National Gaze

Two years after Texas became one of the last states to allow transgender people to use proof of their surgery to get a marriage license, Republican lawmakers are trying to roll back the clock.

Proposed legislation would prohibit county and district clerks from using a court order recognizing a surgery as documentation to get married, effectively requiring the state to recognize a 1999 state appeals court decision that said in cases of marriage, gender is assigned at birth and sticks with a person throughout their life, even if they have surgery.

A man allegedly upset over his teenage daughter’s lesbian relationship fatally shot her girlfriend and the girlfriend’s mother in Austin, Texas.

Jose Alfonso Aviles, 45, faces charges of capital murder. Police say Aviles shot to death Norma Hurtado, 24, and her mother, 57-year-old Maria Hurtado, after knocking on their door.

The population identifying as gay and lesbian in the United States is about 4 million adults, according to a demographer who has long studied the issue, along with nuances of analyzing and calculating numbers about the gay community.

Demographer Gary Gates of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California-Los Angeles estimated that gays and lesbians represent about 1.7 percent of the adult U.S. population.

A bookstore in the heart of San Francisco’s gay and lesbian community closed in late April.

A Different Light bookstore opened in the Castro district in 1985 and soon became a social hub that celebrated LGBT writers and readers.

The Arkansas Supreme Court on April 7 rejected a voter-approved initiative barring gay couples and unmarried straight couples who live together from serving as adoptive or foster parents.

Associate Justice Robert L. Brown wrote for the court in a unanimous decision that the law, called Act 1, would encroach on adults’ right to privacy in the bedroom.

Virginia’s social services board has rejected proposed regulations that would have prohibited adoption agencies from discriminating against prospective parents because they’re gay.

The board voted earlier this month to strip that protection from proposed regulations. The vote came despite objections from some board members that they didn’t have enough time to examine the issue after the state department of social services removed the provision in mid-April.

Discharges of gay and lesbian servicemembers fell to an all-time low in 2010, partly due to a new directive from the defense secretary and the congressional focus on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Last year began with President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, pledging to work with Congress and the Armed Forces to lift the ban against gays serving openly in the military. DADT was enacted in 1994. The year ended with Congress voting to repeal DADT, a process likely to take much of 2011.