Judge dismisses challenge over removal of woman’s name and warns against risks of informal conception arrangements

A woman has lost a court of appeal challenge over her name being removed from a child’s birth certificate after her ex-wife admitted she secretly had sex with their sperm donor.

The “unprecedented” and “unusual” case centred on the question of who were the legal parents of a girl, now aged six.

Second gentleman tells LGBTQ+ fundraiser his ‘phone was on fire’ after wife Kamala Harris entered spotlight

Doug Emhoff has described being caught by surprise by the timing of Joe Biden’s announcement last Sunday that he was dropping out of his re-election campaign, telling an LGBTQ+ fundraiser that he was in an exercise class in Los Angeles when he heard the news.

Emhoff, 59, the husband of US vice-president Kamala Harris, explained to attendees on a fundraising call organized by a group called Black Gay and Queer Men for Harris that he was with “a gay couple friend” having “coffee, messing around and talking” when people started coming up to them.

Galvanized by the 2016 murder of trans sex worker Paola Buenrostro, activists applaud law as critical for feeling safe

When the trans sex worker Paola Buenrostro was killed by a client in Mexico City, her friend Kenya Cuevas grabbed the man to stop him fleeing and recorded the scene as police arrived amid sirens, screams and red and blue lights.

Despite the footage and witness testimonies, a judge considered there was insufficient evidence to hold the man and released him after 48 hours, since which time he has been on the run.

In sexual situations, I freeze and panic, when all I want is to enjoy stress-free physical and romantic relationships

I’m a 26-year-old gay man who is desperately afraid of sex. I haven’t had much sex in the past year, and when I do I tend to freeze and panic, which means that I struggle with erection and orgasm even when I’m with someone I genuinely like. The last time this happened, I felt so sick during foreplay that I wanted to cry and leave. I have major anxiety and body image issues. I also identify as both “a side” (which means I’m not interested in anal sex), and demisexual (on the asexuality spectrum), so I feel as if I’m in this triple minority of being gay, not into anal sex and slow to get comfortable with someone intimately. While I have enjoyed sex in the past, I prefer non-sexual intimacy, such as cuddling. Still, I would like to not be so scared of sex, to be able to relax and engage in romantic and physical relationships stress-free.

Thinking of yourself as being in a “triple minority” is not helpful. Why categorise yourself? You deserve a far better self-view, and not only in terms of body image. Try to ignore the peer pressure. The three aspects of your sexuality you consider to be negative ones need to be reframed as the positive attributes they actually are. For example, allowing yourself adequate time to become comfortable with intimacy is a smart, self-protective way to approach a relationship, and is likely to improve the quality of your sexual connection. If you are not feeling very interested in sex generally, stop forcing yourself to try to do what you think will be approved of by others – although you should also recognise that you could have increased interest in the future if you learn to manage your anxiety, and if you meet someone with whom you feel perfectly safe. Essentially, you are who you are and you do not need to explain, label or excuse yourself. You may meet the arbitrary criteria for “a side” now – a perfectly valid preference, and a style that you’ve found genuinely gives you more options for pleasure – but any of this might change in the future. What matters is that you gather your confidence and always refuse to be anything other than your true, authentic self.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.

Julia Fuhr Mann’s impressive feature eschews the usual point-counterpoint conventions that structure arguments in favour of a more artsy approach

As a summer packed with sporting competitions rolls on, this documentary about trans and intersex athletes makes a timely and thoughtful contribution to the wider conversation about sports and gender. Queer film-maker Julia Fuhr Mann’s impressive first feature eschews the usual boring point-counterpoint conventions that structure so many arguments about trans athletes. Instead, Mann opts for woozy, stylised visuals with the colour temperatures turned up to the max and a collage-like approach to editing to find a route into the subject. A gaggle of athletes of various ages, nationalities and gender presentations are filmed visiting the site of the Berlin 1936 Olympics and other iconic spaces; sometimes they talk among themselves about the challenges they’ve faced in their sports while sitting on the grass or loll together affectionately on the bleachers, one participant’s head rested on the lap of another. The effect is both kind of sexy and warmly collegial at once.

