Not Your (Neuro)Typical Nurse

good news is you don't necessarily have to go to school in a big city to find lgbtq+ community, as long as you know what to ask and look for.

these are our top 10:

1) Antioch College (Yellow Springs, OH)

Antioch stands out because the school publicly reports an extraordinarily queer student community: 82% of students identify as LGBTQ+ and 16% identify as transgender (from its student survey). They have a culture built around belonging, social justice, and real-world learning, in a town that has its own long-standing reputation for LGBTQ+ inclusion.

2) College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME)

COA is ranked #1 LGBTQ-Friendly by The Princeton Review (based on student survey responses about peer treatment across sexual orientation and gender identity/expression). It's a tiny campus in a tiny town off the coast of Maine and has a “human ecology” approach to education that emphasizes values, systems, and impact.

3) Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA)

Wellesley consistently shows up as a campus where LGBTQ+ students report feeling supported (#4 LGBTQ-Friendly ranking in The Princeton Review) and haw q visible, student-led queer community life and queer culture that has its own traditions and continuity, not just offices and policies.

4) Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)

Wesleyan is ranked #6 LGBTQ-Friendly by The Princeton Review and has visible academic and campus-life infrastructure that signals queer community is integrated into the school, not siloed. Strong arts + activism + intellectual culture tends to create a campus where queer students can find community across multiple scenes — not just in one designated "queer" space.

5) Smith College (Northampton, MA)

Smith lands high because it has a well-known queer student culture with concrete, practical inclusion signals, like a stated admissions policy that explicitly includes self-identified trans women and visible, day-to-day supports like a published map of gender-neutral bathroom locations. It's in a small city (hello "Lesbianville, USA!") where off-campus queer community is also deeply woven into the place so the sense of belonging doesn’t end at the campus gates.

6) Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA)

Mount Holyoke is explicit about who it’s for: it states it welcomes female, trans, and nonbinary students, which is a major clarity point for students considering women’s colleges and wondering whether they’ll truly be included. Strong “queer legacy” energy with LGBTQ+ communityhistory, continuity, and tradition rather than feeling new or fragile.

7) Bennington College (Bennington, VT)

Bennington’s placement is supported by student-reported climate (ranked #5 LGBTQ-Friendly by The Princeton Review) and a campus culture known for self-expression and student-driven community-building which is extra important in a small-town setting.

8) Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH)

Oberlin has a long-running reputation for progressive culture and offers practical inclusion infrastructure, including clear housing policies that support gender diversity. Activism, arts, and identity aren’t side quests, they’re part of the college’s public identity.

9) Kenyon College (Gambier, OH)

Kenyon makes the list because it backs inclusion with structure. It reports a five-star Campus Pride Index rating and supports community through Unity House plus widely available gender-inclusive housing options on a small-town campus that still manages to build real, durable LGBTQ+ spaces.

10) Grinnell College (Grinnell, IA)

Grinnell earns its spot because it has a visible, named hub for LGBTQIA+ community — the Stonewall Resource Center — and a campus culture that consistently emphasizes belonging and student support.

any others you think we should include?

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

This is really stupid, but also really terrifying.

Photo by Marc Mol / Caters News.

Hippos and oxpeckers generally have a symbiotic relationship in which the birds eat ticks and other types of parasites from the hippo’s body — the hippo gets free grooming while the bird gets free food.