Of the $1.2 trillion in federal aid disbursed on an emergency basis to small businesses during the pandemic, at least $200 billion — or 17% — may have gone to scammers. That's the latest, most complete assessment of potential fraud by the Office of Inspector General of the Small Business Administration, which oversaw the disbursement of the aid. The report, called "COVID-19 Pandemic EIDL and PPP Loan Fraud Landscape," details how the rush to make the money available made it easier for fraudsters to apply for loans to keep non-existent businesses afloat, and then have those loans forgiven and covered by tax dollars. "The agency weakened or removed the controls necessary to prevent fraudsters from easily gaining access to these programs and provide assurance that only eligible entities received funds," the report says. "However, the allure of 'easy money' in this pay and chase environment attracted an overwhelming number of fraudsters to the programs." The OIG says the $200 billion estimate is the result, in part, of "advanced data analytics" of SBA data on the pandemic cash disbursements. At the time, government officials said the potential economic emergency posed by the pandemic shutdowns of 2020 necessitated a quick loans — despite the likelihood of fraud. "There is something to that argument, especially when it's applied to the very early weeks of the program," says Sam Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas who has studied pandemic fraud. But he says the data analysis behind this new report shows the government did have the ability to tighten up the system. "Some of the analysis that the SBA [OIG] has done on the back end here, you could conceive of this being done in real time," Kruger says. The current administration of the SBA estimates that almost 90% of the potential fraud happened during in 2020, during the first nine months of the pandemic, and that since then, the Biden Administration has implemented more real-time, anti-fraud checks. "SBA did in fact do that, when we put our anti-fraud control framework in place," says Katie Frost, Deputy Associate Administrator in the Office of Capital Access at SBA. As examples, Frost says, the SBA now checks the mismatches of names and employer identification numbers. They also say there's a large gap between the Inspector General's estimate of the size of potential fraud, versus the SBA's estimated amount of likely fraud, once cases have been looked at more closely. "Potential fraud is a little like the metal detector going off," says Gene Sperling, senior advisor to the President and White House Coordinator for the American Rescue Plan. "It means you should investigate further, because sometimes it's a gun, but other times it's a big buckle on your belt." The SBA puts the amount of likely fraud at approximately $36 billion. "The number is significantly less," Sperling says, but "it's still unacceptable, it's outrageous, it's too high. We're proud that in 2021 we were able to come in and reduce that." The inspector general report says the SBA and federal investigators are clawing back some of the stolen money. It points to "1,011 indictments, 803 arrests, and 529 convictions related to COVID-19 EIDL and PPP fraud as of May 2023." All told, the report says "nearly $30 billion" in aid has been seized or returned to the government.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the enforcement of a new Florida law aimed at prohibiting children from attending drag shows after a popular burger restaurant that hosts the shows sued the state of Florida and its governor, Ron DeSantis. U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell issued a preliminary injunction on Saturday in response to the lawsuit filed last month by Hamburger Mary's. The Orlando restaurant's owners allege in the suit that their First Amendment rights were violated after DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1438 into law. The measure would prohibit admitting children to certain drag show performances. "This statute is specifically designed to suppress the speech of drag queen performers," Presnell wrote. "In the words of the bill's sponsor in the House, State Representative Randy Fine: '...HB 1423...will protect our children by ending the gateway propaganda to this evil – 'Drag Queen Story Time.' " The judge's ruling will pause the "Protection of Children" law, which prohibits children from attending any "adult live performance." An "adult live performance" is described in the law as "any show, exhibition, or other presentation in front of a live audience which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or specific sexual activities ... or the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts." Businesses or persons who are found in violation of the law could face prosecution, in addition to thousands of dollars in fines and having their business licenses revoked. Republican Florida state Sen. Clay Yarborough, the bill's sponsor, did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment on the temporary injunction. Jeremy Redfern, DeSantis' press secretary, called the judge's opinion "dead wrong" and added that the governor's office is looking forward to winning an appeal. "Of course, it's constitutional to prevent the sexualization of children by limiting access to adult live performances," Redfern said in a statement to NPR. The owners of Hamburger Mary's said in a statement posted on Facebook that they're happy that Presnell sees that the state's new law is "an infringement on First Amendment Rights." "I encourage people to read the court's injunction, every page, and understand the case, and put the politics and fear-mongering aside," the statement added. Last month, DeSantis signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, restrictions on discussion of "preferred pronouns" in schools and restrictions on using bathrooms that don't match one's assigned sex at birth. In 2022 alone, more than 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were filed during state legislative sessions and 29 of those bills were signed into law.

[audio mp3="https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2023/06/20230628_me_supreme_court_ethics_v_pride_prejudice_and_political_movers_and_shakers.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1070&d=422&p=3&story=1183337280&ft=nprml&f=1183337280"][/audio] The annual cascade of Supreme Court decisions this week will make lots of headlines, but polls show that Americans of all political stripes are increasingly troubled by the lack of a code of ethics for the high court. Chief Justice John Roberts has more than once said the court is working on an ethics code for itself, but so far, crickets. Meanwhile, investigative reporters are finding that Supreme Court conduct is rich ground to plow. Last week, ProPublica reported that Justice Samuel Alito failed to disclose that he had enjoyed an all-expenses-paid, high-end fishing trip to Alaska, complete with private jet travel, courtesy of hedge fund titan Paul Singer, a major Republican donor, who has been involved in 10 appeals to the Supreme Court. Instead of responding to ProPublica's written questions, Alito did something no justice before him has done. He defended his conduct in an op-ed published on the editorial page of the conservative-friendly Wall Street Journal. In explaining why he did not recuse himself from a case in which Singer had ended up with a $2.4 billion windfall, Alito said that he had met Singer only casually at events attended by large groups. But as Indiana University law professor Charles Geyh told ProPublica, "If you weren't good friends, what were you doing accepting this" private jet trip? And "if you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?"

Disclosures follow those about Thomas

And then, of course, there are the ethics stories involving Justice Clarence Thomas. What we now know is that for probably two decades, Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, have gone on lavish trips around the globe paid for by his Republican megadonor friend Harlan Crow and that Crow paid the private school tuition for Thomas' grandnephew and bought properties owned by Thomas and his family. Thomas never disclosed any of this, as he was required to do under the disclosure provisions of the federal Ethics in Government Act, which applies to all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices. When ProPublica disclosed these facts, Thomas issued a statement declaring that when he first came on the court in 1991, he was advised by his colleagues and others that he didn't have to disclose hospitality from personal friends. Thomas then went on to say that his understanding now has been essentially corrected and that he would in the future disclose such personal travel and entertainment paid for by others. He did not, however, commit to amending his prior disclosure forms. And there is at least arguably some wiggle room on the hospitality question. The Judicial Conference in 2023 "clarified" the disclosure rule to make plain that hospitality from a friend, unless it is at the friend's residence or family property, must be disclosed. Thomas is expected to follow that rule in his filing for 2022 — a filing for which he got a 90-day extension, as did Alito. Many court observers, however, expect he won't amend his previous filings. Still, there are some transactions and benefits that have been confirmed but not disclosed in the past that Thomas was required to disclose, according to ethics experts. So he likely will make some amendments to his past filings. "The real estate deal that went down in 2014 where he sold his mother's house and some adjoining properties to Harlan Crow. [The failure to disclose that] is a very clear violation of the law," says Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for more court transparency. As Roth observes, the Ethics in Government Act says that "if you have any real estate transactions, you have to disclose it, and he didn't do that." Similarly, Roth says that the private school tuition payments for Thomas' grandnephew are gifts that should have been disclosed. To be clear, Crow's private jet, his yacht and his resorts are not owned by him personally but by his businesses. So under the "clarified" rule on hospitality from friends, Thomas can no longer escape disclosure, though his public statements have not committed him to amending his prior disclosure forms.

Thomas' omissions date back more than 25 years

Thomas has, in the past, made such amendments when other omissions have come to light. In 2011, he amended 12 years of his disclosure forms to reflect his wife's earnings between 1997 and 2009. In those years, Thomas had checked the box labeled "NONE" for his wife's employment when in fact she was employed by the House Republican leadership, Hillsdale College and the conservative Heritage Foundation, earning a total of over $1.6 million during that time, according to Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice. Other justices have faced ethics questions related to their spouses' jobs. The ethics code requires that justices disclose their spouses' employment but not their salaries. Jane Roberts, wife of the chief justice, owns an interest in a legal recruiting business that places lawyers in major firms. By all accounts, she is very good at her job and makes big money at it, estimated in the millions of dollars. But most legal ethics experts leaped to her defense when critics raised questions about any potential for conflicts of interest. "She did nothing wrong," said University of Virginia professor Amanda Frost, who specializes in legal ethics. In fact, friends of the chief justice and his wife note that she left her job as a lawyer with a first-rate firm when her husband was appointed chief justice, precisely because she wanted to avoid any appearance of ethical conflicts. Fix the Court's Roth calls the criticism of Jane Roberts "mostly a nothingburger," but he draws a distinction between Jane Roberts and Ginni Thomas, who has consulted on several issues that have reached the Supreme Court. Most recently, Ginni Thomas was involved in legal efforts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, but Justice Thomas did not recuse himself when these issues reached the Supreme Court. The problem for the justices is that all these stories — and more — are a corrosive drip, drip, drip, eroding public confidence in the court. And if one compares the Supreme Court today to the court 40, 50 or 75 years ago, this is a very different world. Justices back then were not, for the most part, big public figures. They didn't write books or give lots of speeches, and especially not for groups with clearly ideological viewpoints. And perhaps most importantly, there was not a huge coterie of enormously wealthy people — often tied to political parties and causes — trying to get close to the members of the court.

