7 Things People Outside the U.S. Can Do Instead of Helplessly Sitting By While the World Burns
feature image from Renée Jackson-Harper
The acrid smoke from the fire of Trump’s presidency is wafting across the whole planet. I don’t know about you, but as a Canadian I’ve been doing a lot of flailing around feeling powerless and frustrated, wishing that somebody could sift through the reams of action calls to compile ones that are relevant to me, as a non-American who doesn’t have any local Congresspeople to contact, so I decided to do it myself.
Here are some things people all around the world can do to help douse the abominable orange flame. Please feel absolutely encouraged to share your own links, ideas and information in the comments below!
Boycott
Ali’s last tech column included links to a free app that compiles a list of businesses that support Trump, either ideologically or financially. Many of these businesses have outlets or sell products in other countries, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Winners, and Hudson’s Bay. Don’t want to download an app? Here is the #GrabYourWallet movement’s blacklist of Trump-friendly retailers.
Donate
Use all that money you saved in boycotts for good! Contribute to the cause of organizations that are actively resisting Trump’s reign of terror, and/or who will be directly affected by his platform and policies. All of the following orgs accept international donations:
American Civil Liberties Union
Southern Poverty Law Center
Planned Parenthood
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Americans for Immigrant Justice
NAACP
Black Lives Matter
Transgender Law Center
While you’re donating, consider seeking out ways to donate to marginalized individuals through crowdfunding platforms who are suffering under the Trump administration and who are raising funds for medical expenses, passport fees, travel, childcare, legal fees, bail, housing, transition-related care, or other needs.
Petition
If the heads of state of your country have not yet publicly denounced or taken action to counter Trump’s agenda, you can find or start up initiatives to put pressure on them. For example: here is a petition to prevent Trump from making a State Visit to the UK which is closing in on a million signatures, another from the UK requesting that cooperation with the Trump administration be conditional on human rights, and an open letter that members of the Canadian tech community can sign urging Justin Trudeau to offer temporary residency to those affected by the immigration ban.
Fundraise
Do you know of someone in your country who has been affected by the immigration ban? Start up and/or promote an online fundraising campaign to help them, like this initiative that raised £6000 for a Scottish-Iranian veterinarian stranded overseas.
Rally
After the January 21st Women’s Marches spread worldwide, a friend of mine posted a 7-second video of her tiny community’s tiny march in rural Nova Scotia that went instantly viral, prompting an outpouring of grateful comments from all over the U.S. The lesson here is that solidarity is important, visibility is important, and every voice can make a difference. Here’s a guide to planning your own protest or rally. The next major anti-Trump rally in the U.S. is scheduled for April 15; track down the organizers of the Women’s March nearest to you and find out how you can get involved with the next one. Or find out about other protests and rallies happening near you, make a sign, and show up!
from the Women’s March in Kelowna, B.C. on January 21st
Engage on Social Media
I bet the universe $1000 (in hypothetical galaxy dollars) that each of you has at least one American Facebook friend. And even if you don’t, some of the people who share your posts further probably do. Can’t afford to donate? Already signed a petition? Sharing the links online still helps to spread the word and educate others!
Fight Fascism in Your Own Country
Trump’s political ascendancy could, terrifyingly, have ripple effects around the world unless we stop it, as it gives fuel to fascist movements in other nations. Get involved in local and national politics at home to help ensure the conflagration stops here, and talk to your friends and family about these issues. Remember: Only YOU Can Prevent Orange Fires. Comment below and let us know the details of what actions people can take in your country!
On that note, a special action call to my fellow Canadians: Yes, our very own homegrown Trumpalike is already taking notes here as well. If you think it couldn’t happen here, let me remind you that our last two elections resulted in a majority government with a minority of votes. We need to agitate loudly for electoral reform, as the Trudeau administration promised and are now trying to un-promise. Get involved with Fair Vote Canada, contact your local MPs, and most importantly, spread the word and make noise!
Your turn, international fam: What else can we do?
5 Million Resist Trump: 100 Pictures Of Queer Power At Women’s Marches Worldwide
The Women’s March on Washington and its sister marches are already being called the biggest one-day protests in US history — according to The Women’s March website, nearly million people made it out this weekend to nearly 700 marches held in all seven continents and over 60 countries. On Friday, we experienced a collective nightmare in which the worst man in the entire United States, Donald J. Trump, was sworn in as our next president. So on Saturday, we marched. Not everybody marched, of course. A lot of people didn’t want to, others had to work or had health issues preventing them from partaking. But holy shit did a lot of us get out there and march.
In Washington DC at least 1.3 million people gathered for The Women’s March, an event with an explicitly intersectional platform and a diverse list of speakers and performers who raised awareness about issues often ignored by mainstream white middle-class feminism. In Chicago so many turned out for the rally that they had to cancel the march for public safety concerns. In Boston, an anticipated 25,000 marchers turned out to be at least 175,000. Over 500,000 protesters flooded Midtown Manhattan, marching from the United Nations to Trump Towers. Los Angeles expected 25,000 and got 750,000, its most popular protest in over a decade. St. Paul, Minnesota police are estimating between 90,000 and 100,000 marchers. Austin, Texas broke the record for the largest gathering in Texas history.
In New Mexico, Utah, Alaska and Idaho, they marched in the snow. They marched in small towns you’ve probably never heard of: in Lander, Wyoming, in Lake Erie, Ohio; Yakima, Washington; and in Zebulon, Georgia. They marched all over the world, in cities including but certainly not limited to Oslo, London, Auckland, Nairobi, Guam, Toronto, Amsterdam, Cape Town, Melbourne, Sydney, Mexico City, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Montreal, Geneva and New Delhi.
They even marched in Paradise Bay, Antarctica.
https://twitter.com/lindazunas/status/822755350818549761?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
And, of course, as is our way, the queers and lesbians and bisexual women were out in droves. The flagship event in Washington DC, as viewed via YouTube livestream, had the soothing quality of somehow always managing to keep queer musician and A-Camp fave Be Steadwell in the frame, or else lesbian folk/blues artist Toshi Reagon, seated nearby with her guitar. Speakers included trans activist Janet Mock, lesbian activist and author Angela Davis, the Astrea Lesbian Foundation For Justice’s J. Bob Alotta, and writer and Transgender Law Center associate Raquel Willis. Performers included Janelle Monáe, Samantha Ronson, The Indigo Girls and Climbing PoeTree. Among the DC marchers: Ellen Page, Abby Wambach, Hari Nef, JD Samson, Amandla Stenberg, Jill Soloway, Evan Rachel Wood, Cameron Esposito, St. Vincent, Lea DeLaria, Ani DiFranco, Lily Tomlin, Carrie Brownstein, Danielle Brooks, Lauren Jauregui, Monica Raymund, Rhea Butcher and Sally Kohn. Also, Scarlett Johansson has acquired a lesbian haircut. Just saying.
