Author: Shivendra Singh

I renewed my passport the day after Trump won again. It wouldn’t expire for years, but I did it anyway, along with many trans people I knew who could scrape together the fee. We all had the same thought: get your documents in order now, while you still can.

For over a decade, I’ve written publicly about being transgender. Since 2013, my words about transition, identity, and the fight for basic dignity have appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vice, and other publications. I wrote because I believed in an idea that feels almost silly now: that visibility would lead to acceptance. That if people just knew the stories of trans people, understood our humanity, they’d stop seeing us as threats or curiosities or political pawns.

Now, approaching 40 years old, I watch as Donald Trump has returned to office with an explicit promise to erase trans people from public life. He calcified his campaign-trail hate speech into an executive order. His allies have drafted policies to void our passports, ban our healthcare, and make our very existence a legal impossibility. It’s the greatest attack on the trans community I’ve seen in my lifetime. And yet, somewhat …read more

Instagram is tightening the settings on its “teen accounts” to add new limits on what kids on the platform are able to see. Older teens will also no longer be able to opt out of the default stricter settings without parental approval. 

Meta first introduced teen accounts for Instagram a year ago, when it began automatically moving teens into the more locked-down accounts that come with stricter privacy settings and parental controls. The company recently rolled out the accounts for teens on Facebook and Messenger too, and has used AI tools to detect teens that are lying about their age. 

While teen accounts are meant to address long-running criticism about Meta’s handling of teen safety on its apps, the measures have been widely criticized as not going far enough to protect the company’s most vulnerable users. A recent report from safety advocates at Heat Initiative found that “young teen users today continue to be recommended or exposed to unsafe content and unwanted messages at alarmingly high rates while using Instagram Teen Accounts.” (Meta called the report “deeply subjective.”) 

Now, Meta is locking …read more

Instagram is making a major update to teen accounts that will only allow them to view content similar to what you would see in a PG-13 movie. Under the new system, Instagram will continue to hide content containing nudity, sexual content, or suggestive poses from teens, but now it will also avoid recommending content with strong swear words and risky stunts across its platform.

“Just like you might see some suggestive content or hear some strong language in a PG-13 movie, teens may occasionally see something like that on Instagram — but we’re going to keep doing all we can to keep those instances as rare as possible,” Instagram writes in an announcement on Tuesday.

<img src="https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/7.-Teen-cant-see-account-profile-or-DM-1.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0.039032006245115,100,99.92193598751" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="Instagram will prevent teens from viewing or DMing accounts with 18+ content. | Image: Meta” data-portal-copyright=”Image: Meta”>

Last year, Instagram began putting all users under 18 into teen accounts, applying its existing restrictions on kids under 16 to a larger swath of young users. Teen accounts are private by default and come with safety features that silence notifications from 10PM to 7AM as well as …read more