The new billionaire class of "friends"

In the old days, the justices had political friends; they even played poker at the White House. Washington is, or was, a very chummy town. But the justices did rule against their political pals, and if they got too close, as Justice Abe Fortas did with President Lyndon B. Johnson, ultimately he had to resign. Today there are billionaires, lots of them, who want to build bridges to certain members of the court. As far as is known, at least so far, they are conservative men and women interested in conservative causes. They want bragging rights about knowing the justices, and even if they don't discuss Supreme Court cases, they want proximity and, indirectly, probably influence. By the standards of most Americans, the Supreme Court justices do very well financially. Indeed, if they really cared about money, they likely would not be federal judges. They could be making literally 10 times more than their salaries, which as of January were $274,000 for the associate justices and $286,000 for the chief justice.

The richest and the poorest of the justices

We do know a fair amount about the state of their wealth because they have to file financial disclosure forms for their investments, real estate transactions, books and teaching incomes. Seven of the nine justices filed their disclosure forms on time in June. As to their relative wealth, Roberts is at the top. After all, after almost a decade of public service, he spent 12 years at an elite law firm earning annually what would be in today's dollars as much as $1.7 million, and now his wife is bringing in big bucks. Following what are deemed the best practices for judges, Roberts has most of his investments in index funds of various sorts and mutual funds, where he doesn't control the investments and he won't have conflicts of interest. That said, the way these investments are publicly reported is by a code that indicates ranges — for instance, M is $150,000 to $200,000, and P1 is $1 million to $5 million. So when you add up all of Roberts' investments, the grand total is a ridiculously meaningless range: roughly $10 million to $30 million. None of the other justices is anywhere close to that, and there is no way of knowing whether Roberts' actual total is at the low or high end of that range. As for the other justices, at the low end in terms of wealth are Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan. Kavanaugh lists investments of $15,000 to $65,000. He has spent most of his adult life in public service, and even with his teaching income, capped at $30,000, he is probably the most strapped for now. He lives in a modest and relatively small house, and his wife has a part-time job. In fact, during the pandemic, with the exception of the chief justice, Kavanaugh was the only justice who worked at their Supreme Court office, because, with two teenagers at home, it was just too hard to concentrate. Kagan owns a condo in Washington, but she rents out the parking space that comes with the apartment. The rental spot is valued at between $15,000 and $50,000, and she rents it out for between $2,500 and $5,000. And she has investments, a lot of them in individual retirement accounts and what appear to be other retirement accounts, with total investments in the range of $1.6 million to $3.5 million.

Publishers pay millions for books

In addition to teaching income and spousal income that some justices have, five of the nine are making or have made significant sums from book advances and royalties. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has earned $3.5 million from her bestselling autobiography and her children's books. Thomas reported earning over $1 million for his autobiography, also a bestseller. Justice Amy Coney Barrett has reportedly signed a book contract with a conservative publishing imprint for an eye-popping $2 million. No word on what it is about. Justice Neil Gorsuch has earned roughly $1 million from two books, one a bestseller that is a compilation of his essays, speeches and personal reflections. And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has reportedly signed a contract to write her autobiography for at least a million dollars.

Correction: June 28, 2023 A previous version of this story — both online and on air — said Justice Elena Kagan rented a parking space that come with her condo in Washington for close to $15,000. The amount is between $2,500 and $5,000.

This story was adapted from reporting for Episode 4 of Louder Than A Riot, Season 2. For more about sexual agency in hip-hop, including the pioneering raunch of Miami icon Trina and her complex journey with creative partner Trick Daddy, stream the full episode or subscribe to the Louder Than A Riot podcast.

---

When you trace the lineage of women getting explicit on the mic, flaunting their pleasure and autonomy all at once, all roads lead South — to one Miami-Dade County icon. It was 25 years ago that Trina was tapped by fellow Miami rapper Trick Daddy to guest on his song "Nann N****," stole the show, and soon went on to proclaim herself hip-hop's baddest bitch. Today, the lane she carved has never been more populated, or popular. From City Girls to Sukihana, Cardi B to Megan Thee Stallion, GloRilla to Sexyy Red, sexually explicit wordplay from a woman's point of view has become rap's dominant sound. Many of those artists credit Trina directly as their inspiration, hailing her commitment to position her pleasure at the center of the narrative. As the legend herself says in Episode 4 of Louder Than A Riot: "I was raw, unapologetic. I stood on what I meant. That's why I breed a whole universe of bad bitches." Sexual agency — the freedom to determine your own sexual wants and needs — has long been a social luxury afforded to men, and systematically gatekept from everyone else. For the fans who love it, this form of rap claps back at that imbalance; it uplifts, empowers and highlights loving yourself in the ways you've historically been told to suppress. But birthing a whole universe doesn't necessarily change the world one already lives in. As Trina was wiping her Gucci pumps on dusty old stereotypes about Black women's sexuality, many detractors tried to drag her through more dirt. And despite some progress in the years since, her successors have dealt with the same double standards — listeners, critics and other artists reducing those baddie bars to the pejorative of "p***y rap," without hearing the real message. Atlanta's Latto is one star in Trina's universe who teeters on the tip of this double-edged sword. Latto's highest chart-topper, "Big Energy," along with tracks like "It's Givin," the abortion-rights anthem "P***y" and "Bitch from da Souf" (which got a boost from Trina hopping on the remix in 2020) are as emancipatory as they are titillating. Louder host Sidney Madden spoke with Latto about what Trina's influence means to her, the highs and lows she's faced as a woman expressing sexual agency in her art — and how far she believes this music can go, if people would just get over their fear of it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

