Diangelo-cat

New York City passes law allowing gender-neutral birth certificates

“New Yorkers should be free to tell their government who they are, not the other way around,” said Mayor DeBlasio.

Last week, New York City became the first U.S. city to pass a law allowing birth certificates to be marked with a gender-neutral “X” rather than the traditional gender markers “M” or “F.” The policy will go into effect January 1.

The new law also mandates that people be allowed to choose their gender marker when applying for amended birth certificates, replacing a previous requirement that applicants provide letters from medical and mental health practitioners confirming their gender identity. […]

New York City is unusual in that it issues birth certificates to those born in the city through a vital records department separate from New York state. Typically, birth certificates are issued statewide. New York state does not currently offer gender-neutral identity documents — but a bill proposing nonbinary driver’s licenses was introduced in June 2017, and is still making its way through the state legislature voting process. A NYC municipal ID that gives applicants the option to forgo a gender marker entirely has been available to city residents since 2014, making it one of the first genderless ID cards in the country.

While New York is the first city to pass a gender-neutral birth certificate law, it joins a handful of states that have recently passed legislation to make gender-neutral birth certificates available: Oregon, Washington, California, and New Jersey. Last month, Colorado issued an intersex birth certificate to a single person in response to extensive documentation supplied in their application, but did not announce plans to make gender-neutral birth certificates widely available.

Stories like these make me proud to be a New Yorker! 

People helping people. That’s all this world should be about cuz all we got is each other. Love seeing this kindness from big companies. Needs to happen more often in corporate America. 

I’m just dying while thinking about a hotel employee calmly Googling “How to fold a towel in the shape of an elephant,” and then going out to buy eye stickers.

“My mom painted this and said no one would like it. It’s her 2nd painting.”

“I painted somebody’s mom”

“Took a while and not perfect, but i painted the guy who painted the other guy’s mom”

“I painted the girl who painted the guy who painted the other guy’s mom who painted an egret”

“I painted the guy who painted the girl who painted the guy who painted the mom who painted a bird”

“When it sinks in that I stayed up most of the night to paint a meme for internet points…”

okay u can make fun of Shrek all you want but if u don’t think they were the most beautiful fucking movies ever then ur wrong

hey why don’t discos still exist

fellas is it gay to transcend this plane of existence with your situationship

Cindy is becoming one of my favourite characters, i fear

Old lady Margaery, don’t enjoy this TOO much

We Just Measured All The Starlight In The Universe, And It Spells Doom For Our Future

“An enormous part of our cosmic history has just been revealed for the very first time. We can bypass the foregrounds of our own Solar System, thanks to these gamma-ray signals and how they interact with the extragalactic background of starlight, to understand and measure how star-formation has occurred over all of cosmic time in our Universe, and to infer the total amount of starlight ever produced.

In the future, scientists may be able to go back even farther, and probe how stars formed and emitted light back before the Fermi-LAT team’s instrumentation is capable of reaching. Star formation is what turns the primordial elements from the Big Bang into the elements capable of giving rise to rocky planets, organic molecules, and life in the Universe. Perhaps, one day, we’ll find a way to reach all the way back to the earliest moments of our Universe, uncovering the truths behind the greatest cosmic mysteries of all. Until then, enjoy each and every step — like this one — that we take along the journey!”

For the first time ever, we’ve measured the total amount of starlight ever produced throughout the history of the Universe. We know how many photons, created by stars, now permeate all of space. We know when star-formation peaked, and we know how it’s fallen over time, and how it continues to fall.

Thanks to a new result from the Fermi-LAT collaboration, we understand how star-formation worked, and is dying, across all of space and time. Get the full story today!