Outdoor sports brand Patagonia has sued drag queen and environmental activist Pattie Gonia for trademark infringement.
On 21 January, the clothing company took action against Pattie Gonia, whose name out of drag is Wyn Wiley, citing alleged trademark infringement.
The brand’s press release states: “While we wish we didn’t have to do this – and actively engaged with Pattie for several years to avoid this – it has become necessary to protect the brand we have spent the last 50 years building.”
Patagonia’s statement claimed that the legal action against the drag queen is due to her failing to stick to a previously made agreement, with the retailer claiming that in late 2024, the drag star began “selling ‘Pattie Gonia’ branded apparel online and continued to create and use versions of our logo”.
Pattie Gonia speaking outside of the Capitol building. (Getty)
It goes on to claim that the drag queen filed a trademark application seeking the exclusive rights to use the name as a brand in September 2025, which it noted would “pose long-term threats to Patagonia’s brand and our activism”.
Patagonia has requested a nominal sum of $1 million in damages and seeks to prevent the activist from further infringing merchandise or obtaining federal “Pattie Gonia” trademarks.
Pattie Gonia is yet to respond to the lawsuit.
The statement adds: “For these reasons Pattie Gonia’s use of a near-copy of our name commercially – including as a brand for environmental advocacy – and her trademark application seeking to obtain the exclusive right to use that name going forward, pose long-term threats to Patagonia’s brand and our activism.”
The Trump administration has been forced to partially abandon its attempt to obtain the personal medical records of thousands of young transgender patients.
Families and patients in Los Angeles, California, secured a major win last week after the Department of Justice agreed to stop pursuing the documents containing the personal information of over 3,000 patients.
The US government announced in July last year that it had sent more than 20 subpoenas to clinics across the country over what it called an investigation into “healthcare fraud.”
Attorney general Pam Bondi said at the time that it had demanded details, such as the names, birth dates, social security numbers, and addresses, of trans young people and their parents/guardians in order to quell what she described as “a warped ideology.”
The Department of Justice has attempted to obtain the medical records of over 20 hospitals providing gender-affirming care. (Getty)
The department agreed to rescind subpoenas against the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) last Thursday (20 January) after seven families with trans children sued the department in November. The DOJ has not entirely abandoned every legal effort to seek information, but it has retreated from the personal identifying parts of the subpoena following that litigation.
Plaintiffs argued ahead of the ruling that the Justice Department had not given sufficient evidence to justify its investigation and was requesting private information without “any probable cause.”
“It was basically a fishing expedition,” Khadijah Silver, director of Gender Justice & Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government, which represented the families, said. “Without any probable cause, they did not have the authority to be seeking medical information.”
Under the federal court ruling, the DoJ has agreed to withdraw its requests for documents identifying parents or patients, according to Cal Matters.
Silver said that the plaintiffs are seeking to dismiss the case entirely, adding: “This is one piece of a large, very important puzzle, but it does allow our clients to hold on to their basic legal right to medical privacy.”
Trump administration targets gender-affirming care for trans youth
A similar federal court ruling blocking the DoJ’s subpoena against Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC was held in the same week, arguing the demands constituted “overreach untethered to any lawful purpose.”
“The Government seeks to fulfil its policy agenda through compliance born of fear. Moreover, in the view of the court, the subpoena is a classic impermissible fishing expedition,” US district judge Julie Robin wrote in the ruling.
Both CHLA and Children’s National Hospital were forced to shutter their gender-affirming care programmes for trans youngsters last year.
They are among a handful of hospitals who, over the past year, have closed their trans youth care programs over “legal and financial risks” despite residing in states that legally permit treatment.
One of the hospitals facing pressure from the US government, Boston Children’s Hospital, refused to close its services, saying in August that it firmly believes its gender-affirming care programmes are vital.
“The belief that all children deserve the opportunity to live, grow, and thrive with love and support is foundational to who we are and what we do,” a spokesperson said.
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Everyone and their uncle is talking about The Traitors after its delightfully deceptive season finale this weekend, but did you know it’s loosely based on an old psychological exercise invented in the Soviet Union in the ’80s?
Warning: This contains spoilers for the season finale of The Traitors UK. Reader discretion is advised.
The reality TV show, which sees 22 people from across the UK participate in a weeks-long social deduction game to work out who amongst them is secretly a “Traitor”, aired the acclaimed finale to its tense fourth season on Friday (23 January).
Contestants and this season’s surviving Traitors, Stephen Libby and Rachel Duffy, bagged £95,750 during Friday night’s conclusion, which was watched by over 9.6 million people according to the BBC.
The Traitors’ finale contestants. (Getty)
Based on the Dutch series De Verraders, the BBC show and its celebrity off-shoot has seen critical acclaim since it first began in 2022, raking in multiple awards.
While it takes its own unique spin on the social deduction formula, the game’s format is actually based on a Soviet-era experiment that dates all the way back to the 1980s.
The Russian social experiment that became known as ‘Mafia’
In the late 1980s, Moscow State University psychology student, Dimitry Davidoff, had a problem. Juggling his course work and a teaching job, the young academic struggled to present his research in a palatable or unique way, and had increasingly little time to work on doing so.
Working to earn his degree in the heart of Russia during an intense transitional period for the Soviet Union, Davidoff’s student years were practically submerged in the politics of deception.
Flash-forward to a snowy November evening in 1987 Moscow – just months after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster – the budding psychologist combined his work and created a social experiment to try with his students.
The Traitors returned for season four, with a huge twist. (BBC)
“I asked a couple of students to go outside and agree on a secret discussion topic for the class, then move us into discussing your topic without us noticing,” he told Vulture. “They would come back and try to manipulate the group into talking about it.”
The task wasn’t particularly engaging to begin with. Students tasked with changing the topic failed to sway the group. This, however, gave the professor his self-described “eureka moment.” What if no one knew who was trying to change the topic?
The aim of the experiment, inspired by the work of 1920s psychologist Lev Vygotsky, was to prove that a few people with perfect information can almost always triumph against numerous people with incomplete information. Davidoff later described the experiment as an example of the “uninformed majority versus the informed minority.”
It became incredibly popular amongst his students, who began sharing it with friends and family until it spread into a global phenomenon known as Mafia or Werewolf.
‘No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar’
Mafia’s structure is simple; there are two teams, traitors and innocents. Each round consists of a day and night phase. During the day, innocents are tasked with voting out all the traitors, and during the night, traitors are tasked with eliminating all the innocents. The only catch – the traitors know who the innocents are, but the innocents don’t know who the traitors are.
It is widely considered one of the most fundamental social deduction games of the entire genre, with off-shoots like Blood on the Clocktower or Secret Hitler using Mafia’s core structure.
Davidoff noted that the game became exceptionally popular in Silicon Valley during the mid 1990s, which helped launch it into the cultural zeitgeist.
“As time went on and the year 2000 came, there was a Mafia story every week,” he said. “An African village was cut off from electricity, so the people played Mafia through the crisis. A Christian camp in Pennsylvania gets busted because of naked Mafia games.”
It eventually went on to spawn the series of international reality TV shows known as The Traitors. Davidoff said that while he found the show entertaining, it was “disappointing” to see how the mechanics of the game had been used.
Asked if he had any tips for fans and players to seek out any Traitors, he said: “I think Abraham Lincoln said, ‘no man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar,’ so lie as little as you can.
“But, really, there are no secrets to this game. That’s the whole point of Mafia and why it is special. Nothing from outside the game can really help you in Mafia – no knowledge, no skill, no experience.”
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