---

Sidney Madden: What are some of the earliest memories you have of sexually explicit lyrics? Things that were like, "I don't know if I should listen to this" — but made you want to listen more? Latto: I grew up in a household where our parents didn't really shelter us. There wasn't that "cover your ears" or "look away." I remember singing Kelis' "Milkshake" to one of my friends and they was like, "Um, are you allowed to say that?" I'm like, "Say what?" I think having young parents, they weren't trying to make me have this false belief of what the world really was. It was still a level of respect — we wasn't just sitting at the table like cussing to my parents. But musically, we could listen to whatever. It wasn't "bad" lyrics in my house. Do you remember the first time you heard Trina's "Da Baddest Bitch"? It was probably through my dad, on some sitdown. We would watch videos on Music Choice, YouTube, whatever, and he would talk highly of these women. This Trina, you know? She from Miami. A diamond princess. Listen to her music. I didn't think about what they were saying as explicit; we would be appreciating the bars and the wordplay and just the overall creativity of the artists. So when did you transition from a rap fan, whose dad was schooling you on all these people, to someone who kind of curated your own tastes? I would be writing raps in my room, and I didn't say nothing about it at first. My dad, his dad, my uncles, cousins, they all drag race — that was like the thing in my family. But I remember telling him, "I don't wanna drag race, I wanna rap." And I think I just rapped him one of raps that I had, and somehow he saw the potential, 'cause I was trash back then. But he just supported me wholeheartedly. I was probably like 8. When I'm turning like 16, 17, I'm like, aight — I wanna cuss in my music. [He was] like, nah, we ain't doing that. So that relationship with my dad became rocky around that time. That's when it starts being like, "OK, you wanna protect me, but I'm growing up. I'm writing my own music. I got stuff I want to talk about now." I probably had a little boyfriend I wanted to write a song about. Or, I'm at the club and these bitches was hating, and we jumped them outside in the parking lot. It wasn't even sexual lyrics, it was just explicit as far as cussing and just being a little less of a commercialized kid rapper. When I changed as a woman, my music changed. Take me to the era of Queen of da Souf, and creating the anthem that was "Bitch from da Souf." It's not that long ago, but it was such a step forward at the time. I was getting my feet wet in the industry, and I felt like I had a point to prove. I'm reintroducing myself as this adult, sexually liberated woman, versus this kid that was rapping about having a crush on you and how they love to read. And this is when you started to get a lot of huge collaborations. What did it mean to get Trina on that track? Oh my God. To this day, nobody understands — 'cause first of all, I was independent when Trina did that, and she just seen the vision. Being an independent artist and coming into the game as a grown woman, her approval meant the world to me. Nobody ever gonna speak on Trina in my presence. In reporting this season, one artist we spoke to was Omeretta the Great, who actually invoked your name. She said, "Latto, she talks about sex a lot, but Latto is actually hard. I feel like she had to take that route for people to pay attention to her hard raps." What do you think about that? You know, you can never see yourself from a third-person point of view, but I think it is less strategic than people think. Like, there was never a sit-down meeting where I'm like, "OK, now I'm gonna do this so people can start paying attention to me." No, I literally just became a grown woman. I went from living in my mama house and having a curfew to being grown. I'm f***ing, I'm s***ing, and I'm rapping about it. It is what it is. I guess I could see how that could be interpreted differently, because people didn't see the transition — they just saw me as a kid, and then the next day I'm talking about, "First I make him eat it till he lockjaw." I get it. But it was just way less strategic than what people think. I do think to a certain extent, as a female rapper, you have to have some type of sex appeal. Why do you think that? You know, it's definitely changing for the better for sure, but we're still women. We're still fighting for men to just look at us as humans, rather than an object. In real life women fight that battle daily, so it's not gonna be no different in the music industry. Anybody say otherwise, that's cap — that's not being 100. In what ways do you feel like your sex appeal and your explicitness has helped you? And then in what ways have you felt like maybe it was used against you? I think it gives me another experience to rap about that women can relate to. I can speak from the perspective of in the moment having sex, or I can rap in about sex from a n**** from the past. It's so many different ways that you can flip the sexual content, so that's a positive. A negative would be, because those songs are pushing the boundaries, people love the drama, so those songs tend to run to the forefront. People who aren't familiar with your whole catalog hear those couple songs and run with this narrative that that's all you talk about. That's the songs that y'all are making blow. I record so goddamn much — I'm in the middle of an album right now — and I have so many songs that are not about that. And if you wanna hear "It's Givin," or just read the title, and be like, "Oh, Instagram bad-bitch music"? That's the s*** I'm talking about where people be so simple-minded. I see the comments — my ass can't stay out them damn comments. But if you get past it and you listen to the record with an open mind, it's so empowering. I say, "Work a nine-to-five and she tryna finish school / I bring the table to the table, n****, why would I need you?" Like, I'm lifting women up. But you know the stigma with female rap. As soon as they hear "p***y" or anything just putting down a man, they throw it all in the same category. That song is from 777, your major label debut. There was so much push around it, and then something happened that kind of sucked the air out of the moment: You were interviewed on the radio before the release, and mentioned that a rapper featured on the album had tried to push up on you sexually to get their verse cleared. That one issue became a big part of the narrative. Other rappers started taking shots at you, and people online accused you of lying and clout-chasing. I'm not going to ask specifics about that. But I do want to know why it was important for you to say it, and how it made you feel when it blew up this way. That morning that I had to do all this press stuff, I got the news that if I take this song off my album, then it's not gonna be dropping at the same date that I've been promoting all this time. And I'm a new artist — baby, we can't be doing all that. I'm just stuck. So when they asked me, "How has the process been," that's what was on my mind that morning. I'd just had to make an executive decision to leave something that I did not want to be on there, to do something that I did not want to do, to deliver a project to my fans and put my name attached to something that I wasn't confident in. I kept names out of it, because I didn't want it to turn into what it turned into, this narrative where it's like I'm looking for sympathy. Honestly, that's not even the half of what I've dealt with in this industry, so I was blindsided by people's reaction to it. People don't know what they're proposing us to do in exchange for these features. They be bullying female rappers behind closed doors. Half the time these n****s don't be interested in doing no song with us if it don't come with no p***y. I think your honesty in that moment was important. Even if it's the tip of the iceberg, it opened up a conversation of what you deal with being in this industry as a Black woman, and the misogyny that still is allowed to operate in this space. I'm appreciative for the way things are shifting for female rappers, but people still don't know. Y'all see all these thriving female rappers; that's beautiful. But I know so many of them have stories similar to mine, maybe even worse than mine. And people don't see us speaking up, because look at when we do. It shows you that hip-hop is no different than the real world. People see the money and the glitz and glamour of female rappers and think that we are above certain things. No, the same stuff that my mama be telling me she deal with being a woman in the corporate world, I be dealing with in a male-dominated music industry world. That is everyday life, for all women. Trina has said in a couple interviews that she reached out to you after that and gave you some tips on how to deal with it, because she's had those experiences herself. What was some of the advice she gave you? Don't let people silence you. Don't let people intimidate you from your experiences. This is s*** that you experienced — no one can invalidate that. And a lot of women was in my DMs or texting me, giving me those same words of advice. But, you know, I'm young. It's easier said than done. I can't even sit up here and act like it didn't bother me. What are some double standards you think are still in place for women in rap? The first thing that comes to mind is performances. Men can get up there with no t-shirt on, just some damn Amiri jeans and a couple chains on, and just go hold they nuts like, "Yeah, that's all I got for you." We getting paid the same amount to invest half of that s*** into dancers, lighting and just putting on a real show. We sitting in glam for two hours. We done did a week of rehearsals. And when we hit that stage, they gonna critique us up and down on social media — name finna be trending when we do them award shows. But the men, half the time they don't even be rehearsing. They get up there fresh off the flight and just treat it like a festival or whatever. Another double standard is rapping about sex and, you know, regular lifestyle things that we all rap about. For whatever reason, the woman rapper is under the microscope: You can't drop two, three singles in a row talking about your p***y. But these n****s love talking about how many hoes they got, which car they driving, what hood they from and what gun they gonna kill you with. They can talk about that every day, up and down every album. And my feature thing is another good example. They look at us as like, "Oh, she reached out for a feature — that means she must wanna f***." Like, nah, I'm actually just a fan of your music. But they be taking it and running with it. So what do you feel like the industry, or just Black men in hip-hop, owes Black women to make it safer? So many female rappers now, we are linking up with each other, featuring on each other's songs and being there for each other. Whenever you see me do a song with a female rapper, I don't charge. I need to cover my costs: My glam is expensive, so I'm gonna need your label to pay for my glam. But as far as profit, I don't want no money for the feature or to show up for the video. I want to do my part where where I can. But — we need the men. We need them to call these n****s out when they do some lame s***. That might be your partner. Y'all might be from the same hood. Y'all might got a mixtape together or a feature, whatever. But we need them to speak up for us, because the s*** these n****s be doing and getting away with publicly and nobody speaks up, that's foul. We all have to work together to rewrite that.

States along the West Coast and in the Northeast have the highest shares of households with same-sex couples, according to the latest 2020 census results released Thursday. The new numbers from the Census Bureau make up the most comprehensive statistics the federal government has produced to date about married and unmarried same-sex couples living together. But many other LGBTQ+ people, including those who are not living with a partner or are in different-sex relationships, remain invisible in this key national dataset that's used to determine political representation, enforce civil rights protections, inform research and policymaking, and guide an estimated $1.5 trillion a year in federal money for public services in local communities. "A lot is tied to Census Bureau data," says Kerith Conron, research director of the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. "Being invisible in those systems or only sort of partially counted is, I think, problematic." Former President Donald Trump's administration blocked efforts to get questions about sexual orientation and gender identity onto a Census Bureau survey that's considered a testing ground for changes to the forms for the decennial national head count. Now, the Biden administration has renewed that process as advocates for more official statistics about LGBTQ+ populations continue to grapple with long-standing data gaps that make it difficult to fully understand people's needs amid rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment from right-wing groups.

Why are only same-sex couples who live together represented in 2020 census data about LGBTQ+ people?

While forms for the last U.S. census did include a question about a person's sex with options for "male" and "female," they did not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity. The bureau, however, did provide checkboxes for a question about household relationships that allowed people to identify as a "same-sex" or "opposite-sex" spouse or unmarried partner. Those new response options were introduced to improve the agency's data about same-sex couples, which the bureau first began collecting in 1990 by matching people's responses about their sex and household relationship. That way of conducting a once-a-decade census produces only "a piece of the puzzle," says Conron of the Williams Institute, which tracks estimates of the country's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations. "At this point, less than 20% of LGBT people live in same-sex couple households," Conron explains, based on the institute's estimates. "That means we don't know a lot about the 80% or more of LGBT people who have different-sex partners or aren't living in a household with a partner. And that's significant." For Josie Caballero, the lack of an opportunity to identify as a trans woman on the 2020 census was disappointing. "If we're not asking the question, if you're trans or not, in these surveys, it is impossible for us to actually identify those disparities and make sure that funds and resources go to the communities that are desperately in need," adds Caballero, who is the director of the U.S. Trans Survey and special projects for the National Center for Transgender Equality.

What is the Biden administration doing to get more comprehensive census data about LGBTQ+ people?

Late last year, the Justice Department sent a formal request to the Census Bureau for questions about sexual orientation and gender identity to be added to the bureau's American Community Survey, which goes out to about 1 in 38 households every year, according to a recently released working paper by a bureau official. "The request included citations of several statutes to justify the collection, including a need for data to properly enforce discrimination laws," wrote Andrew Roberts, the chief of the agency's sex and age statistics branch. Roberts also referenced a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that confirmed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects workers against discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Changes to the census questions are often tested first on experimental versions of the American Community Survey. The bureau — which has been asking about sexual orientation and gender identity on an experimental survey about how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting households — is planning more experiments starting this year on how the American Community Survey can ask about these topics in English and Spanish after the administration requested $10 million for this research.

Are there privacy concerns related to using the census to collect more data, especially with more anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment from right-wing groups?

Federal law prohibits the federal government from releasing personally identifiable census records until 72 years after a head count's Census Day, and it is illegal for the government to use census data against a person. But the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and sentiment among right-wing politicians and other groups has underlined concerns about how census data can be misused and individuals can be reidentified in anonymized statistics, a risk the bureau has been trying to address through a new, controversial privacy protection system. Protecting the confidentiality of people's information, however, may be harder with AI and other advances in computing becoming more accessible to bad actors who may try to trace publicly available statistics back to an individual by cross-referencing different datasets, says Stephen Parry, a senior statistical consultant at Cornell University who has written about best practices for collecting gender and sex data. "I do think that the question about privacy is important, but I also wonder whether people weight privacy as not being as important as it was in the past because they are so used to giving up their privacy and showing on social media facets of their lives that previous generations hadn't," Parry adds. One of the guidelines for collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity that the Biden administration has released is to allow survey participants to choose whether or not to respond to those kinds of questions and "make an informed decision about whether to provide this information based on its intended uses, potential risks, and their privacy preferences." "I think that people being given an opportunity to volunteer that information is important," says Rebecca Moon, president of the Shoals Diversity Center, a nonprofit organization based in Florence, Ala., that offers mental health support for the LGBTQ+ community and supports increasing government data collection. "Not everyone is out, especially in the South. There's a lot of LGBTQ hatred." Caballero of the National Center for Transgender Equality says it's "a very scary time" for many transgender people living in the U.S. and not feeling comfortable reporting your gender identity to the government is "very valid." But, Caballero adds, those who do choose to be counted as transgender for the census, if given the chance one day, make it "easier for the next trans person to tell their story and say that they are here." "You can't argue with the fact that hundreds of thousands of trans folks have been able to say in a quantitative, scientific way that we exist and this is what it looks like to live here," Caballero says. "And if we did not have that data, it would be extremely difficult to prove that we deserve human rights." Edited by Benjamin Swasey