In Los Angeles, GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis spoke at the rally that also featured transgender activist and actress Laverne Cox. On social media, posts from the Los Angeles march popped up from queer celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Alexandra Billings, Rowan Blanchard, Hannah Hart, Jenny Owen Youngs, Kesha and Kate Moennig.
I was in Ann Arbor, a college town with a long history of liberal activism that attracted around 11,000 marchers for an afternoon rally, including lots of students but also a lot of parents with small children.
This is, hopefully, the beginning of a genuine protest movement that will only grow as Trump continues, against all odds and common sense, to remain president of this country day after day. Seasoned activists saw a lot of young people come out and march for the first time this weekend, but undoubtedly many of these protesters, even the young ones, have come out before. We’ve marched for Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, or we marched against Prop 8 or other LGBTQ causes. This is important to talk about because extended and crucial conversations that came out of those movements have already helped shape this new one. Specifically, The Women’s March has benefited from past conversations around racism within the social justice community and specifically the tendency of white feminists to push their issues into center stage, failing to consider the existence of, let alone promote or give a platform to, the causes that matter most to people of color. Initially, the March seemed like more of the same White Feminism as before — its initial co-founders were two cis straight white women, retired attorney Teresa Shook of Hawai’i and Bob Bland, the founder of Manafacture New York. When Okayafrica’s Vanessa Wruble saw the event gathering steam on social media, she reached out to Bland and Shook to strongly suggest they get some women of color onto their team, and thus they immediately did so. Bob Bland now shares the national co-chair position with three women of color: Linda Sarsour (executive director of the Arab American Association of New York), Tamika D. Mallory (African-American civil rights activist and gun control advocate) and Carmen Perez (executive director of Harry Belafonte’s Gathering for Justice). From that point forward, most of the march’s initiatives were explicitly inclusive and intersectional, a tradition that must continue for future protests to be successful. The movement isn’t perfect by any means — for example, it seems to have some major blind spots w/r/t trans issues — but it does seem to be on the right track and is open to feedback and criticism. And now we have the internet, which’ll enable information to be disseminated and actions to be planned with far more ease than women’s movements past. Going forward, the onus will be on the most privileged marchers to continue showing up for issues that don’t impact them directly. The March’s website already has begun posting information on actions we can continue to take every day, starting this week with writing our senators.
So we didn’t get our first woman president — but for one day after Trump’s swearing-in, women ruled the world just the same. Look at these pictures of protests all over the world. Look at the Women’s March on the front pages of every newspaper.
And now, below, look at the LGBTQ people and LGBTQ Allies I found all over Instagram, standing up for themselves or standing up on our behalf. There are literally hundreds of marches I didn’t include here, including many of the largest ones, due to time constraints, but I did my best!
This is DAY ONE. We have so much work left to do.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjPLYdlODJ/
Asheville, North Carolina
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjWaa5jHoJ/
Atlanta, Georgia
Austin, Texas
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiv2HtADpz/
https://twitter.com/laurie2474/status/822979275708104704
Berlin, Germany
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiEmNRA1cb/
Boston, Massachusetts
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi26mTAzIc/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi2VsJBdtT/
Brownsville, Texas
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi1qrMjsdw/?taken-by=ezterr
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Chicago, Illinois
Dallas, Texas
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPicFWnA3sp/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiiufPAz1O/
Denver, Colorado
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjsomSg-jH/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjifx2D2BE/
Detroit, Michigan
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPieenqgrpI/
Houston, Texas
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjIMTygY-j/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjGbBnj7lP/
Indianapolis, Indiana
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiXw0PDyC5/?taken-by=carooates
Jackson, Mississippi
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjfnIqh9NE/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiz7KdhABI/
Juneau, Alaska
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPihe7DF_cx/?tagged=womensmarchalaska
Key West, Florida
Kodiak, Alaska
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjI3lsj4y4/?tagged=womensmarchalaska
Lansing, Michigan
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiloxOjBJE/?taken-at=391871919
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi0dQvgG9l/?taken-by=khaleesi_wiley
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPisZs2AsSx/
London, England
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiyMLjjSf7/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPj2wwoAHY2/
Los Angeles, California
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjvYdvjzc4/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjFeQcB8ml/?taken-by=giahoaphamm
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi-zsflt6l/?taken-by=robinshoots
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjDc-CgnKv/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPigXgxDW6I/?taken-by=bellathorne
http://www.instagram.com/p/BPilQbuD65x/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPgj-EJAtbV/?taken-by=undocumedia
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPikdDtjBjL/?taken-by=bishilarious
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPikXMeAwmD/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiuM6uDMpE/?taken-by=amberrose
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiyOx9g9ka/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPj4kytlSTt/?taken-by=jessesulli
Memphis, Tennessee
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiz3fQAFGG/
Mexico City, Mexico
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjAH6WAD_8/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPkvI6FDm34/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjbneuB7CR/
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiYOk-ApGk/
Nashville, Tennessee
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi7wi-glLU/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPicfaBgK2v/
New Orleans, Louisiana
New York, New York
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi-DbxB8-Z/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi1efAAqHP/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiuJYiDJ16/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi8nCBAkeU/
O’ahu, Hawai’i
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi-89BD63n/
Oakland, California
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPizoHRjIAn/?taken-by=dearjonesey
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjDVa_BZMB/?taken-by=it_has_teeth
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi9aVVAzH7/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPixsf_AIpX/
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjAA02DjsM/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi_zoqgIIF/?taken-at=194185
Orlando, Florida
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjRh3zgExU/
Paris, France
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPilLS7APcF/?taken-by=sincerelysyreeta
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPix2mGgn3M/
Phoenix, Arizona
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjMcEFhM8E/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjakCGgEyS/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjqoc6AEUv/
Portland, Oregon
https://twitter.com/fIawlesssivan/status/822967788918583296
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPim-SclP69/
San Diego, California
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjHO4lF6d6/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPkrTqPFUpq/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPk5MhBDCP2/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPko1HHjtZA/
San Francisco, California
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjNON4gsI_/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi-8zQD2Mu/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi-2RMDmbb/
Seattle, Washington
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjzHX9lZgB/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjAv2PARPo/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiqB24FHCm/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPimfeqBs85/
Spokane, Washington
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPixLO2AEiI/
St.Louis, Missouri
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiUqdQg1qB/
St.Paul, Minnesota
Sydney, Australia
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPgxRoDArUX/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPgnqr1l0_Q/
Topeka, Kansas
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi031BgAY3/
Trenton, New Jersey
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjF8dTglUV/
Vancouver, BC Canada
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPinqZEhARb/?taken-by=kewebster
Washington DC
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi5JhABvMj/?taken-at=236471522
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjArYWD1wj/?taken-by=daniebb3
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjIcXuAmB3/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPj-61WBzyq/?taken-by=amandlastenberg
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPi_HwbgbG1/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPjEzn7jZjI/
Northern Ireland Is Proof of How F*cked Abortion Access in the UK Really Is
feature image of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon via Shutterstock
I’ll be blunt: the UK’s abortion laws are a disaster, and nowhere worse than in Northern Ireland. Internationally, people generally know that the Republic of Ireland’s abortion laws are terrible, but for the most part their neighbours to the North and West are overlooked. If people don’t forget that the North is still a part of the UK rather than the Republic (which, considering the history involved, is a bizarrely common mistake) they assume that everything is fine. After all, in the United Kingdom abortion is free on the NHS and available up to twenty four weeks — which is around when people stop listening and fail to notice the small print.
