can distinguish between gay and heterosexual men accurately 81 percent of the time and between gay and heterosexual women 74 percent of the time. The study has raised an uproar with LGBTQ advocacy groups such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The groups have called the study "A dangerous and flawed research that could cause harm to LGBTQ people around the world."