u/BringMeInfo

>The Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday upholding state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports is prompting questions about whether trans rights litigators have made strategic missteps, saddling the ascendant legal movement with sweeping precedents that could hurt their cause for years to come.

Critics, including some trans rights advocates, say the movement has rushed to tee up causes that the court’s 6-3 conservative majority is not ready to embrace — particularly expanded rights for trans athletes, which polls show most Americans oppose. Given the high court’s solidly conservative record on LGBTQ+ issues, some supporters of trans rights are delivering a sobering message: Keep cases away from the Supreme Court.

“The question right now is not whether transgender advocates should fight or not fight — it’s whether going to hostile courts is the most prudent move,” said Duncan Hosie, a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and a supporter of legal protections for trans people.

In Public Speaking (2010), Fran Lebowitz argues that early HIV transmission in gay male communities was structured by dense sexual and social networks, and that in tightly interwoven arts scenes this meant the most socially central figures, often also key artistic, critical, and institutional nodes, were among the first to die. She further suggests this produced a cascading sequencing of deaths among progressively less central figures across New York’s theatre, dance, and downtown performance ecosystems.

Can her claims withstand historical scrutiny? Or are they no more than charming aphorisms?

News, but it's also history?

A potentially important development in the issues surrounding student loan availability for MSW.

>The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, comes nearly three weeks after the Education Department finalized rules that lower the amount of money graduate students can borrow from the federal government. The rules, which take effect July 1, are a feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer. They implement borrowing caps based on whether students are pursuing a degree in what is designated as a professional or graduate program.

Students in professional programs can borrow up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 total, while those in graduate programs will face annual limits of $20,500 and a lifetime limit of $100,000.

The law listed examples of professional programs, including pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry and theology.

Before now, all graduate students could borrow up to the full cost of attendance, which conservative lawmakers blamed for high program costs and high student debt.

In the fall, the Education Department and a committee of higher education experts negotiated the details of the loan caps, but the terms sparked a backlash over the exclusion of some professions from the higher loan limits, including nursing, physical therapy and social work. The department received more than 80,000 comments on the proposed rule, with many industry groups challenging the professional designation and warning that students would be shut out of critical fields.

Professional degrees are not limited to the list, the regulation says, but the Education Department held fast to the examples — only agreeing to add clinical psychology after intense debate with experts.

Despite the outcry, the Education Department refused to further expand the list of degrees deemed professional in the final rule.

In the lawsuit, the states claim the department exceeded its authority with an arbitrary definition of “professional degree” that Congress never envisioned.