The Abortion Act 1967 on medical termination of pregnancy:
(1) Subject to the provisions of this section, a person shall not be guilty of an offence under the law relating to abortion when a pregnancy is terminated by a registered medical practitioner if two registered medical practitioners are of the opinion, formed in good faith—
[F1(a) that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family; or
(b) that the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or
(c) that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or
(d) that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.]
Technically, abortion in the UK is actually illegal, with certain medical exemptions. To access abortion on the mainland then you need to convince not one, but two – two! – doctors that you need one. That you really need one. And only with the consent of those two doctors can you move forward and access one. The penalty for accessing abortion outside of those channels is up to life imprisonment. I wish I was joking.
I can’t speak firsthand as to how difficult getting an abortion is in practise, but it seems to vary wildly by doctor and by region. Some doctors have actively obstructed patients access to abortion care for any number of reasons ranging from personal religious belief to apparent ignorance of the law itself to petty moralising. There are also doctors who find this entire thing farcical and consider any person asking for an abortion to be at risk of psychological injury if forced to continue the pregnancy, granting abortions to anyone who applies within the legal limits. Some doctors have even got into legal trouble for pre-signing forms to speed up the process, making it very clear that the law is about forcing women to jump through hoops to access reproductive healthcare and not about anything else. (Incidentally if you too find this obscene and would like to change it there’s a campaign you can involve yourself in here).
But all of this is irrelevant if you live in Northern Ireland, because the 1967 Abortion Act doesn’t apply there. Instead, their devolved parliament chose to keep in place the literal Victorian legislation that predated it, with small updates permitting abortion in cases where the mother’s life was in imminent danger and the fetus not yet viable. More recently, the law has again been updated to allow for abortion in cases where giving birth will cause both serious and long term or permanent harm to the gestational parent. But even if you meet the criteria, you still have to realise that you’re pregnant and navigate your way through the system before you make it to nine weeks, and good luck finding a doctor willing to help you out with that. Northern Ireland is small and extremely religious, and running an abortion clinic there is really quite a lot like doing the same thing in Texas.
So while abortion isn’t technically entirely illegal in Northern Ireland, it may as well be. The unwillingly pregnant have resorted to ordering the abortion pill online and carrying out DIY abortions at home, something which is obviously dangerous and also exactly what every pro-choice organisation told us would happen. So far no one’s been handed that potential life sentence, but prosecutions are still going ahead for patients who get caught.
Of course, because there’s always one rule for the rich and another for everyone else, there is a loophole available for anyone with the money to do it. It’s illegal to procure an abortion outside of official channels while in Northern Ireland, but there’s no law stopping pregnant people from leaving the country and getting one elsewhere. Dozens of Irish women from both sides of the border come to England every year for abortion care. In addition to the time off work and the travel and accommodation costs they also have to pay for the abortion out of pocket, because despite being National Insurance paying citizens the Northern Irish women still aren’t entitled to NHS abortion care on the mainland.
Except maybe not for much longer. Scotland’s First Minister and her cabinet have a history of progressive policies — from trialling basic income to protecting the rights of our unemployed and disabled citizens — and now they’ve turned their attention to the plight of Northern Ireland’s abortion patients. Last week a member of the Green party raised the issue in parliament and, though it was something of a politician’s answer, Nicola Sturgeon’s response was promising:
“I am happy to explore with the NHS what the situation is now in terms of the ability of women from Northern Ireland to access safe and legal abortion in NHS Scotland and whether any improvements can be made.
Like Patrick Harvie, I believe that women should have the right to choose, within the limits that are currently set down in law, and that that right should be defended. When a woman opts to have an abortion – I stress that that is never, ever an easy decision for any woman – the procedure should be available in a safe and legal way”
“I certainly agree that no woman should ever be stigmatised for having an abortion. No woman ever wants to have an abortion; there will be a variety of circumstances in which a woman finds herself in that position, and I absolutely agree that safe abortion is of paramount importance. I also agree that abortion should never be seen in isolation—it is a part of healthcare, and delivering abortion safely is a fundamental part of healthcare.”
This isn’t a guarantee of anything, of course, and even if she does come through and open NHS abortions to Northern Irish patients they’ll still have to find the money to come over here and find ways to explain their sudden absence to family and employers. It’s also disappointing that she’s defending the current laws as they stand and pushing the line that abortion should be, is always, an inherently difficult choice. But to make the sort of changes she’s being asked to make often requires that sort of appeasing language, at least at first, whether or not it’s in line with her own beliefs. Importantly, whether or not this leads directly to expanding abortion services for patients in Northern Ireland, it’s reopened the conversation around abortion rights and services and may provide a launching point for us to push for reform.
News Fix: A French Court Gets Rid of Burkini Bans
Feature image via shutterstock.com
French Court Says Bye, Bye to Burkini Bans
Authorities in 15 French towns had banned burkinis, full-body wetsuits worn by Muslim women, citing public concerns in the wake of terrorist attacks in the country. However a French court reversed those bans today saying the mayors who enacted them did not have the proper authority to do so.
via The Guardian
Earlier this week, photographs emerged of four police confronting a woman at a Nice beach and forcing her to remove some of her clothing. The Guardian reports:
A witness to the scene, Mathilde Cousin, confirmed the incident. “The saddest thing was that people were shouting ‘go home’, some were applauding the police,” she said. “Her daughter was crying.”
Last week, Nice became the latest French resort to ban the burkini. Using language similar to the bans imposed earlier at other locations, the city barred clothing that “overtly manifests adherence to a religion at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks”.
