Appalachian OUTreach

09/05/2026

BREAKING🚨🏳️‍🌈 Maine's highest court ruled a dad can stop his daughter's mom from taking her to an anti-LGBTQ+ church after a judge found it was psychologically harming the girl.

In 2021, Emily Bickford started bringing her daughter to Calvary Chapel Greater Portland in Westbrook, one service during the week and two on Sundays. The girl's father, Matthew Bradeen, said she began having panic attacks after teachings about the rapture, hell, demons and the Antichrist, and started trying to convert him so he wouldn't be left behind, as Sean Scott of The Maine Monitor first reported.

At Sunday services she listened to testimonials from people who said Jesus saved them from "s*xual and physical trauma, gay and le***an relationships, and infidelity." She brought home study pages about demons and s*xual impropriety. Janja Lalich, an expert on cult-like organizations who testified in the custody hearings, said the church's sermons were "filled with hateful rhetoric," including homophobia, disdain of science, and hatred of public schools.

While the custody hearings were underway, Bickford brought the girl to a service where pastor Travis Carey led a six-and-a-half-minute prayer about the case, naming the parents and the child almost 30 times, calling Bradeen "in need of salvation" and the proceedings "an attack on God's Word." Bickford made no attempt to take her daughter out of the room. She later called the service appropriate.

Bickford also took the girl out of school saying they were visiting the state capitol, when the trip was to an anti-abortion protest. She opposed counseling for her daughter's anxiety, viewing mental health treatment as a hoax.

A district judge gave Bradeen final say in December 2024. Liberty Counsel, the Christian nationalist legal group representing Bickford, then told donors the ruling barred the child from attending any church or Christian event, even Christmas or Easter. The order said no such thing. Decisions about other churches stay with both parents.

The justices wrote that the finding "reflected simply that it is harmful for a child to hear negative and frightening messages about one parent from the other parent or the other parent's authority figures."

Their ruling was UNANIMOUS.

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09/02/2026

09/02/2026

In 2023, she became the first openly transgender person elected to public office in Tennessee. Now, the Navy veteran has a new job — as Nashville Metro Council's president pro tempore.

"I am proud of this moment. I’m proud of the history it represents...but more than anything, I am humbled that the people I have served alongside for the last three years believed in me enough to entrust me with this responsibility," she said.

08/28/2026

Jason Pirro drove for and assisted Dolly Parton for more than 30 years, a working relationship that outlasted the 1990 tabloid story that tried to expose him.

That July, the supermarket tabloid Star ran a "s*x change shocker" about a trans man in Dolly's limo, using the deadnaming, exploitative language of the era. Pirro's own words in the piece were unbothered: "Dolly has been good to me... Dolly knows all about me."

Trans community publications quickly reclaimed the story. The XX Club, a Hartford support group, ran it in the August 1990 issue of its newsletter Twenty Minutes, and Lou Sullivan's pioneering FTM Newsletter preserved similar material as rare proof of a major star's acceptance at a time of almost no trans visibility. Sullivan died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.

Parton kept Pirro close long after. She thanked him by name in the liner notes of her 2016 album "Pure & Simple" and credited him in her 2023 book "Behind the Seams." In her 1994 memoir she wrote that if she hadn't been a woman she'd have been a drag queen, and that everything she knew "about s*x-change operations" she learned from her good friend Jason.

Parton died Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 80. In the days since, q***r and trans fans have circulated Pirro's story again as one more piece of a legacy she spent decades living out loud.