[audio mp3="https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2023/06/20230628_me_virginia_johnson_on_her_time_at_dance_theatre_of_harlem_it_was_love.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1145&d=413&p=3&story=1184531912&ft=nprml&f=1184531912"][/audio] When Virginia Johnson auditioned to be a ballerina for the newly created Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969, she was already conditioned to steel herself against rejection. Her longtime teacher, Mary Day, had warned her that major ballet companies were not ready for a Black dancer, especially one as tall as she was. So when Arthur Mitchell, a co-founder of the dance company, told her that he "didn't like my dancing, didn't think there's any hope for me, but said we'll see what we can do," she did what she had always done: kept her head up, and kept dancing. Mitchell was a pioneer in his own right. Already a star at New York City Ballet, he was one of the few Black principal ballet dancers in the world. But he wanted more: a school to expose other Black and Latino kids to ballet and a professional company to offer the most talented a place to excel. It turned out that Johnson's training had been very different from the style that Mitchell preferred. Despite that, Johnson went on to become a principal ballerina for DTH - the highest rank in a dance company - for 28 years. She starred in pieces as wide ranging as Giselle and A Street Car Named Desire, and then pivoted to arts reporting before returning to the dance theatre as artistic director. This week, after more than a decade in that role, Johnson retires from Dance Theatre of Harlem. Part of her job involved getting the traveling company back on stage and back on solid financial footing after it shut down for many years. On July 1, DTH's current choreographer, Robert Garland, will take over her job. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Some of the excerpts include some quotes from the interview that were not aired in the broadcast version. Michel Martin: Talk to me about those early days. The shocker for me is that Arthur Mitchell didn't like you. I'm like, what? Why? Because you're actually a little bit tall for a prima ballerina. Virginia Johnson: I'm very tall. I was a very tall Giselle. I was trained in the Vaganova School, which is a very classically and very placed [style]. There's a beauty to being still. Arthur Mitchell came from George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, which is where he created the style of dancing called neoclassical ballet, which is about dynamic movement and covering space and not being static — not making poses, but making movement. And so, yeah, you know, it was horribly deflating and painful when he was like, "Oh, I'm not sure about you." But it was also an opportunity to learn something and to be challenged by something new. Tell me about those early days. Did you feel like pioneers? We did feel like pioneers. We did very much feel like we were crusaders, that we had an important message, that we had to change people's minds. And those early years of Dance Theatre of Harlem were extremely — it was a lean time for us. It was a small company. We did a lot of bus and truck tours. We were going into small cities. People were thinking they were going to see the Harlem Globetrotters. No. Because it was a bunch of tall, skinny Black people and they couldn't imagine that we were ballet dancers. Are you serious? We would be in the airport and it's like, are you guys the Harlem Globetrotters? So there was a lot of convincing. We had to band together. We had to be strong and we had to be excellent. And Arthur Mitchell was a very tough taskmaster, and he drove us to become dancers that we may never have become without the imperative, you know: If you're a Black person in America, you can't be good. You've got to be better than the best because people are not going to accept you. And so he very much brought that idea into, okay, we're in ballet and we're not just being ballet dancers. We're going to be the best ballet dancers. The other thing that the Dance Theater of Harlem did that I think people may not understand, even if they've seen it, is that even the language of ballet is very white. There's like the so-called white ballets. And that's not because the people are white. Why are they called the white ballets? Because the costumes are white. But so yes, the thing that people get stuck with is a very narrow definition of what ballet is. And certainly ballet started in the court of Louis the 14th. You know, but there's Russian ballet and there's Italian ballet. Ballet is everywhere. Ballet speaks to people because it's an art form of elevation. And elevation is a human impulse. Ballet got refined and sliced and diced and came to be this thing that was about everybody looking exactly alike and everybody having the same physical shape, having the same timing, the same unity of... Precision Precision. It was almost like kind of a militaristic approach to it, albeit on centering the female body and a specific type of femininity and etherealness and so forth. Exactly You had an incredible career of 28 years as a dancer. I think people even outside of dance can understand the toll that it takes on your body. How did you do that? Well, it was love. Ballet is very hard. And you have to knock yourself out every single day. And yes, there is a certain amount of pain. There's certain amount of physical and mental anguish to that. But I was getting to do what I love to do. And the challenge of becoming better than I was yesterday was something that I use like candy for me. Anything that remains a pain point for you or something undone or anything you wish you had done that you weren't able to do? This is going to sound really very egotistical, but I wish I had had a lot more confidence in myself because I would have been a greater dancer than I was. How did that understanding come to you? I had to get old. I was so full of doubt about every single thing that I did and that I really did spoil things for myself. But I did keep trying. And I finally got old enough that I was doing performances. You know, I was in my late thirties when Giselle came to me, very old. So I at least had that little bit of awareness, self-awareness that I was like, okay, you're getting to do this, you sure better do it. What made this the time to step away? Oh, I'm old. You're not old. You're seasoned. No, it was because this company needs more challenge, needs a new challenge, needs a vision. Robert Garland, we danced together in the day with the company. But Robert Garland is an amazing choreographer. He's somebody who's got his pulse on American culture. And when I talk about American culture, I'm talking about African-American culture, classical American culture, American culture as we want it to evolve to be, which is representative of the people who are in this nation. And Robert is a young man who has access to that kind of vision. So it wasn't about me stepping down. It was about what does this organization need now to really keep thriving.

[audio mp3="https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2023/06/20230627_atc_casa_mia_profile.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1128&d=404&story=1184470838&ft=nprml&f=1184470838"][/audio] The pregnancy was a turning point for L. She was in an abusive relationship. "He actually hit me when I was pregnant," she says. "I was like, 'Well, if that's not gonna stop him, then nothing is.'" NPR is not using her full name — just her initial — out of concern for L's safety. She considered abortion, but even if she'd wanted one, it was impossible. Abortion is illegal in Texas, and she didn't have the means to go to another state. The closest clinic is at least an eight-hour drive from her home in San Antonio. L also had another child, a 4-year-old boy, and couldn't leave him. The only thing she had the power to do was to quit her relationship. She just needed a place to go to. There was another complication, though. L is in recovery. She has struggled with substance use disorder in the past and was taking methadone — a drug that helps mitigate the side effects of opioid addiction — when she got pregnant. She needed to find a place to go to that would be supportive and understanding. That's when she found Casa Mía, a program in San Antonio that provides housing and support for pregnant women and new mothers struggling with addiction. L received medical treatment for addiction as well as mental health care. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy, who's now 2 months old, despite her history of substance abuse. Had she not found Casa Mía, she says, her life would look much different. "Oh, both my kids would've been taken away permanently — for sure," she says. "I probably would've been out in the streets homeless." Fear of losing their children to the state is one of the main reasons women who are both pregnant and struggling with substance abuse don't seek help. Experts say it's not unfounded. "There are certain states that will criminalize you for using substances and being pregnant," says Dana Sussman, acting executive director of Pregnancy Justice, a legal advocacy group for pregnant people. In states like Texas, where a fetus has been granted equal rights to the mother, criminal charges can be steep. Not only does the criminal justice system punish women in these circumstances, says Sussman, but it also "provides you with no mechanism to seek help without the specter of criminal charges or the child welfare system."

Abortion restrictions are especially burdensome for the most vulnerable women

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, Americans are having fewer abortions. Some experts estimate that there have been tens of thousands fewer abortions across the country in the past year — at least 25,000 fewer in Texas, where much of the state is hundreds of miles from access to abortion. These circumstances are especially burdensome for women who are already grappling with destabilizing forces. Those struggling with substance abuse are at greater risk of unplanned pregnancies; nearly 20% of women who seek an abortion are homeless, according to one study. Babies who were exposed to opioids in the womb can have something called neonatal abstinence syndrome — and they are some of the most fragile. In the United States, a baby is given this diagnosis every 25 minutes. Lisa Cleveland saw this firsthand working as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at a Texas hospital. Often when babies are taken from their mothers at birth, she says, they are never reunited. She was tired of watching mothers lose their children to foster care. That's when she founded Casa Mía through the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The program is run out of a converted old house. Nine women live there now. Residents spend time working in a garden out back or playing in the backyard with their toddlers. Babies and cribs are around every corner. Cleveland points to a row of battery-powered baby swings that line the wall in the living room. "So those work really, really great for babies who are experiencing withdrawal symptoms," she says. The best medicine for babies with this condition, she says, is their parents. "Mamas and babies go together," Cleveland says. "It's a two-pack, right? And so to think that you're gonna have healthy children raised by an unhealthy mother — that just doesn't work out." Staff at Casa Mía prioritize helping mothers with recovery and destigmatizing substance abuse. These kinds of programs are rare. Casa Mía is funded through Texas Health and Human Services and has a long waiting list. Demand has grown significantly in recent years. "We're really struggling as a nation dealing with opioid use disorder and pregnancy," says Stephen Patrick, director of the Center for Child Health Policy at Vanderbilt University. Caring for these babies is expensive, he says. The U.S. spends nearly a half-billion dollars a year on treating babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome, Patrick says, and the majority of them still don't have adequate care. "What we've been doing so far really isn't working," he says. Criminalizing substance use disorder instead of treating it in pregnancy surfaces a larger issue. "I think time and time again, we see the needs of pregnant women and infants flying under the radar," Patrick says. "No one is owning the problem." After much pressure, the state of Texas recently expanded its Medicaid benefit to postpartum mothers. Lower-income women can now receive health care for a year after they have a baby. But advocates say the state still has a long way to go toward supporting new parents.

