Dan Clarendon

In 2009, Rachel Crandall-Crocker created International Transgender Day of Visibility as a day of celebration and a counterpoint to the mournful Transgender Day of Remembrance that falls every November 20. Her efforts paid off, as International Transgender Day of Visibility, or TDOV, has become a global occasion every March 31.

Creators have been hiding Easter eggs in media for at least half a century now. You might recall that video game designers hid secret outcomes in early computer games like 1973’s Moonlander and 1980’s Adventure. Easter eggs are all over television, too. Sometimes they hint at future plot twists. Sometimes they seem like throwaway details until years later. Sometimes they connect disparate-seeming stories into a shared universe. And sometimes they’re just for laughs.

Pixar has been bringing its pandemic-era, streaming-only movies to multiplexes this year, with Soul lighting up screens in January and Turning Red following suit in February. Now it’s Luca’s turn—the film started playing in theaters March 22—and social media users are still mourning the gay romance that could have been Pixar canon.

Kings had an all-too-brief reign on NBC, canceled after just 13 episodes. At the time, the network executives who had championed the show were getting pushed out, the new guard was unwilling or unsure of how to promote the show properly, and network TV itself was struggling to stay relevant. Ultimately, Kings aired for just six episodes before getting dethroned from its Sunday night time slot and then exiled to summer for the rest of its run.

Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein died in 1955, but the story of his brain has continued for years now, all because of one man who took the gray matter into his own hands and kept it for decades, even crossing state lines with the brain. What happened to Einstein’s brain? Believe it or not, it was the pathologist who conducted Einstein’s autopsy who just took the brain without permission, as detailed in last year’s documentary film The Man Who Stole Einstein’s Brain.

Any television buff will tell you, sometimes less really is more. We all know TV shows that ran too long, whether they “jumped the shark” or just drifted out of the cultural conversation. We’d go so far as to say that the TV shows here, however, could have ended after Season 1. We’re not saying we didn’t enjoy any of these shows from Season 2 onward, but we’d argue they would have better off as one-season wonders.

Judging from the reports coming from ABC’s panel yesterday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, it seems you could have heard a pin drop after the producers of The Bachelor were asked about the reality franchise’s racial issues.

Two long-running, hospital-set soaps — ABC’s General Hospital and NBC’s The Doctors — debuted on the same day on April 1, 1963. The Doctors ran for nearly 20 years, but General Hospital has lasted three times as long — and counting! ABC is honoring the show with a primetime special, General Hospital: 60 Years of Stars and Storytelling, but the General Hospital that started that day in 1963 is very different from the show fans see today.

Hang out on Reddit long enough, and you’ll eventually see transphobic attitudes show up—explicitly and implicitly—in queer communities on the platform. And social media is, of course, a microcosm of a society which some think LGB equality is an acceptable substitute for LGBT equality. One Reddit user recently shed light on transphobia in the gay male population, saying that although he loves being gay and trans, his interactions with cis gay men “[have], by and large, been less than ideal.”

Paria Hassouri and her husband were thousands of miles from home, on vacation in Thailand, when they got a call from their daughter’s school. A teacher told them that Ava, then 13, was questioning her gender identity. During Ava’s coming-out experience, Hassouri educated herself about how best to support her daughter. Other parents are trying to do the same, as children and teens are opening up — sometimes even earlier in their lives — about their placement in a galaxy of queer existence.

Fans’ love for Hogwarts’ witches and wizards need not snuffed by the ramblings of a 50-something cisgender white lady. They have used Vanishing Spells on the woman whose words hurt trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people around the world. Call it the Fandom That Lived.

On March 13, the American College of Surgeons recommended hospitals across the country minimize, postpone, or cancel all scheduled elective surgeries because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As many hospitals took that advice and shed certain procedures from the books, many transgender people were left with devastating setbacks as gender-affirming surgeries were canceled or indefinitely postponed as the question of which procedures are “elective” looms.

After declaring the violence epidemic against transgender people a “myth,” journalist and self-described “gay conservative” Chad Felix Greene is now attacking the idea of the use of “they” as a singular pronoun and criticizing the APA for endorsing the usage.

Color photography was developed, so to speak, with a definite bias toward lighter skin — a reality cinematographer Ava Berkofsky sought to overcome when she was hired to light season 2 of the HBO comedy Insecure.