Related read: A Guide for White People on the #BurkiniBan and Discussing Muslim Women
Law & Order
+ Purvi Patel could be released from jail as early as September as soon as they can schedule a re-sentencing hearing. She was initially sentenced to 20 years in prison for feticide and felony neglect of a dependent but in July an Indiana appeals court vacated the feticide conviction.
+ The National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate students at private universities are employees and have the right to organize and form unions.
+ Martin Blackwell, a Georgia man who poured boiling water over a sleeping gay couple, was sentenced to 40 years in prison. The jury convicted him of aggravated battery and aggravated assault. The couple Anthony Gooden and Marquez Tolbert suffered severe burns. Blackwell was dating Gooden’s mother at the time of the attack.
+ A federal judge ruled it was ok for a funeral home to terminate a transgender employee after she transitioned, citing the owner’s religious convictions.
+ Another white boy rapist gets off with only two years of probation because jail time simply would’ve “destroyed this kid’s life.”
+ Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and brutal policing tactics against Latinxs, may be facing fines or jail time for being in contempt of court.
Grab Bag
+ Five women vying for Senate seats in seven swing states could lead to a rise to Democratic power in the Senate.
+ The NYPD illegally monitored Muslims and political activity related to Islam according to an Office of the Inspector General for the New York Police Department report.
+ Who Is Ultimately Responsible For The Vicious Hack Targeting Leslie Jones?
+ The University of Chicago sent a letter to incoming freshman telling them they don’t provide “so-called ‘trigger warnings’” or “condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces.’”
+ Two Orlando hospitals will cover the medical bills of Pulse shooting victims. Orlando Health and Florida Hospital will absorb out-of-pocket medical expenses and will write off an estimated $5.5 million or more in care.
+ Police officer Gerry Realin, who helped remove the bodies after the Pulse shooting, is fighting the state of Florida to have his PTSD recognized for worker’s compensation purposes.
Seeds of a Revolution: Malaysian Trans Community Win in High Court’s Landmark Ruling
The Malaysian transgender community achieved another historic win this week when the Kuala Lumpur High Court ordered that the National Registration Department (NRD) to update a trans man’s information on his Identity Card (IC) to better reflect his current name and gender identity.
Previous attempts in Malaysian courts to allow trans people to change their names and gender markers on their ICs, such as Vasudevan Ramoo’s 2015 application to the High Court or the 2013 Court of Appeal case by Kristie Chan, had been unsuccessful. However, William Lim and Muhammad Izzat Md Jonid, counsel for the anonymous trans man, used those cases to argue that their client had “satisfied the thresholds” for affirming their gender identity through surgery and living as male.
Justice S. Nantha Balan noted in his grounds of judgement that the plaintiff’s constitutionally enshrined right to life includes the right to “live with dignity as a male and be legally accorded judicial recognition as a male.” Dismissing the NRD’s concerns of detransitions or the plaintiff changing his mind down the line as “far-fetched [and] reflective of an alarmist mindset”, he also argued that, rather than causing confusion as the NRD claims, officially recognising the plaintiff’s gender identity would avoid conflict and provide certainty.
Nisha Ayub receives award from John Kerry by Giselle Rimong Lidom
Malaysian trans rights activist Nisha Ayub notes in a public Facebook post that while the State will undoubtably attempt to challenge this ruling, the same way they challenged other significant trans-related laws such as the 2014 Court of Appeal declaration of anti-crossdressing Syariah Laws as unconstitutional (Malaysia has a dual court system with both Syariah courts and Civil courts), she hopes that “local and international allies will come forward to give support and hopefully put [an] end towards violation of [one’s] rights towards a [person’s] identity, freedom of expression and most importantly to our own body.”
The 2014 Court of Appeal ruling, while eventually overturned, was especially notable given that it was the first time anyone had challenged the Syariah Court at all, let alone won — and that the win came from a community whose identities and lifestyles are highly criminalized in Malaysia.
Malaysians celebrate 2014 ruling by Al-Jazeera America
The Malaysian Government regularly claim that they won’t support LGBTQ rights as they are supposedly against Islam, even going as far as comparing LGBTQ people to ISIS. Meanwhile they endorse “parenting guides” about identifying “gay and lesbian” traits in children and sponsor an anti-LGBTQ play painting the community as a conspiracy by the Opposition Party and “foreign agents” to corrupt the innocent minds of children.
Public support for the Malaysian LGBTQ community, especially trans people, has grown significantly in the last few years. The I Am You: Be A Trans Ally education and social media campaign, launched in 2013 by Nisha’s group Justice for Sisters and other trans activists, has over 2500 likes on Facebook alone, as well as positive responses from local and international media. When Justice for Sisters called for donations to fund legal support for 16 trans women arrested in mid 2014 for cross-dressing, they quickly raised far more than their projected RM 24,000 [US $7,484].
Justice for Sisters poster
Meanwhile, Nisha Ayub in particular has steadily been gaining international accolades for her trans advocacy work. She was awarded the Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism by Human Rights Watch in 2015, and in 2016 San Diego officially declared April 5 “Nisha Ayub Day” after her receipt of the US Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award — the first trans person to do so.
Other notable Malaysian trans people include I Am You co-founder Dorian Wilde, political secretary Hezreen Shaik Daud, and writer & ex-gay conversion therapy survivor Yuki Vivienne Choe.
I Am You campaign banner by I Am You
The work of these legal practitioners and activists fighting for LGBTQ rights in Malaysia, as well as ever-growing public and institutional support, is heartening to observe. Their willingness to take on the previously untouchable Syariah Court as well as this possibly paradigm-changing ruling on IC changes opens the door for reviews of current anti-LGBTQ laws, especially since those cases have been argued on the basis of upholding the Federal Constitution. A lot of work still needs to be done to make Malaysia safer and more supportive of LGBTQ people, and these wins may seem tiny compared to nationwide same-sex marriage or complete decriminalisation of homosexual activity, but they should not be underestimated or ignored. Malaysia is a rapidly changing country and these are the seeds of a revolution.
Note: the writer has previously fundraised for The Seed Foundation, which is also managed in part by Nisha Ayub.
OPEN THREAD: Post-Brexit Feelings Smörgåsbord
The first thing I felt when I checked the news at 5:30am on Friday morning, was a sweary kind of disbelief, turning into genuine, chest-compressing shock that it had happened: the UK had voted to leave the EU.
JK Rowling could not magic it away; I briefly wondered if it was time for a comforting glance from Mary Berry to assure us we really had done the best we could, even if the result was a bit wonky. But then, looking at voting demographics by age, I realised there was a 60% chance she’d have voted Brexit, and had to arrest the thought before it brought my entire cultural reality tumbling down.