Elsewhere, Ugandan runner Annet Negesa tells of discovering she was intersex at the height of her career and the devastating effects that medical interventions had on her. Trans woman Amanda Reiter, a marathon runner, calmly recounts how more often she faces hostility from outraged spectators rather than rivals on the track as the latter are often more aware that having been born a man isn’t the big advantage some make it out to be when it comes to long-distance running in terms of pace, uphill runs and stamina.

My former colleague Barry Snelgrove, who has died aged 68 of cancer, was a forward thinking senior probation officer. He was involved in a number of groundbreaking initiatives throughout his career before joining the Home Office, where he became a policy adviser on issues connected with offenders.

In total Barry spent 21 years in the National Probation Service, working mainly in the London area. For three years from 1990 he was the director of Sherborne House in Southwark, an experimental day centre run by the Inner London Probation Service (ILPS) for young adult offenders. It provided, among other things, employment skills training, an accommodation finding service and an offending behaviour programme. It began each day by offering participants breakfast, since many of them were homeless.

The London-born standup on a magical Netflix animation, Joe Lycett’s activist T-shirt, and how she fell in love with pole dancing

The comedian Sophie Duker was born in London in 1990. She studied French and English at Oxford, where she got into improv, and in 2018 performed her first standup show, Diet Woke. Appearances followed on TV comedy stalwarts such as 8 Out of 10 Cats, and in 2022 she won the 13th series of Taskmaster. Duker’s new show, But Daddy I Love Her – about father/daughter therapy and sugar daddies – will run at the Pleasance Courtyard Cabaret Bar in Edinburgh from 31 July to 25 August, and then tours. Her Sugar Daddy scheme will provide 250 £5 tickets via the Pleasance website to people of colour and anyone unwaged or on a low income, available with the code SUGARDADDY.

Ralf Schumacher’s announcement that he is gay reminds Peter Grimsdale about the life of a leading figure of Britain’s early motor racing scene

Grand prix motor racing may have always looked like a bastion of heterosexuality, but there was one memorable dissenter (Former Formula One driver Ralf Schumacher comes out as gay, 15 July). Raymond Mays, who co-founded both English Racing Automobiles and British Racing Motors from in his family home in Bourne, Lincolnshire, made no attempt to hide his sexual preferences during his 30 years behind the wheel.

As a pupil at Oundle school he annoyed the headmaster with his preference for matching blue socks and handkerchief, and developed passions for both motor racing and the music hall. He chose the former and went on to become one of the founding fathers of Britain’s burgeoning Formula One industry, but among his many racing trophies he always proudly displayed a silver cup from a dance competition at the Casino ballroom in Skegness.
Peter Grimsdale
Author of High Performance: When Britain Ruled the Roads

After a decades-long battle to discover the truth about what happened to Scott Johnson, his brother Steve has written a book about never giving up

Steve Johnson would be forgiven for turning his back on Australia, the nation that took more than three decades to properly investigate the death of his brother, Scott Johnson, at North Head, Manly, in 1988. Yet he has an affinity with this country, a connection that appears to transcend crime and punishment.

The 65-year-old US IT entrepreneur is speaking to me via Zoom from California before he travels back to Australia for the 26th time, on this occasion not to attend a courtroom or plead for justice but to promote his memoir, A Thousand Miles from Care.

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Giorgia Meloni is trampling what few rights the LGBTQ+ community has – so many just feel grateful to be ‘tolerated’

I was chatting online the other day with a female friend who is undergoing IVF in Italy to have a child with her girlfriend. IVF for lesbian couples is not approved by law in Italy; instead, doctors have the power to decide whether to approve the treatment on a case-by-case basis.

My friend was enthusiastic about her gynaecologist, because, as she told me, “despite being utterly against same-sex parenting, she is helping us do it without objecting”. That conversation left me with a bitter taste and, above all, confirmed how desensitised queer Italians have become to the daily discrimination they face.

Viola Di Grado is an Italian novelist and literary translator. Her latest novel is Blue Hunger

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