Episode 2000: Echoes of Sanity | This Way Out Radio Episode #2000
- Jul 28
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 4
We mark our 2000th episode. Pete Hegseth gets trolled by U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, The Rainbow Rewinds to Judy Grahn, Vito Russo and Reverend Troy Perry and Lucia Chappelle gives advice from a 2000 episode old lesbian. In newswrap France's new rights watchdog is no friend to queer people or women, while the trans position of the U.K.'s new government is questionable and a gay German politician falls to surrogacy hypocrisy. In the U.S., the House declines to make Trump's transgender military ban permanent, but advances other anti-trans measures, and a Seattle judge keeps a historic LGBTQ+ beach nude, but curbs the bad behavior.
Featured speakers: Major Erica Vandal, Jesse Miranda, Pete Hegseth, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, Judy Grahn, Vito Russo, Rev. Troy Perry, Lucia Chappelle
Credits: Associate Producer/Host Lucia Chappelle, Producer Brian DeShazor, News writer Jeb Backe, feature producers, Lucia Chappellle, NewsWrap reporters Ret and Melanie Keller music: Stan Freberg, Ludwig Goransson and Kim Wilson
All this on the July 27, 2026 Edition of This Way Out!
Join our family of listener-donors today at thiswayout.org/donate/.
NewsWrap
Program #2000 Distributed 07/27/26
A French senator with a history of fighting against marriage equality and reproductive freedom is now the country’s new Defender of Rights. President Emmanuel Macron’s nominee François-Noël Buffet survived a narrow vote to take on the position of Défenseur des droits. It’s an independent watchdog position, responsible for defending citizens whose rights are infringed upon and ensuring the equal protection of legal rights in France.
In 2013, Buffet took part in protests against same-sex marriage. He voted against extending medically-assisted reproduction to single women and female couples in 2021, and he abstained from a 2024 vote to enshrine abortion rights in the French Constitution.
The role of Défenseur des droits has major investigative powers and is meant to be a check on the government. They may intervene in areas such as the ethics of security professionals, the protection of children's rights, combating discrimination, and safeguarding whistleblowers.
In a July 7th hearing before the National Assembly’s Legal Affairs Committee, Buffet was accused of having a history of “racist and homophobic votes.” The senator told the Members of Parliament that he had, in his words, “evolved” on “a number of issues.”
To Nicolas Faget, the appointment is “both absurd and scary.” As spokesperson for the Association of Gay and Lesbian Parents and Future Parents, Faget warns, “One of the bulwarks shielding same-sex parents and their children from discrimination is at risk of being undermined by someone who does not believe in those rights.”
The people of the United Kingdom are acclimating to their seventh Prime Minister in a decade. Labour’s former mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham is considered to be more left-leaning than his predecessor, Keir Starmer. However, like Starmer, Burnham’s previously positive track record on LGBTQ+ issues crumbled when the transgender bathroom ban was instituted earlier this year.
Burnham has appointed Yvette Cooper as his Health Secretary. She follows gay M.P. Wes Streeting in the position. Streeting resigned in May of this year after the controversy surrounding his prohibition on gender affirming puberty blockers for trans youth. Temporary substitute James Murray also supported the trans bathroom ban.
The dodgy trans rights history among the recent Labour Party Health Secretaries has onlookers wary of Cooper. She has largely side-stepped any public comment about trans rights since the anti-trans culture war began, despite being outspoken about introducing gender neutral options for passports in 2015. Last year, she was critical of the protests following the Supreme Court’s decision to exclude trans women from the legal definition of a woman.
The United Kingdom’s High Court will decide this week whether to halt the country’s puberty blocker trial. The trial has provided the only avenue for youth to receive gender affirming care since the ban. The PATHWAYS trial was granted by ministers to be an exception to the ban, arguing that the data from the use of puberty blockers among the youth could provide the evidence that had been lacking. However, the anti-trans parents organization Bayswater Support Group argues that the study is unlawful and is attempting to stop it. Discussions around the High Court case may finally reveal Cooper’s true colors.
Surrogacy hypocrisy is forcing a gay German politician to resign from the Bundestag. A key ally of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Jens Spahn has served as chair of the Christian Democratic Union. The conservative CDU is staunchly opposed to surrogacy, so eyebrows were raised on July 15th when Spahn announced that he and his husband Daniel Funke just had a baby via a surrogate mother.
