A gay former employee of the Pittsburgh Steelers is suing the NFL team for alleged sexist and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.
As The Advocate reports, Chelsea Zahn filed a lawsuit against the Steelers last week, claiming she experienced “multiple incidents of discrimination and a hostile work environment” based on both her sex and sexual orientation while she was employed by the team from 2013 to 2024.
According to the January 13 complaint, the Steelers violated Zahn’s constitutional right “to be free from illegal, invidious and damaging discrimination in her employment” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the Equal Pay Act.
“Pittsburgh is Steelers town. We are very proud of our team,” Zahn’s attorney Joel Sansone, told The Advocate. “We can’t have them treating our citizens like this simply because they’re different.”
Zahn alleges that the Steelers paid female employees less than their male counter parts for the same or similar work during her time with the team. She claims that prior to her promotion to corporate sales manager in 2022, she was denied promotions twice and told that she was “too young” and lacked experience, while less qualified and less experienced male employees were promoted instead. When she was promoted, Zahn alleges she was offered a lower salary than her male colleagues.
According to the complaint, Zahn’s co-workers became aware that she is gay after she was promoted in 2022, and she alleges that she was consequently treated less favorably than her straight male colleagues. She claims her superiors made her cover for straight male co-worker at work events and was told to do so because she did not have children. She alleges that this treatment “was motivated by the fact that Plaintiff does not conform to the gender stereotypes of a heterosexual woman.”
Zahn resigned from her role with the Steelers in September 2024. Sansone told The Advocate that the hostility Zahn experienced because of her sexuality spurred her decision to resign.
“Management ignored her request for some sort of remedial action,” Sansone said. “The conditions were so intolerable that anybody would feel compelled to leave.”
Despite securing the most new sponsorship business of any corporate sales manager during the 2024 sales season, according to the complaint, Zahn was informed in February 2025 that Steelers president and owner Arthur J. Rooney II had decided not to pay her the entirety of the more than $100,000 in bonuses and commissions she had earned. Zahn alleges this was in retaliation for her prior complaints about her treatment during her employment.
To date, Zahn has received a check for less than half of what she is owed, which she has not cashed, according to the lawsuit.
“What I’m hoping for is that the Steelers recognize that they made a mistake here and step up to the plate,” Sansone told The Advocate. “Or step up to the line of scrimmage, I guess you’d say, and do what’s right.”
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Transgender Utahans and their supporters marched through the state Capitol building on Wednesday to protest what one lawmaker called “possibly the most egregious anti-trans bill” yet introduced by Republicans during their years-long campaign attacking the LGBTQ+ community.
“I’m anticipating a big fight” over the bill, state Rep. Sahara Hayes (D) told the Utah News Dispatch at the protest. Hayes is Utah’s only out queer legislator, and she’s married to a trans woman.
She called H.B. 183 the worst of a slew of new anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced this session.
The sweeping bill replaces the term gender with sex in the state; repeals previous provisions related to gender identity (including protections for housing, employment, and crime); prohibits amendments to the sex designation field of a birth certificate; requires use of the term “biological sex” when referring to gender on state documents; prohibits trans employees from interacting with children in state health care settings; and requires courts to favor parents who disavow a child’s gender identity if it differs from their sex assigned at birth in state custody disputes.
The demonstration drew more than 60 people who marched through the state capital on the legislature’s second day back in session. The demonstration followed protests the day before against fascist Republican and Trump administration policy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the war in Gaza.
“We’re here because trans people are continuously being attacked in Utah and across the country. Frankly, we’ve had enough,” said Veronika DaVil, a drag artist who organized the Wednesday event.
Trans people are a “marginalized community that keeps being attacked over and over again to distract from larger issues,” she said, adding that “people need to stand up for the trans community because they can’t do it by themselves.”
“This is such a small community,” DaVil said. “Attacking trans people won’t make rent cheaper. Attacking trans people won’t make our groceries more affordable. It is a smoke screen.”
Kree Arias, a trans man and member of the grassroots activist group Utah March, said LGBTQ+ people are “under attack,” and H.B. 183 is just the latest example.
He hoped that alerting the public to the draconian legislation during the legislature’s first week back in session would increase the community’s visibility.
When asked what he’d say to lawmakers if he had a chance to meet with them, Aria replied, “I would like to just sit down with them and be like, ‘Hey, you know, this is who we are,’” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about our transness or our gayness, or any of that. I want to talk about who we are as people. We’re brothers, we’re sisters, we’re uncles,” he continued.
“‘This is what we’re about,'” he’d say, “being ourselves, being beautiful and proud.”
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A federal judge has voided a Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoena requiring Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. to hand over private information on young patients receiving gender-affirming care (GAC). The ruling is just the latest roadblock in the DOJ’s quest to end GAC for trans youth; however, the hospital stopped offering GAC last July in response to the current presidential administration’s threats to defund institutions that offer such care.
The case involved eight families that received transition-related healthcare through the hospital’s Gender Development Program between 2020 and 2025. The families said that the DOJ’s subpoena — which demanded their addresses, children’s social security number, medical diagnoses, prescriptions, and all documents affirming parental authorization, among other information — violated their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and their Fifth Amendment right to privacy in their medical records.