Not even Lindsay Lohan’s last-ditch remain tweets could halt my downward spiral; by 7:30am I was on the verge of hysterical tears, after learning my best friend’s mother’s leave vote apparently hinged on the high price of sub-par cauliflowers in Belgian supermarkets.
It remains to be seen if she comes to regret this, but certainly many Brexiteers are sinking into deep Bregret, after realising yes, their vote really did count for something, and discovering all those campaign promises were really more “aspirations.”
While much of my own gloom is self-indulgent (though not unwarranted in light of economic turmoil and various xenophobic incidents since the ballot), perhaps the most justified in their sense of despair and betrayal are younger voters who overwhelmingly wanted to remain in the EU, and fear the result has ruined their future.
It’s not just the age split that’s worrying, it’s the gaping chasms in sentiment between different parts of the country that I fear will widen further as politics lurches to the right in the UK. We’ve had half a decade of austerity chipping away at services most needed by the marginalised; how bad will things get in a Brexit-induced recession before the economy recovers from the uncertainty?
And yet there’s half a nation, and more in other countries, feeling jubilant at the outcome.
So many feelings! Please come and share your post-Brexit processing here, whether your #1 feeling is joy, misery or just ever-increasing sickness of the word “Brexit.”
Sunday Funday Is Ringing in Pride Month with Justin Trudeau Because Canada Rules
I can’t believe I’m not at A-Camp right now and the only thing that will ever make it better is a bunch of good news.
Canada Rules
+ Justin Trudeau, of course, raised a pride flag on Parliament Hill for the first time ever.
+ Canada’s national anthem might soon be gender-neutral.
+ Every single Canadian province will soon fund gender-affirming surgery.
Okay, So People Still Hate HB2, Yep
+ Selena Gomez is donating proceeds from her June 7 show in North Carolina to an LGBTQ charity.
Selena Gomez is showing support for her LGBTQ fans in North Carolina by taking a “show must go on” approach.
In a letter to Billboard, Gomez wrote, “I am very fortunate to have grown up in a home where I learned from an early age that everyone should be treated equally.” That is exactly why she doesn’t plan on canceling her Revival Tour stop in North Carolina on June 7. Instead, Gomez will donate proceeds from the show to a local LGBTQ charity.
“I went back and forth on whether I should cancel my concert in North Carolina,” Gomez wrote. “And ultimately, I think what is right for me is to move forward with my show and donate a portion of the proceeds to Equality North Carolina and their effort to defeat this act of discrimination.”
+ The Grateful Dead will donate $100,000 to the HRC and Equality NC after a June 10 show as well.
+ Cyndi Lauper met with LGBT youth to discuss North Carolina’s bathroom bill.
“The Sims” is Getting On Your Level
“The Sims” is gonna expand its gender customization options very soon.
“The Sims has always been this magical sandbox where you get to create the Sim that you want,” Rachel Franklin, executive producer of The Sims 4, told BuzzFeed News. “We recognize that diversity is beautiful and wonderful in the world — it’s our job to reflect that in the game.”
Franklin said that the design team, which has been working on the update for the past year, worked alongside LGBT advocacy group GLAAD to ensure the latest update would be sensitive to all players of the game — including transgender players.
“We are always delighted to see how people use the game and how people play the game,” she added. “We want them to be able to find a way to express themselves and their creativity and give them all the tools possible to do that — to accurately reflect themselves.”
This Dog, Tho
2016 Already Deadly for Trans Women; At Least 48 Murdered in Brazil
feature image via shutterstock
At Least 48 Brazilian Trans Women Already Murdered in 2016
+ Horrifyingly, there have been at least 48 trans women reported killed in Brazil so far in 2016. It’s important to keep in mind that the real number is likely significantly higher than this, as these are only the killings that have been reported and/or in which are correctly identified as trans women. It’s common for law enforcement and media to misgender trans victims of violence, making it difficult to estimate exact numbers, although it’s unequivocal that they’re high. A 2015 report from Al Jazeera found that Brazil has “the greatest number of murdered trans people in the world.”
In late January, Brazil launched a campaign to support its trans citizens aiming to “inform and educate both society and the health professionals about the benefits of personalized attentions to that segment of the society.” Despite the effort, it seems that so far 2016 is more than on track to match the epidemic of violence against trans women that previous years have seen.
So Presidential
+ Last night there was yet another Democratic Town Hall event, in which Bernie and Hillary answered questions posed to them by voters from New Hampshire, which will feature the first primary vote. I’m not writing a separate post on it because there are just SO many of these events at this point it’s absurd! I mean there’s another Dem debate tonight and another GOP debate on Saturday and ANOTHER Dem debate on February 11 and the actual election of the President of the United States is still more than ten months away. A child conceived today would likely be born before then. God help us all. Anyway! The Dem Town Hall last night didn’t reveal much more about anyone’s platform than we likely already knew, although it was the first official Dem event without O’Malley in it. The major issues remain: how is Bernie going to pay for his plans, why did Hillary vote the way she did on the Iraq war, who supports veterans the most, who can reach across the aisle, etc etc.
My favorite part is this:
COOPER: I just have a few more. Actually it (looks like it seems)… So we just have time for a few more questions. We’ve covered a lot of, a lot of foreign policy issues. There’s a lot of folks out who really don’t know much about you, so I thought we’d just ask a couple of sort of lighter questions just to kind get to know you. I read one of daughters say that, if you had a car, or if they sold cars with manual locks on windows, that’s the kind of car you would get. So what kind of car do you actually have.
SANDERS: I have a small Chevrolet. It is one of the smallest Chevys that they make.
COOPER: Do you know what year it’s from?
SANDERS: Yeh, it’s about five years old.
COOPER: OK, not bad.
SANDERS: A red car.
COOPER: Is it true you chop your own wood? It’s a red car.
SANDERS: Pretty good on mileage, but yeah.
COOPER: Is it true you chop your own wood.
Politics, everybody! You can read the full transcript here.
+ In his last term as President, Obama made his first visit to an American mosque, the Islamic Society of Baltimore, giving a 45-minute speech that “[framed] Islam as deeply American and its critics as violating the nation’s cherished value of religious freedom.”
+ Rand Paul has suspended his campaign for President.
+ Maybe I just wasn’t paying close enough attention in 2012, 2008 or 2004 but to me, the weird media-specific drama of this election cycle feels unparalleled. What is going on. In the latest plot twist since Donald Trump sat out the Iowa GOP debate, Hillary and Bernie were invited to an “unsanctioned” Democratic debate on MSNBC, “unsanctioned” in the sense that it wasn’t the idea of the Democratic National Committee. Anyways, both candidates (Martin O’Malley has dropped out) have been hemming and hawing about whether they’ll accept the invite and debate, but Sanders has finally agreed and so that’s happening tonight! Before he opted in, Hillary was going to debate “with or without him,” and I sort of wish that had happened so I could see what a one-person debate looks like. Anyways, I guess I know what I’m doing tonight!