Surrogacy is illegal in Germany, and Spahn has long stood against efforts to legalize it. In 2015 he wrote in GQ Magazine that as a gay man and a Christian he could hardly warm to the idea of what he called at the time a “rented womb.” When he was Health Minister in 2020, Spahn’s department rejected a push to legalize altruistic, or non-compensated surrogacy. During that debate he told the Bundestag that the ban existed primarily to safeguard the welfare of the child.
While his party was passing a resolution reaffirming the prohibition on surrogacy during a national conference in February this year, a U.S.-based surrogate mother was pregnant with Funke and Spahn’s child.
It is not illegal in Germany to raise a child born in another country via surrogacy. However, Spahn’s actions collided with his political messaging and party platform, and his CDU Bundestag colleagues decided it was one collision too many. Just three days after he came out as a new dad, Spahn resigned.
The United States House of Representatives has rejected President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military. MAGA Republican Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado proposed the amendment to the annual National Defence Authorization Act. If passed, it would have codified Trump’s Executive Order to eliminate transgender servicemembers.
The legislation required all personnel to serve in accordance with their biological sex. Four Republicans broke with the party line on July 21st to help defeat it by a vote of 217 to 212.
Major Erica Vandal is one of the servicemembers currently battling the ban in court. She spoke to Dan Ming of Evident Media for the documentary Fighting to Serve:
[AUDIO- VANDAL]
“Gender-affirming care has zero impact on our ability to deploy, our ability to be ready, and our ability to meet standards. As far as my medicines that I'm taking, it is a shelf-stable pill I take twice a day. No different than medication of whatever variety that thousands of other troops take daily.”
The discriminatory executive order, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” is taking fire from several major lawsuits. As of June, the U.S. court of appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that transgender members of the military can continue to serve, but the armed services can continue refusing to enlist new transgender members.
Though the codification of Trump’s trans military ban was rejected, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina was successful in proposing two anti-transgender amendments: one would prevent military health insurance from covering gender affirming care; the other would prohibit trans girls from participating in kindergarten through twelfth-grade sports at Department of Defense-run schools.
Finally… Seattle, Washington’s historic clothing optional LGBTQ+ beach will remain open. Following several years of a neighborhood dispute over Denny Blaine Park, King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung denied a request to close the park or ban legal public nudity.
Neighbors have been complaining to the city about “lewd conduct” they claim to have observed on the beach. One neighbor tried to curb the nudity by building a playground near the park. The frustrations of a few built up until a neighborhood association called Denny Blaine Park for All sued the City of Seattle in 2025 for allegedly failing to prevent inappropriate activity.
On the other side, the group Friends of Denny Blain is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the park's historic nude and queer character. Co-lead Jesse Miranda told KUOW:
[AUDIO- JESSE MIRANDA]
“We have dated back to the early 20th century, someone skinny-dipping at that park, and 40 years of queer history at that park. And so when people throw around words like closure, it feels like erasure.”
The clothing-optional beach has been a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community for decades. Nudity is not a crime in Washington, but the state does outlaw “indecent exposure,” defined as intentionally “obscene exposure [...] knowing that such conduct is likely to cause reasonable affront or alarm.” The neighbors argued that they were reasonably alarmed.
Friends of Denny Blaine’s Jesse Miranda found room to sympathize with the neighbors:
[AUDIO- JESSE MIRANDA]
“By the way, the people who support this park as a place for nudity also agree that they would like to see some of the more lewd and inappropriate behavior cracked down upon. It's not great for them either to have people doing inappropriate things in and around the park. And so the question is, you know, what can Seattle do beyond just basically stationing cops there 24 hours a day, which they're not going to do. And following whatever they try actually ends up working.”
Judge Chung decided to keep the beach open and maintained the right to nudity. However, he also directed the city to staff the park watching for “illegal behavior” and to install fences as privacy buffers for neighboring homes.
Just in from the weekend– on Saturday night, an attack on a Pride Parade in Berlin, Germany injured 29 individuals and killed one. The assailant drove a van into the crowd and exited the vehicle to assault the attendees with what appeared to be a machete. The suspect was tracked down by police and shot, dying on the scene Sunday. This is a developing story and NewsWrap will provide further coverage next week.
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