Those who find this program say they feel lucky

Casa Mía is one of the few places where some of the most vulnerable moms can find support. Lorna Weis is another mom who lives there. Weis was in a master's program and working a full-time job when she started using methamphetamine. "It was the miracle drug for a while," Weis says. Suddenly, she had enough energy to get through her busy schedule. But after six months, "it quickly consumed everything that I was and everything that I had." Then she got pregnant. She, too, was in an abusive relationship. She started looking for a way out. Weis called as many social service agencies and shelters as she could find. There was nowhere to go. "I just was getting slammed doors in my face," she says. It wasn't until after she had the baby that she hit rock bottom with a suicide attempt. Her son went into foster care. That's when she found Casa Mía. "I don't think about it," Weis says of what might have happened had she not landed at Casa Mía. "I'm really big on law of attraction and bringing good things into your life and ... I just know that I was at the end of my rope." After receiving treatment at Casa Mía, she's scheduled to be reunited with her baby in a few months. She points to a bulletin board covered in pictures of him. "He was born 4 pounds, 15 ounces, 19 inches long," she says. "It was all legs and feet." Isaiah Phoenix is her son's name. She chose Phoenix, she says, because this baby was born of hope.

---

If you or someone you know might be considering suicide or be in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. For suicide prevention resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, click here.

Peso Pluma has entered his own era. He is the future that Regional Mexican music labels have been dreaming about for the past four or five years. As other artists in the genre have teetered on the edge of a breakthrough, he is the first of the would-be superstars that labels have been steadily banking on to thrust corridos tumbados, corrido trap and sierreños — modernized takes on historically marginalized genres of guitar and horn-driven music — into the mainstream. Over the last couple of months, the 23-year-old singer from Jalisco, Mexico, whose raspy voice makes him sound more like a Boomer than a Zoomer with an Edgar mullet, has racked up music history milestone after milestone. And if he isn't on your radar yet, it's probably just a matter of time. His duet with the group Eslabon Armado, Ella Baila Sola, became the first Mexican music song ever to enter the top five on the Billboard Hot 100, with over 24 million streams. It also peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200. He's been a monster on Spotify, too. Peso Pluma, who also goes by Doble P, ranks as the No. 5 most-streamed artist in the world on the platform, with five of his collaborations hitting the Top 50 Global chart. Coachella audiences went wild when he and his diamond encrusted Spider-Man necklace joined singer Becky G on the main stage a few weeks ago. The two crooned to one another, singing the break up song "Chanel." And last week, Mexican American fans tweeted about being on the verge of tears as he performed a solo rendition of Ella Baila Sola on The Tonight Show – the first Regional Mexican musical artist to perform on the show's stage. In other words, the young star está en el fuego.

From construction worker to headliner

Technically, Peso Pluma is not really Peso Pluma. Rather, he's one of three members of the group who make up Peso Pluma, including his cousin. (The name translates to "feather weight," which he has said described them all when they first got together "as a bunch of skinny guys.") And while in earlier interviews and performances he'd make an effort to explain the difference, he now seems to have adopted the moniker for himself as his popularity explodes and more audiences mistakenly conflate the two. "People call me that and I just respond," he told the podcast Abstractamente. His real name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, and just a few years ago, he was working as a waiter at an Italian restaurant in New York's Little Italy. Later, he made about $200 a day in Los Angeles as a construction worker. "It's not the labor that's hard, it's working under the hot sun," he said. Now, he's about to embark on a U.S. tour, hitting over 20 cities across the country. The rags-to-riches aspect of it all isn't lost on him. "A lot of my success has been based on sacrifice, discipline and keeping my foot on the gas pedal. That type of hustler mentality is ingrained in me and I think, coming from this genre, that discipline is our strength," he recently told Variety. He added: "We love to work, we love to be in the studio, and we love to continue doing new things because we know that nowadays music is consumed fleetingly — that isn't lost on me."

A Gen Z spin on traditional Mexican music

Like a lot of kids who dream of being famous, Peso Pluma has said he first dreamed of being a soccer star. But when it became clear that wasn't going to pan out, he turned to music. Raised on hip-hop and reggaeton, he wanted to become a rapper. But, he said, he quickly realized his voice — simultaneously gravelly and nasal — wasn't suited to those styles of music. So he joined the new wave of Mexican Gen Zers who have returned to the traditional country music of their parents and grandparents, putting their own spin on norteñas, corridos and cumbia. "He was born in 1999! Of course, his music's going to have those influences. How can it not?" Anita Herrera, an artist, curator and cultural consultant who works in Los Angeles and Mexico City told NPR. Herrera notes that the hip-hop influence doesn't end in the music. Unlike their predecessors, many of the new wave of Nuevo Corrido performers have given up the traditional botas and sombreros. Instead, they sport bucket hats, swap out the silky Versace button downs for Versace t-shirts, and wear Nike Air Force Ones or Jordans. Herrera was at Coachella where Peso Pluma and Becky G sang their song together. "Everyone was just loving it," she said. "All of that is what speaks to us. To all of the first-gen [Mexican] kids who are part of the diaspora and grew up here in the U.S. or in the U.S. and in Mexico. To everyone who grew up listening to this music and were made fun of because it wasn't cool. Now, there's no denying it."

El momento Mexicano

The moment, and Peso Pluma's skyrocketing fame, encapsulate a significant cultural shift. The style of music, long considered to be paisa or chunty – both derogatory terms for rural Mexicans — has now been embraced as something cutting-edge, Herrera said. While Puerto Rico and Colombia have benefited from worldwide embrace of reggaeton over the last two decades, the spotlight is finally moving to Mexico, she said. "Este es el momento del Mexicano," Herrera declared. And for proof of that, one need look no further than the No. 1 charting Spotify Global hit — un x100to, a cumbia-reggeaton hybrid by Bad Bunny and Regional Mexican group Grupo Frontera. The genre has always been popular in Mexico and among the Mexican diaspora. Bands like Los Tigres Del Norte have been selling out stadiums in the U.S. for decades. And in states like California and Texas, as well as Mexican states along the border, there's been a constant crop of new artists who have had significant success. Still, the music and the scene that goes along with it have been relegated to the fringes by the music industry and companies trying to reach into the pockets of Latino customers. In her job as a consultant with music labels, marketing agencies and clothing and alcohol brands, Herrera said she'd always get shut down when recommending the inclusion of Regional Mexican artists in campaigns or live events. "It didn't fall under what they thought Latino was," she explained. "For them, it was too low brow ... even though this is where the culture is and this is where the spending power is." Now, after the quantifiable success of artists like Peso Pluma, Natanael Cano and Fuerza Regida, the same companies are clamoring to work with the artists, she said.

Tik Tok is leading new audiences to Regional Mexican music

Felipe Garrido, a Peruvian economist working in the U.S., agrees that the genre's widespread success has been years in the making. Garrido is a huge fan of Mexico's regional music and has been tracking the explosion of the corridos tumbados subgenre across streaming music platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. In an April analysis with Chartmetric, Garrido found that the combined total Spotify monthly listeners for Natanael Cano, Junio H and Fuerza Regida – three of the genre's most popular artists — has boomed. Together, their listens increased from 1.6 million at the beginning of 2019 to 54.1 million in 2023, at a compounded annual growth rate of 142%. Part of their success, and that of Peso Pluma, stems from their presence on TikTok, Garrido said. According to his research, Garrido said "60% of TikTok users, who are primarily Gen Zers, discover new music on TikTok rather than somewhere else." It's only after they find new music on the platform that they turn to Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube, he added. Another important factor in the genre's exponential growth is the artists' willingness to collaborate with one another, even across music labels. Of the six hits that Peso Pluma has on Spotify's Global Top 50, only one is a solo song. The others, at Nos. 2, 3, 10,17 and 19, are all with other rising stars. "That helps them out a lot. It pushes them to be included in most of the [music streaming] services playlists," which is another way new audiences are introduced to the music, Garrido said.

Going global with it

All the trappings of fame — the money, the girls, the cars — are all great, Peso Pluma told Abstractamente. But "getting to work with all of these guys who I've admired for so long is the coolest part of everything that's happening right now," he said. And he is determined to bring others along for the ride. "They call it Regional Mexican music but how is that possible?" he asked during a recent interview. "People are listening to corridos even in Japan!" "I want to get rid of the label," he added, explaining that the genre has transcended the idea that it's regional. "Look how far we've come." He resists the idea that there's only room for one Spanish language music genre — i.e., reggaeton — for fans to love. In a mix of metaphors — one about the sun and another about cake — he added, "The sun shines for everyone and everyone can decide how much they want to eat."   Contributor: Vanessa Romo

A group of small children sits cross-legged with their teacher, Steve Mejía-Menendez, on a round carpet. He's a pre-K teacher at Lee Montessori Public Charter School's campus in Southeast Washington, D.C., and although I'm here to meet him, I almost don't spot him because he's eye level with his students. Mr. Steve, as he's known here, is talking a few students through a geometry lesson when another student approaches to ask an unrelated question. This kind of distraction happens all the time in classrooms around the United States. Mr. Steve doesn't lose focus. He uses American Sign Language to say "wait" — palms facing up, fingers wiggling — and the child waits quietly. When the lesson arrives at a natural stopping point, the student is invited to ask his question, and Mr. Steve silently responds by nodding his head along with his fist, which is sign language for "yes." Blink, and you could miss the whole interaction. This isn't a school for students with hearing disabilities, but Mr. Steve uses ASL as part of a broader approach to minimize noise in the classroom. And it's noticeably quiet. No one is talking louder than what's often referred to in Montessori schools as "the hum." "Silence is kind of a peak achievement in a child's ability to control themselves," Mejía-Menendez says. "We create the conditions for children to concentrate." Unlike this classroom, the city outside is full of noise. And studies show that too much noise, particularly loud noise, can hurt a child's cognitive development, notably for language-based skills such as reading. That's because if noise is just, well, noise, it distracts developing brains and makes it more difficult for children to concentrate. But when their environment is quiet enough for them to pay attention to sounds that are important or particularly interesting to them, it is a powerful teaching tool. "[Young children's] brains are craving sound-to-meaning connections, so it's very important that the sounds around them be nourishing and meaningful," says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University. She believes turning down the noise in our lives starts with embracing — even enjoying — silence.