+ President Obama has received 136,000 signed petitions asking him to “to stop operations targeting Central American mothers and children for expedited deportation proceedings.”
Health/Reproductive Rights
+ Rick Scott, governor of Florida, has declared a state of emergency in the four FL counties where the Zika virus has been discovered.
+ A new documentary, No Más Bebés, delves into the US’s history of forced sterilization of poor women of color, mostly Latinas.
In the early and mid 1970s a young Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, working in the obstetrics ward of the L.A. County USC Medical Center in the predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A., began to notice that immigrant women, not fluent in English, were being pushed into tubal ligations while they were in the active late stages of labor. Several of the women in the film remember the moment, while being rushed into the operating room for an emergency C-section, that they were given a piece of paper, in English, to sign. Over several years, Dr. Rosenfeld covertly gathered proof of these sterilizations and sought out the help of a young Chicana attorney, Antonia Hernández, to bring a legal challenge. In 1978, after months of tracking down the women who had been sterilized, Hernández and her clients brought a lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, and asserted that their right to bear children had been violated by coercive sterilization. Anchoring the argument to Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut, Hernandez’ legal strategy was to prove that there is an established individual right to procreate. “No Más Bebés” tells the story of their fight to stop the practice of sterilization without consent.
+ Abortion was officially declared a human right in a case brought before the United Nations Human Rights committee. Ten years ago, a seventeen-year-old Peruvian woman was refused access to a medically indicated abortion; this week, the UN awarded her financial compensation and affirmation that she deserved access to an abortion when she needed it.
Law/Order/Prisons
+ A UK lesbian mother has won her court battle against her former partner, who took their three-year-old daughter to Pakistan and denied her coparent visitation after their relationship ended. It’s significant that the plaintiff has won her case and been recognized as her daughter’s mother despite not being the gestational parent.
+ Kenneth Miller, the Mennonite pastor who helped ex-lesbian Lisa Miller kidnap her daughte r Isabella from her former partner and flee the country, was convicted and will serve a 27-month prison sentence.
+ In Indiana, a bill advocating for LGBT rights (but which didn’t include protections for trans people, choosing instead to defer discussion of them to a summer study committe) was allowed to die without going to a vote.
Freedom Indiana’s Chris Paulsen says she would have liked to have another six weeks to talk to legislators. But she says protecting gays and lesbians without covering trans Hoosiers wasn’t enough. Senate Minority Leader Tim Lanane (D-Anderson) says Democrats did offer to compromise, skirting the issue of wedding-related businesses by limiting the bill to employment and housing protections. But he says Democrats weren’t willing to exclude [trans people], and Republicans wouldn’t add them.
+ Sandra Merritt, one of the two anti-abortion activists who were indicted by the grand jury last week was offered probation to settle her charge. If she maintains a clean record during her probation, the charge could be dismissed. Merritt’s attorney has memorably called the indictment and the case “dumber than a bucket of hair.” Both Merritt and the other anti-abortion activist indicted, David Daleiden, are expected to turn themselves in.
+ Members of a high school wrestling team in Norman, Oklahoma are being charged with sexually assaulting two teammates on a bus. The victims were 12 and 16 years old. In the aftermath, “an adjunct coach responsible for supervising the students on the bus has been fired and a second has resigned.” Upsettingly, this is not the first time recently Norman has made the news for sexual assault. From Jezebel:
Norman is the same town where, as Jezebel reported last year, three teenage rape victims were bullied out of school at Norman High, the other large public high school, after they all reported being assaulted by the same person, 18-year-old Tristen Killman-Hardin. He pleaded no contest to raping one of them, an unconscious 16-year-old, and is currently serving 15 months in prison. He is slated for release on November 30, 2016.
+ Three black women, students at SUNY Albany, say that 10-12 white men and women screamed racial slurs at them and assaulted them on a bus headed to campus. There is reported to be cell phone footage of the assault, and police were interviewing 16 people in connection with the incident.
Data/Research
+ A new report finds that a record 149 people in the US were found to have been falsely convicted of a crime, with “nearly four in ten” being falsely convicted of murder.
+ A new report from the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that ICE is still detaining women, children and families in deportation raids, often using deceptive and misleading means to enter their homes and take them in. One reportedly used was to ask people to identify a photo of an African-American man implied to be a criminal as a ruse to get them to open their doors.
Beginning early January, the Obama administration detained a total of 121 people, deporting 77 of them within three days of apprehension and without allowing them to speak with a lawyer. Most of the raids happened in North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia, and targeted individuals from Central America’s Northern Triangle – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – which is facing intense poverty and violence.
+ A report from Grassroots Leadership shows that over 10,500 state prisoners are currently incarcerated in private prisons outside their home states, and that the number will likely increase — “West Virginia is moving forward with a plan that could move up to 400 prisoners to private out-of-state prisons.” The trend to relocate prisoners to out-of-state private prisons puts money in the pockets of the private prisons while making it difficult to impossible for incarcerated people to be visited by friends or family from their home, “[impeding] prisoner rehabilitation by diminishing prisoners’ ties to family and community, compromising rather than enhancing the public good.”
+ It’s always been suspected based on logic and anecdotal evidence that voter ID laws (ostensibly there to combat voter fraud, a crime which occurs extremely rarely) have the impact of keeping poor voters and/or voters of color away from the polls; now a new study confirms it.
“…the researchers found that in primary elections, “a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points.” The impact of strict voter ID was also evident in general elections, where minority turnout plummeted in relation to the white vote. “For Latinos in the general election, the predicted gap more than doubles from 4.9 points in states without strict ID laws to 13.5 points in states with strict photo ID laws,” the study found. That gap increased by 2.2 points for African Americans and by 5 points for Asian Americans. The effect was even more pronounced in primary elections.”
Flint Water Crisis
+ The FBI, EPA and Congress are all trying to figure out who to blame for the water crisis in Flint, with Darnell Early, who was the emergency manager of Flint when they switched to the water supply which was since revealed to be poisonous, being forced via the threat of being “hunted down” by US Marshals to go to Congress and testify.
However, virtually no one OTHER than Darnell Early is being forced to testify, perhaps most notably Gov. Rick Snyder. Other than the director of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, no one else in city or state government is being asked to testify so far, which to some indicates a lack of interest on Congress’s part in pursuing the chain of responsibility all the way up the ladder. Republican representative Jason Chaffetz is organizing the hearings, and Democrats have sent him a letter asking him to rethink how they’re being done.