The DOJ argued that the families lacked legal standing to oppose the subpoena because none of them directly received it — the subpoena was sent to hospital workers — and because the families challenged the subpoena after the DOJ’s deadline for patient information had passed.
But, because the subpoena sought “private medical records containing highly sensitive treatment” about children, U.S. District Judge Julie R. Rubin wrote in her ruling that the families had legal standing, both because the subpoena put an “undue burden” upon the families and because their children were relying on their parental guardians “to protect [their] interests because [they lack legal] capacity to act in self-protection.”
“This court joins the district courts around the country in finding that the Government’s Subpoena lacks a proper investigatory purpose under law; serves only to bolster the Executive’s policy objective of terminating access to gender affirming healthcare for adolescents; and has no plausible or coherent tether to its stated purpose,” Rubin wrote.
Last June, the DOJ sent subpoenas to 20 medical providers who offer gender-affirming care to trans youth. Under the pretense of investigating healthcare fraud, the DOJ demanded patients’ Social Security numbers, emails, home addresses, and information about the care they received.
The DOJ said that its subpoenas seek to prevent healthcare fraud and “off-label” use of puberty blockers and hormones to treat youth gender dysphoria, beyond the “on-label” uses approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The blockers and hormone treatments in question have been used safely on children for decades to treat precocious puberty and certain cancers, and off-label uses of these drugs for trans individuals have also occurred safely for decades without any additional federal government oversight.
However, Judge Rubin said that DOJ lawyers “failed to place before the court any information, record, or evidence” — such as an affidavit, complaint, or whistleblower statement — “supporting or pertaining to the investigation of the hospital for any health care offense.”
“The Government seeks to investigate how the Hospital treats its patients; specifically, in the context of gender-affirming patient care,” the judge wrote. But the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) that the DOJ cited in its investigatory subpoena “regulates commerce, not patient care,” the judge added. As such, the DOJ shouldn’t need such sensitive private medical information in order to investigate alleged healthcare fraud, the judge ruled.
“The court concludes the Subpoena was not issued for a legitimate governmental purpose, is not limited in scope to any legitimate purpose, and is oppressive in its breadth,” Judge Rubin wrote. “The court finds the Subpoena is a pretext to fulfill the Executive’s well-publicized policy objective to terminate and block gender affirming healthcare.”
“The Subpoena bears no credible connection to an investigation of any statutory violation by the Hospital,” Judge Rubin continued. “Rather, the Subpoena appears to have no purpose other than to intimidate and harass the Hospital and [the families], and those similarly situated. The Government seeks to fulfill its policy agenda through compliance born of fear. Moreover, in the view of the court, the Subpoena is the classic impermissible fishing expedition.”
While the judge applied her ruling only to the eight families that sued, her mention of the DOJ’s “fishing expedition” echoes a federal judge’s ruling last September that reached the same conclusion, as well as a similar ruling issued by another federal judge in November.
“Today’s ruling is a crucial victory for families and for the fundamental right to medical privacy,” said Donovan Bendana, Liman Law Fellow at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD Law) and counsel for the families. “The court saw through the government’s attempt to use its investigative powers as a weapon against families who are simply trying to access healthcare for their children. These families should never have been forced to go to court to protect their children’s private medical information from government intrusion. This decision makes clear the federal government does not have the authority to intimidate patients and doctors or to insert itself into private medical decisions. We are grateful the court stood up for these families and for the principle that all Americans have a right to make healthcare decisions without fear of government harassment.”
“When families fear their private health information could be exposed or used against them, they may delay or avoid seeking necessary medical care – putting children’s health and wellbeing at risk. The court’s decision protects not only the families who brought the case, but reinforces fundamental principles of medical privacy and limitations on government power that benefit all Americans,” said Jennifer Levi, Senior Director of Transgender and Queer Rights at GLAD Law.
“Parents of transgender adolescents want what every parent wants: to ensure their children get the medical care they need to be healthy and thrive,” said Eve Hill, Partner at Brown, Goldstein & Levy. “This ruling affirms that the government cannot intrude into the exam room or second-guess the medical decisions families make with their doctors.”
The administration’s “toxic” war on gender-affirming care
Though there is no federal law banning gender-affirming care, the current presidential administration has sought to eradicate the practice through a January executive order (that has since been blocked by several courts). The order instructed the DOJ to extend the time that patients and parents can sue gender-affirming doctors and to use laws against false advertising to prosecute any entity that may be misleading the public about the long-term effects of gender-affirming care.
In April, Bondi issued a memo to DOJ employees, telling them to investigate and prosecute cases of minors accessing gender-affirming care as female genital mutilation (FGM), even though hospitals don’t conduct such female genital surgeries. The memo threatened to jail doctors for 10 years if they provide gender-affirming care to young trans people.
Additionally, the DOJ sought information about the providers’ employees and their correspondence with pharmaceutical manufacturers, marketing departments, and sales representatives, as well as other sensitive information dating back to January 2020.
Fewer than 3,000 teens nationwide receive puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, according to a 2025 JAMA analysis of private insurance data. Gender-affirming care is supported by all major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as safe and life-saving for young people with gender dysphoria.
One doctor interviewed by The Washington Post called the federal government’s crusade against gender-affirming care a “toxic plan” that will force some patients to detransition, potentially forcing them into adverse psychological and physical effects, including increased anxiety, depression, and the development of unwanted physical changes.
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