Our noisy world shapes our brains

Silence is difficult to find and to create — for adults and kids alike. Around the world, fans of silence have begun to catalog the world's disappearing quiet places. But Lee Montessori is in Washington, D.C., a city that is surround-sound cacophony: busy highways, screeching commuter trains, jarring car horns, waterways with the blare of boat whistles and the seemingly constant whir of presidential and military helicopters and the drone of commercial airplanes. But teachers do what they can. Inside this bright elementary school, there are no disruptive public address announcements. Students even wear special classroom shoes made of cloth and soft rubber soles. "The hearing brain is vast," Kraus, the neurobiologist, says. "Our experience with sound really does shape us." In fact, she has written an entire book about that topic, called Of Sound Mind. The brain processes auditory input faster than visual input, Kraus explains, and when we have the space to listen, our brains prioritize what we tune in to and reward paying attention through a release of dopamine. For example, if you're a teenager excited to be learning the guitar, musical tones will get preferential treatment. If you're learning to play basketball, the bounce of the dribbling ball and your coach calling out plays will get your attention. There are certain sounds, like the sound of your own name, that your brain is unconsciously conditioned to respond to, even when you're asleep. But when sounds are out of our control and not important to us, they shift into the category of noise: a neighbor's dog barking at a squirrel, a faulty car alarm, the drone of a highway. When the sounds we are exposed to aren't helping us learn a new skill or stay safe at a busy intersection, the brain can get distracted and have trouble focusing.

It takes brainpower to ignore sound

When the world was a lot quieter, our brains paid attention to every little leaf rustle or snap of a twig as a tool for survival, Kraus explains. And when our brains are processing sounds that trigger questions like "Am I in trouble here?" or "Can I ignore this?", there is less room to focus on the task in front of us. Consider a modern equivalent: When you're listening to someone tell you something and your phone dings — Ding! "Is that important?" — you just lost track of where you were. Your brain has to work overtime to ignore sounds. Inside the cochlea — the spiral cavity of the inner ear that produces nerve impulses in response to sound vibrations — there are inner hair cells and outer hair cells that interact to amplify or deamplify the vibrations. Say you are listening to a piece of music on the radio, but traffic noise is in the background. Kraus says your brain will tell the outer hair cells to slow down and deamplify the traffic noise to protect your ears. So when there is even just a moderate level of background noise, like traffic or a truck idling, our brains process more slowly. Kraus uses the analogy of a DJ sitting at a mixing board in your brain, assessing and adjusting sounds that come in all day long. The more that DJ has to do, the less operating power is available for your brain, making it harder to process new information. It can become physically exhausting as well. People who have trouble hearing often experience listening fatigue.

Noise is especially distracting to young brains

"We can close our eyes, we can avert our gaze, but we hear in 360 degrees," says Emily Elliott, a psychology professor at Louisiana State University who studies memory and cognition and is one of the authors of a study about how auditory distraction affects a young child's ability to perform serial recall tasks. Elliott and her colleagues devised a test in which they gave young children a visual task of memorizing a series of items on a screen. Then they told the children that sounds would be playing but not to pay attention to them, because they weren't relevant. "In general, performance goes down when you're asked to remember a series of things in order in the presence of irrelevant or distracting auditory stimuli," Elliott found. "So that tells us that [the sound is] somehow being processed in the cognitive system, because you can't just willfully go, 'I'm going to not listen.'" Elliott and her team found that the critical ingredient of distraction is sound that changes in some noticeable way. "It could be music with lyrics," she says. "Music with lyrics is more distracting than music without lyrics." They also found that children under age 7 in particular are bad at memorization because their brains are not yet able to employ a key tactic known as rehearsal. That's where you repeat things to yourself to remember them. And not only will they not remember a list of things, but they're also not aware that they won't remember them. So when you're giving a young child directions or teaching a new topic and a distracting noise is present, the odds of the child remembering any of what you've told the child are pretty low. One study of New York City schoolchildren in the 1970s found that students in classrooms next to noisy elevated train tracks performed significantly poorer on reading tests than their peers on the other side of the building. After the study was published, the city took steps to soundproof the classrooms and minimize the noise coming from the tracks, and a year later, the students' test scores were the same on both sides of the building. In another study by neurologist Kraus and her team, they mapped the brain activity of 66 ninth-graders from Chicago Public Schools while asking them to perform reading and memory tasks. Then they monitored the children's electrical brain activity while watching a movie and listening to disruptive sounds. They found that the students who grew up under circumstances associated with noisier environments performed poorer on the reading and memory tasks and that those students had what she calls "noisier" brains — meaning a lot of neurons were firing all the time, even when the brain wasn't engaged in a task. You can think of that excess electrical activity as static. "And if there's too much static, it makes it hard to make sense of all of the information that you want to be processing," Kraus says. According to Kraus, more static in a child's brain means it's harder for that child to listen and stay focused wherever they are.

How silence and some types of noise can benefit children

Kraus believes silence can be a benefit to children. When she and her team monitored kids with "noisy brains" under scalp electrodes, they found that periods of silence helped lessen the static. Her team has also found that making meaningful sounds, like playing a musical instrument or singing, builds and strengthens neural connections. Other research has found that pure silence can be healing. In one study on mice, scientists tracked brain cell growth among mice that were exposed to white noise, mice pup sounds, classical music and ambient sounds, and they compared those mice with mice that were left in silence. The mice that were left in silence had the most significant brain cell growth, leading researchers to conclude that the act of listening to silence regenerates nerve cells. But absolute silence is rare outside a controlled lab environment. Even in the middle of the woods, you'll hear natural sounds of birdsong, the running water of a stream, leaves rustling and insects buzzing. These types of sounds could be described as noise, but they are calming to us. And if we try, we can find and re-create these natural sound environments in the middle of a city. In addition to being a researcher, Elliott, the psychology professor, is also a mother of three. She learned early on as a parent to put white noise machines in her kids' bedrooms so that if one of them woke up screaming in the middle of the night, they didn't all wake up. "White noise is fascinating because it masks lots of variability in sound," she says. "It takes out some of the frequency ranges and presents something that sounds like a continuous, steady sound." In other words, it mimics running water in a stream, and our brains tune it out. This type of noise becomes a benefit in this situation, because it's masking the variability of the other sounds that would be a distraction.

Get cozy with the sounds of silence

Creating enough quiet to help hear meaningful sound is easier said than done. Some blame, in part, a culture that promotes constant stimulus. "There is some expectation that you need to be loud and flashy to capture your child's attention. Everything has to be a fun fair," says Ellen Doherty, chief creative officer for Fred Rogers Productions. That's the company that inherited the mantle of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, the children's television program developed in the 1960s and known for its calm and reassuring tone. It's still producing media for children, including Doherty's series of shorts, Through the Woods, which is deliberately quiet. The three-minute shorts are about a kid walking through the woods, wondering, observing and experiencing. Instead of background music, you hear birds chirping, the wind blowing and leaves rustling. The sound designers do a believable job of making viewers feel like they are in the woods. But Doherty says this kind of programming goes against the grain of expectations. "We take our shows to focus groups and ask parents, 'Would your child watch this?'" Doherty says. "And so often, parents say to us that if it's not bright and flashy, 'my kid won't watch that.'" Doherty calls that type of show the fun fair. She believes you can have good shows with music and bright colors that aren't distracting but actually work to teach learning skills such as how to manage emotions or calm yourself down. "My metric," says Doherty, "is does this need to exist?" "I think that we need to be able to honor silence," Kraus says. "And there's something almost mystical there. You know, may we have a moment of silence? It's really a time to kind of get into yourself." Using Doherty's question, "Does this need to exist?" as a guide, we might begin to think of silence as a chance to learn and look forward to making our lives quieter.

---

Edited by Emily Harris and Steve Drummond; visual design and development by LA Johnson; research by LA Johnson; fact-checked by Will Chase; copyedited by Preeti Aroon.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A 1-year-old Australian shepherd took an epic trek across 150 miles (241 kilometers) of frozen Bering Sea ice that included being bitten by a seal or polar bear before he was safely returned to his home in Alaska. Mandy Iworrigan, Nanuq's owner who lives in Gambell, Alaska, and her family were visiting Savoogna, another St. Lawrence Island community in the Bering Strait, last month when Nanuq disappeared with their other family dog, Starlight, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Starlight turned up a few weeks later, but Nanuq, which means polar bear in Siberian Yupik, was nowhere to be found. About a month after Nanuq disappeared, people in Wales, 150 miles (241 kilometers) northeast of Savoonga on Alaska's western coast, began posting pictures online of what they described as a lost dog. "My dad texted me and said, 'There's a dog that looks like Nanuq in Wales,'" Iworrigan said. She reactivated her Facebook account to see if it might be her wandering hound. "I was like, 'No freakin' way! That's our dog! What is he doing in Wales?'" she said. The events of Nanuq's journey will likely always be a mystery. "I have no idea why he ended up in Wales. Maybe the ice shifted while he was hunting," Iworrigan said. "I'm pretty sure he ate leftovers of seal or caught a seal. Probably birds, too. He eats our Native foods. He's smart." She used airline points to get her dog back to Gambell on a regional air carrier last week, a charter that was transporting athletes for the Bering Strait School District's Native Youth Olympics tournament. Iworrigan filmed the happy reunion when the plane landed at the air strip in Savoonga, with both she and her daughter Brooklyn shrieking with joy. Except for a swollen leg, with large bite marks from an unidentified animal, Nanuq was in pretty good health. "Wolverine, seal, small nanuq, we don't know, because it's like a really big bite," she said.