“Although we have made multiple requests for you to invite the Governor, to date you have neither invited him to testify nor provided a timeframe by which you might do so,” the letter reads. “There is no question that the Governor’s actions are directly relevant to the Committee’s investigation,” the Democrats write. “He championed the state law in 2011 giving him authority to appoint the emergency managers in Flint, his appointees oversaw the process to seek cost-savings by transitioning Flint off the Detroit water system and onto treated water from the Flint River, and his appointees overruled a vote by the Flint City Council in 2015 to return to Detroit water.” Some have also claimed that Snyder’s administration made the decision to switch the water source itself, and the administration has come under fire for leaked documents showing it sent bottled water to state employees in Flint long before water was made available to residents. Snyder’s own task force laid primary blame for the crisis with the state Department of Environmental Quality, and he himself said in his state of the state address that he takes “full responsibility.”
Grab Bag
+ Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson filed paperwork yesterday to run for mayor of Baltimore.
“Baltimore is at a moment,” Mckesson, who becomes the first of the prominent post-Ferguson activists to seek public office, said in a phone interview on Wednesday night. “I’m running to usher Baltimore into a new era where our government is accountable to its people and aggressively innovative in how it identifies and solves problems.”
+ In 2009, the high court of Delhi decriminalized homosexual sexual relations, a law that was a relic of colonial Britain. In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned Delhi’s ruling, effectively re-criminalizing homosexuality. Now, the Supreme Court says they’re going to revisit that decision, and calling it “a matter of constitutional importance.” That doesn’t mean it will necessarily be re-overturned, but they wouldn’t be revisiting it if there weren’t a chance of that. Also in India this week, a court ruled that women can legally head households, specifically that “the eldest female in a family [can] formally occupy a role traditionally inherited by men.”
+ The New York Times has a profile on Beit Simchat Torah, the NYC synagogue for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Jews, and how it’s finally getting a property that the synagogue itself owns so it can have a permanent home.
+ In a frightening incident, commentator and professor Melissa Harris-Perry was threatened by a strange man who mentioned Nazi Germany and demanded to know why she was allowed to be on MSNBC. You can read a full account from Melissa Harris-Perry here.
+ Australian members of parliament can now breastfeed in chambers at will, replacing the previous system wherein nursing members of parliament would leave the chamber and vote via proxy if they had to breastfeed.
+ Updates on the occupation at Oregon Malheur Wildlife Refuge, aspects of which are still ongoing. Four people, as of yesterday, were still occupying the refuge, and Ammon Bundy’s lawyers are crowdfunding for his legal fees; Bundy petitioned to be released with an ankle bracelet but a judge denied the request. The four remaining occupiers seem to have the support of Ammon’s father Cliven Bundy, and tensions are high between locals whose lives have been adversely affected by the occupation and supporters of it.
+ It’s been commonplace lately for Republican presidential candidates and pundits to call on Muslims around the world to speak out against ISIS/Daesh. ThinkProgress has a piece covering how often Muslims who do speak out against ISIS globally are brutally murdered as part of official ISIS policy and strategy, something which pundits don’t seem to be taking into account.
+ Tax documents show that while Chick-Fil-A pledged to stop pledging money to anti-LGBT causes, it’s still donating to a Christian athletics association with anti-gay messaging, including a “sexual purity” policy for its staff and even volunteers. Gross!
Indiana Lost $60M After Passing Anti-Gay Law Last Year, Doesn’t Stop Them From Proposing New Ones This Year
Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law Impacted The State
+ A new study by Visit Indy, a tourism organization in Indianapolis, found the state may have lost up to $60 million in hotel profits, tax revenue and other economic benefits. The tourism group surveyed 12 out-of-state conventions and found they all decided against hosting their conventions in the state specifically because of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allowed discrimination against LGBT people on religious grounds.
“The evidence of the disastrous consequences from Gov. Pence’s discriminatory RFRA flight last year is undeniable,” JoDee Winterhof, the senior vice president for policy and political affairs at the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “Despite the profound economic damage they inflicted on the state last year, anti-LGBT lawmakers are so vehemently opposed to eequality that they are pushing for an even more catastrophic ‘Super RFRA’ this year.”
The “Super RFRA” will be debated tomorrow in the Senate Judiciary Committee along with five other pieces of anti-gay legislation. While Gov. Mike Pence tried to fix the state law after a national outcry and clarified the legislation couldn’t be used to opt out of nondiscrimination protections, the new bill would allow anti-LGBT businesses to turn away LGBT customers.
Law & Order
+ David Fowler, head of the Family Action Council of Tennessee, filed a lawsuit to challenge how Tennessee is affected by the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage. He, along with several other ministers, asked Williamson County Clerk Elaine Anderson to stop issuing all marriage licenses until their lawsuit is settled. And to make matters embarrassingly worse, State Rep. Susan Lynn, along with 16 other Republican cosponsers, filed a resolution in the House to support the lawsuit. “I have dozens of sponsors, and the message of my resolution is clear,” she said. “We as a state have been violated, and we expect the doctrine of separation of powers and the principles of federalism reflected in our Constitution to be upheld.”
+ In super great news, a grand jury in Texas indicted two anti-abortion activists who shot undercover videos of Planned Parenthood that ignited a firestorm of anti-choice legislation and propaganda against the organization for allegedly making a profit off of selling fetus tissue. The grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing. David Daleiden, president of The Center for Medical Progress, and Sandra Merritt, the founder and CEO of BioMax were indicted for “tampering with a governmental record,” a second degree felony. Daleiden was also indicted for “prohibition of the purchase and sale of human organs,” a Class A misdemeanor.
Police & Prison
+ President Obama announced a series of executive actions banning solitary confinement for juveniles in the federal prison system and as punishment for prisoners who commit “low-level infractions.” The new rules also state that the longest a prisoner can be punished with solitary confinement for their first offense is up to 60 days and not a whole year like it is currently.
Protestors carrying a photo of Anthony Hill CREDIT: AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN
+ Air Force veteran Anthony Hill was naked and unarmed when DeKalb County police officer Robert Olsen shot and killed him near his apartment outside of Atlanta. A grand jury indicted Olsen on six counts including murder. 27-year-old Hill was experiencing a breakdown after he stopped taking his medication to treat bipolar disorder and PTSD. Think Progress reports:
According to a Washington Post investigation, Hill was one of more than 120 people with mental illness killed by police in 2015, making up a quarter of all people shot and killed by law enforcement last year. As with Hill, officers in most cases were not responding to someone reporting a crime, but rather a relative, neighbor, or bystanders calling for help dealing with a mentally fragile person behaving erratically.
One of the many banners supporters held outside the courthouse on Thursday read, “Mental illness is not a crime.”