[audio mp3="https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2023/05/20230525_atc_at_a_gente_funny_show_only_bilingual_audience_members_are_in_on_the_joke.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1048&d=292&p=2&story=1177147618&ft=nprml&f=1177147618"][/audio] Venezuelan comedian Angelo Colina is on a mission to make Spanish-language material mainstream in the U.S. comedy scene. In the past, Latinx comedians with non-English routines have largely been relegated to restaurants, bars and other spaces where Spanish already dominates. But Colina, 28, is part of a new generation of performers working to change that, one show at a time. Standup comedy has long wrestled with American identity, and Black, Asian and Latinx comedians have remixed conversations about race and representation with an edge. Some of the nation's biggest names in standup comedy – Cheech Marin, George Lopez, Gabriel Iglesias and Cristela Alonzo — come from Chicano or Mexican-American backgrounds. But the most popular American routines are almost exclusively performed and commercially successful in English. On a recent Sunday evening, a young, diverse audience filed into a Washington, D.C., club called Room 808 to see Gente Funny (People Funny) – the Spanish-language circuit Colina recently created. During his set, Colina asked people in the audience where they're from. A young guy sitting in the back raised his hand. "I'm from Bolivia, my friend's Cuban!" "Bolivia y Cuba?" Colina replied in Spanish. "I'm white as f***k," the Cuban friend said in English. "No, you're not," Colina smirked. "Pero a los cubanos les encanta pensar que lo son." (But Cubans love thinking that they are) The crowd erupted into laughter, as Colina continued to shake his head. In interactions like these, Colina's performances poke and prod at the construction of Latinx and Hispanic identity in the United States, without subtitles. Framing and satirizing that identity is inevitably complicated because it encompasses such a wide range of races, countries, languages and cultural backgrounds. Spanish itself is an colonial language imposed throughout Latin America, where people still speak a variety of indigenous languages. But Colina says for Latinx performers, it can still feel like their identities need to check a certain box or rely on particular tropes. "But I'm not only an immigrant, and I'm not only Venezuelan, and I'm not only a guy with an accent," he says. Hispanic people comprise the biggest minority population in the country and Spanish is the most widely spoken non-English language in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau. But Colina says even as more films, TV shows and standup routines incorporate Spanish into their dialogue, it can often feel like the language is used as a decorative and superficial device. "Because it's a café con leche or it's a chancla, and we're just so much more than that," he explains. "Our voices are different, and we speak differently, and we have a different sense of humor."

Coming to America

Colina first realized his sense of humor could lead to a career when he was studying filmmaking in Venezuela. A professor told him he was bad at writing dramas but good at making people laugh, so he began writing sketches and jokes. He left his hometown of Maracaibo to move to Bogota, Colombia for two years before eventually immigrating to the U.S. in 2018. It was while he was living in Utah that he performed standup for the first time: a three-minute set in English. Language barriers – and mistranslations – became central to his story. "My mom doesn't speak English, and my entire set was talking to [her] about stuff I did in her bedroom with girls," he says. "She was just clapping, and everyone in the room was dying laughing because they knew she didn't know. And she was just happy to see me doing well." Colina kept performing and sharing clips of his sets online, and he eventually connected with Venezuelan comedian Andrés Sereno, who invited him to do his first Spanish set in New York City. It went so well that Colina moved to the city not long after. But when they didn't find many opportunities to perform Spanish routines in clubs, he and Sereno created their own circuit called Español Please. Those shows are designed to connect first, second and third generation Latinos — and also dig into the experience of being bicultural and bilingual. It led to an invitation for the group to be part of the 2021 New York Comedy Festival. By performing in Spanish, Colina says he didn't have to change his voice or justify how he sounds. First with Español Please and now with Gente Funny, he's providing a stage for other Latinx comedians to also share their material in Spanish.

Latinx representation pushes forward

"I think for a long time, there was this perception that in order to be a Latino comedian, you needed to be a comedian that fit the paradigm of what a Latino was for people that weren't," says Venezuelan American comedian and TV writer Joanna Hausmann, who's been making bilingual content for more than 10 years. "I really think there was this sense for a while that bilingual comedy was just not mainstream and there wasn't enough of an audience," says Hausmann. But the rise of YouTube and social media video uploads changed everything, says Hausmann. Latinx-focused, bilingual content was no longer seen as niche. Soon, her own sketches and rants about immigration, identity and culture were drawing hundreds of thousands of subscribers. On the larger pop culture stage, there's also the Bad Bunny phenomenon: a Puerto Rican singer who refused to "crossover" and make music in English for the larger pop market and still became one of the most acclaimed and successful superstars in the world. Colina and Hausmann both say there's a palpable new enthusiasm for Spanish as the main language of expression, from both inside and outside the culture. Cuban Dominican comedian Marcello Hernandez brought jokes in Spanglish to Saturday Night Live, and the second season of Los Espookys, from Ana Fabrega, Julio Torres and Fred Armisen, just received a Peabody Award. The shift in the pop culture politics of Spanish is happening as the demographic makeup of Latino communities in the U.S. is also changing. From 2010 to 2019, Venezuelans, Guatemalans and Hondurans became the fastest-growing groups within the Hispanic demographic category. That shift is diversifying what Latinx communities look like, how they express themselves and how they connect with one another. For Colina, with both his circuits and his solo headliner tour, "Little Alone" (a purposeful mistranslation of the word "solito"), the point is to foster a space where almost everyone in the audience speaks and understands English but is choosing to speak Spanish and tell jokes from that distinct point of view, with its specific sense of humor. As non-Spanish speakers find their way, Colina's attempts at translating the set into English becomes a punchline — one where only the bilingual members of the audience are in on the joke. "I think that's our biggest flex as immigrants and as bilinguals," Colina says. "We get to decide how to dictate [the conversation] now."

Once upon a time, Polly just wanted a cracker. Nowadays, Polly might want a Zoom call. A recent study took 18 pet parrots and examined whether video calls could help them fulfill their social needs. Parrots are incredibly socially complex creatures, and surpass 6- and 7-year-old children in puzzle tasks and memory skills, says Jennifer Cunha of Northeastern University, who co-authored the study. "They have high mental needs that aren't always catered to very well in companion situations," she said. And pet birds of a feather shouldn't always flock together, according to another lead researcher, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas from the University of Glasgow. "A very high percentage of them have diseases which can be transferred when in-person interaction takes place," Hirskyj-Douglas said. So Hirskyj-Douglas and Cunha got together with lead author Rébecca Kleinberger, also of Northeastern University, to see if parrots in captivity could find companionship through video calls. They taught them to ring a bell, after which a tablet would be presented. One or two images of fellow parrots would appear on a phone or tablet, and using their beaks or tongues, the parrots would choose. To see how much the parrots actually wanted to spend time on video chats, researchers measured engagement and agency. "So how frequently they rang the parrots when the system was available and then how quickly they use the system," Hirskyj-Douglas explained. They were prepared to see negative reactions from the birds, like aggression. But instead, they say they saw a lot of social behaviors they would potentially see between birds that were together or in the wild. "So mirroring behaviors where they might move in the same kind of way, dancing, singing together," Cunha said. "They really seem to, as one owner said, come alive during the calls." Kleinberger said while there was potential for connection between animals through the screen, there were also unknown risks of exposing the birds to a new technology, so they had to be careful in training the owners and monitoring the video chats closely. But the researchers did conclude that video calling technology could reproduce some of the social benefits of living in a flock, even between parrot species. And Cunha said some of the birds still ask to chat with their pals. "Some of the birds continue to call each other. So I think that there's a lot of long-term potential for these kinds of relationships," she said. In other words, maybe what Polly wants is a lasting friendship, even through a screen.

[audio mp3="https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2023/05/20230525_me_scientist_near_a_breakthrough_that_could_revolutionize_human_reproduction.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1128&d=422&story=1177191913&ft=nprml&f=1177191913"][/audio] It's a Wednesday morning at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in downtown Washington, D.C., and Dr. Eli Adashi is opening an unprecedented gathering: It's titled "In-Vitro Derived Human Gametes as a Reproductive Technology." It's the academy's first workshop to explore in-vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, which involves custom-making human eggs and sperm in the laboratory from any cell in a person's body. "It is on the precipice of materialization," says Adashi, a reproductive biology specialist from Brown University. "And IVF will probably never be the same." For the next three days, dozens of scientists, bioethicists, doctors, and others describe the latest scientific advances in IVG and explore the potentially far-reaching thicket of social, ethical, moral, legal and regulatory ramifications of the emerging technology. Hundreds more attend the workshop remotely. "The implications here are huge," says Alana Cattapan, who studies reproductive health issues at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The realization of the advance for humans likely is still years away, but the excitement about it among scientists is growing.

So far, healthy IVG mice

Japanese scientists describe how they've already perfected IVG in mice. The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They've even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups. "We are in the pathway of translating these technologies into the humans," says Mitinori Saitou from Kyoto University, addressing the group via Zoom. In fact, Saitou says he's fairly far down that pathway. He's turned human blood cells into iPS cells, and used those iPS cells to create very primitive human eggs. Others have created primitive human sperm this way. Neither the sperm or eggs are developed enough to make embryos or babies. But scientists around the world are intensively working on that. "I've been really impressed with all the data that we've seen here and just how quickly this field is evolving," says Dr. Hugh Taylor, a reproductive health specialist at Yale School of Medicine. "It makes me confident that it's not a matter of if this will be available for clinical practice but just a matter of when."

'Life-altering' for infertility

Next, the workshop participants, who gathered at the end of April, explore the implications of IVG if the technology were ever to become a reality for humans. "This could be life-altering for individuals to build that family that they dream of through IVG," says Andrea Braverman, who studies infertility at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. IVG would enable infertile women and men to have children with their own DNA instead of genes from the sperm and eggs or donors. Same goes for women of any age, rendering the biological clock irrelevant. But that, Braverman says, raises many questions. "Yes it's great to be able to not to have to worry as woman that 40 is the cliff that we fall off of," she says. "But on the other hand: What are the implications for families? For the children that have parents that are older? I always think about freshman move-in day in your 80s." IVG could also enable gay and trans couples to have babies that are genetically related to both partners. "We too could point to our children and say, 'He has your eyes and my nose,' in a way that is something that I think many queer people covet," says Katherine Kraschel, who studies reproductive health issues at Yale Law School. But Kraschel also worries that could undermine acceptance of gay people parenting children who aren't genetically related to them through adoption or by using other peoples' sperm and eggs. "To the extent the IVG replaces markets in sperm and eggs, concerns about backsliding I think are really warranted," she says.

Provocative possibilities

Another theoretical possibility is "solo IVG" — single people having "uni-babies" — babies with just one person's genes, says Dr. Paula Amato, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland "In theory you could reproduce with yourself. And the resulting child would be 100 percent related to you," Amato says. "You could do that if you wanted to." She warns, however, that may increase the risk for genetic problems in offspring. At the same time, the DNA for IVG could be obtained from anywhere a single cell could be found, says Henry Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford. That raises a long list of other provocative possibilities, he says, including "90-year-old genetic mothers, 9-year-old genetic mothers, 9-month-old fetuses that become genetic parents, people who've been dead for three years whose cells were saved who become parents." People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely. Throughout the meeting, researchers and bioethicists warn that the ability to create a limitless supply of IVG embryos — combined with new gene-editing techniques — could turbo-charge the power to eradicate unwanted genes. That could help eradicate terrible genetic diseases, but also move "designer babies" even closer to reality. "The desire to genetically modify the future generation in a hunt for a assumed perfect race, perfect baby, perfect future generation is not science fiction," says Amrita Pande, a professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town in South African. "IVG when used with gene-editing tools like CRISPR should make us all worried." IVG is probably still at least years away — and may never happen, several of the participants note. There are still significant technical hurdles that would need to be overcome, and questions about whether IVG could ever be done safely, several experts repeatedly warn during the workshop Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration is already exploring the implications of IVG, according to Dr. Peter Marks, a top FDA official. "It's an important technology that we are very interested in helping to move it forward," Marks says. But Marks notes Congress currently prohibits the FDA from even considering any proposals that would involve genetically manipulated human embryos. "This creeps out our attorneys," Marks says. "It makes them feel uncomfortable in this space." But if IVG remains off-limits in the U.S, Marks and others warn IVG clinics could easily spring up in other countries with looser regulations, creating a new form of medical tourism that raises even more ethical worries. That includes the exploitation of women as surrogate mothers. "Does IVG really increase human well-being?" Pande asks. "Whose well-being does it increase?" Others agree. "The door that opens to this space is one in which so many things are unsettled," says Michelle Goodwin, director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California, Irvine. "So many ethical questions are yet to be unpacked."

The Pakistani movie Joyland has made headlines around the world for its ground-breaking depiction of a love story between a married cisgender man and a transgender woman in the city of Lahore. (Cisgender refers to a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.) It was initially banned in Pakistan after "a campaign accusing the film of inappropriate content," as NPR has reported. But the ban was reversed in much of the country. The movie won multiple prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and was Pakistan's submission for this past March's Academy Awards (although it didn't earn a nomination). Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai signed on as an executive producer. Joyland opened in U.S. theaters in April. For the most part, Pakistan's trans community agrees with the accolades. "I don't like to give any negative comments for the movie, as it's the only movie which has given us a representation," says Shahzadi Rai, a transgender political activist and violence case manager at Karachi-based nongovernmental organization Gender Interactive Alliance. "We were extremely happy that for the first time, world cinemas were releasing a movie of a Pakistani Khwaja Sira," Rai says, using the term for the third gender community in Pakistan, which includes trans folks. "Everybody across the class spectrum of the Khwaja Sira community agrees that the movie did an incredibly accurate job of representing the community and its issues," says Dr. Mehrub Awan, a trans activist in Karachi. But some worry that the increased visibility brought by the film is a double-edged sword, leading to misconceptions — and even harm — from the general public at a time when opponents are pushing back against trans rights. In the movie, trans performer Alina Khan plays the fiery Biba. Haider, after long being unemployed, gets a job as a dancer in Biba's show and a romance begins. Biba shares that she hopes to undergo gender-affirming surgery. "As a community we don't care if you have done [gender-affirming] surgery or not. For us, a trans [person] is trans if they identify themselves as trans, regardless of their genitals," says Anaya Rahimi, a theater performer and stand-up comedian based in Lahore who is transgender. In an NPR guide to gender terms, the definition of trans is: "an adjective used to describe someone whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth. A transgender man, for example, is someone who was listed as female at birth but whose gender identity is male." Gender-affirming surgery is not part of the definition. Now some members of the trans community in Pakistan worry the general public will come away from the movie with the idea that all transgender women have male genitals – and that could lead to discrimination against trans women, who in Pakistan use women's washrooms, sit in the women's section of public transport and prefer to be interrogated by women police when trouble arises. The movie could also lead to unsettling inquiries, says members of the trans community. Rai, for example, who has undergone gender-affirming surgery, says she's been questioned about her private parts since the film came out. "Because of this movie, people now bluntly ask if we have [a] penis." She also says she was questioned about "my private parts" on a Twitter space discussion: "I was harassed and shamed." "I am now uncomfortable in public washrooms," she says. These emotions are playing out against an uncertain legislative environment for the trans community. In 2012, Pakistan's Supreme Court ruled that all trans people can legally be designated as a third gender. And in 2018, Pakistan's parliament passed a transgender rights bill. But trans people still endure discrimination and violence – for example, an Amnesty International Report found that "In the last year alone (October 2021 – September 2022) 18 transgender people were reported to have been killed in Pakistan – the highest figure in Asia." And there is now a push to amend the 2018 bill, led by a senator in the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami. Conservative religious groups in Pakistan say that anyone who's assigned male at birth is a man and that only Allah has the authority to decide gender. The proposed changes to the law include examinations of transgender people by a medical board. Joyland's release coincided with this pushback and it got caught up in the debate, says the film's director Saim Sadiq. Although Pakistan's countrywide ban on the film was reversed, the ban still holds in the province of Punjab, home to the movie's setting of Lahore and just over half of the country's transgender community. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics census data from 2017 put the total transgender population of the country at 21,744. "My biggest joy [would be] to see this film in my hometown, Lahore," Sadiq says. "I have already filed a suit in Lahore high court to be able to undo the ban in Punjab." But the trans performer Rahimi thinks it's best that the film not be released in Punjab for fear of additional backlash. She fears for her safety in public spaces. "I respect any and all sentiments that may arise as a response to the film," Sadiq says. He says that he worked closely with the Khwaja Sira Society, a nonprofit group in Pakistan, during a five-to-six month research period. The film's star Khan and the program director of the Khwaja Sira Society, both trans people, served as script consultants. It's not possible to cram every detail about the Khwaja Sira into a two-hour film and that wasn't his intent as an artist, Sadiq says. While the Khwaja Sira community has been visible in Pakistan for a long time, "now the visibility is becoming nuanced and transgressive and positive," for many reasons besides Joyland, like the trans bill, Sadiq says. "The thankfully changing discourse does bring an unease and discomfort with it which is unfortunate, but that's how conservative societies battle with progressive ideas and elements. It is a long road ... hopefully ... the upcoming steps will not be this uneasy and fearful." When members of the public make uninformed generalizations, he says, "we should strive to put the burden of responsibility and course correction on the one making those generalizations, not on a film like Joyland and certainly not on the Khwaja Sira community." The filmmakers paid great attention to detail in their research, says the transgender activist Dr. Awan. "The one message that this movie conveys is how complex loving is for all people in Pakistan regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity." Benazir Samad is an international journalist at Voice of America in Washington, D.C. She tweets @benazirmirsamad

[audio mp3="https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/waitwait/2023/02/20230204_waitwait_3ba802e7-25b5-4815-9780-b0253b104fbe.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1052&aggIds=5163715&d=2843&p=344098539&story=1152554955&t=podcast&e=1152554955&ft=nprml&f=1152554955"][/audio] Billy Porter thought he was going to be a preacher before discovering musical theater as a teenager and pursuing that instead. And, while a Tony, an Emmy, and a Grammy means he definitely made the right choice, We'd pay any amount of money to see a preacher wearing one of his red carpet looks. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Peter Grosz: So we have to ask, since we just mentioned it in our introduction of you, is that true? Were you going to be a preacher growing up? Yeah, I grew up in the Pentecostal church. And, you know, in that space, when somebody felt a special energy coming over you, they called it the anointing. And when that happens, it means you're going to be a preacher. How did you feel? Did you feel like you could see yourself as a preacher? Because as somebody who had a performative gene and an instinct, that must have been exciting. You know? I took it on and I preached my first sermon when I was probably around ten or 11, and I knew immediately: NOPE You're now a style and fashion icon in addition to everything else. Are there any things that you've worn on the red carpet that were extremely stylish, but also extremely uncomfortable? Then, during the award ceremony or whatever event that you're in, you're like, I'm going to change into some sweatpants because I'm going to sit here for 3 hours. I can't be sitting in this, like, birdcage looking cape thing or whatever. Yeah, you have to think about that and think about what you're going to take off. Like, the hat that I went to the Grammys with, the one that opened and closed. Yep. For people who don't know, it was this hat that sort of had this 360 degree curtain that was motorized. And it just opened up like a curtain in front of your face. Oh, my God. It hurt so bad that it left a mark. It like, almost cut me, it left an indentation, it was so heavy!