Undocumented Immigrants
+ As many as 1,000 undocumented immigrants living in Flint aren’t getting the help they need during this water crisis because they’re too scared to go to water distribution centers because they don’t have proper identification.
+ Musicians/singers Juanes and John Legend performed outside an Arizona detention center for activists and detainee’s families after touring the jail, in an effort to draw attention to immigration and mass incarceration.
+ Latino Rebels launched their #MIGRAMAP to help track ICE raids across the country. “The collaborative project aims to gather data from and for our community’s needs and will capture the official and unofficial national story of these ICE raids. This will give everyone the opportunity to fight for undocumented people in their local community.”
International News
+ As one of his last acts in office, Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva vetoed legislation allowing same-sex couples to adopt children. He said the issue should be subjected to a public debate since it’s a “sensitive social topic.” Cavaco Silva’s term is up on March 9 and will be turned over to Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
+ Four people were killed in a school shooting in a small town in Canada on Friday. An unidentified male was taken into police custody. The shooting happened at La Lonche Community School in northern Saskatchewan, which has about 900 students ranging in age from kindergarteners to high school seniors.
+ J-FLAG, a Jamaican LGBT organization, surveyed a few hundred queer people from the island and found that 75 percent of respondents have considered emigrating from Jamaica, a country with strict laws against LGBT people. Many of the respondents also experienced widespread harassment and discrimination but didn’t report it to the police because they thought the police would take no action, the incident was minor, or they feared a homophobic or transphobic response from authorities. They found 71 percent of gay men, 59 percent of lesbians, 35 percent of bisexuals, and 29 of trans people said they were harassed or faced discrimination.
+Orashia Edwards, a bisexual man from Jamaica was finally granted refugee status and can stay in the UK after fighting for three years.
Sports!
+ Trans athletes don’t have to get bottom surgery to compete in sports in accordance with their gender under new guidelines that will be adopted by the International Olympic Committee, according to OutSports. The IOC hasn’t officially announced the guidelines but OutSports reports the IOC met in November and will most likely adopt the new rules before this summer’s Olympics. “To require surgical anatomical changes as a pre-condition to participation is not necessary to preserve fair competition and may be inconsistent with developing legislation and notions of human rights,” the guidelines state. According to the new guidelines, a trans woman would be able to participate in women’s events one year after hormone therapy instead of having to get bottom surgery and be on hormone therapy for two years as the rules are now.
+ The Edmonton Oilers of the Canadian National Hockey League wrapped their sticks in Pride Tape to show their support LGBT inclusivity and diversity.
Score One for Lesbian Parental Rights with Judge’s Landmark Ruling
Judge Rules Lesbian Parent Has the Right to Custody
Lauren Poole
+A Virginia Beach judge ruled both women in a same-sex marriage are legal parents of their child, even if they separated. Lauren Poole and Karen Poole were married in Maryland in 2013. Karen became pregnant through a sperm donor and gave birth in the summer of 2014. The two separated less than a year later and Lauren was looking for custody of the child in court. Karen’s attorneys argued it was Karen’s decision to choose a second parent. Judge Steve Frucci said both women decided to bring the child into a their marriage and it was clear Lauren intended to be a parent. Judge Frucci wrote in his ruling, “The conscientiousness of a divorce does not mean that Plaintiff is no longer a parent because the Defendant, as the gestational parent, no longer wishes her to be one.”
“I never thought we’d be here, but we are…It was crazy, actually. It felt amazing, to finally hear what I already knew and what I already felt…It was great,” Lauren said after the ruling.
“We’re seeking joint legal and shared physical custody, so shared parenting arrangement, so that the child can have the complete and full benefit of two engaged and involved parents,” said Lauren’s attorney Barbara Fuller, who called it a landmark ruling.
Bills, Bills, Bills
+ Wow, California’s got a shit ton of LGBT-friendly laws going into effect this year. I’m giving the lawmakers, who made these bills and actually give a damn, a standing ovation. Here’s a rundown:
- A bill called the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Disparities Reduction Act requires four state agencies to start collecting demographic data on gender identity and sexual orientation. Departments of health care services, public health, social services, and aging must to collect voluntary information from LGBT people in order to assess and understand disparities that impact them.
- Senate Bill 703 “requires out-of-state companies bidding on state-funded contracts to offer their transgender employees the same benefits other employees receive.”
- Senate Bill 731 requires state officials to consider gender identity when placing youth in foster homes.
- AB 87 “prohibits peremptory challenges during the jury selection process of a prospective juror based on an assumption they will be biased because of his or her gender identity, gender expression, ethnic group identification, genetic information, or disability.”
- AB 830 allows victims of violence due to their gender identity or sexual orientation to sue for damages against the responsible party.
- The California Healthy Youth Act requires comprehensive sex education for middle school and high school students that includes information about LGBT people.
- AB 827 “calls for the creation of a training program to help teachers combat bullying and support LGBT youth who are coming out of the closet or being targeted by other students.”
- AB 960 protects families using “assisted reproduction methods.” Sperm donors are not considered parents and unmarried people using assisted reproduction methods have the same rights as married couples.
+ Of course, states can’t all be gay utopias! There’s a “religious freedom” bill that tried to pass in the Georgia Senate in the last session but was ultimately tabled, although it has the possibility of being resurrected in the 2016 session. The bill has the same language we’ve been hearing about in other states; basically it would allow individuals, companies and religious organizations to discriminate against LGBT people because their religion says so. There might be another discriminatory bill that we could also see in Georgia’s legislative session. Sen. Greg Kirk says he’s working on a bill that would “protect” government employees who believe marriage should be between a man and a woman. He hasn’t filed it yet but he said it should be filed soon since Georgia’s legislative session kicked off yesterday.
Law & Order
Caesar Goodson Jr.
+ An appeals court has temporarily stopped the start of Caesar Goodson Jr’s trial. He’s the second police officer charged in connection with the death of Freddie Gray. CNN reports: “The stay concerns the question of whether another of the charged officers, William Porter, can be compelled to testify in Goodson’s trial.” Goodson was the one driving the police van carrying Gray, who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury after he was shackled without a seat belt in the van. Goodson faces the most severe charges out of the six other police officers. He could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
+ FedEx claims that one of their longtime employee’s spouse isn’t entitled to her pension because their same-sex marriage doesn’t count. Think Progress reports:
“Taboada-Hall died six days before United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Because Taboada-Hall died just a few days too soon, FedEx now claims that Schuett does not count as her wife.
In the eyes of the law, Schuett and Taboada-Hall are married, and they were married as of the day of their wedding ceremony. Although California law did not permit new marriage licenses to be issued to same-sex couples on the day of their wedding, Schuett successfully filed a “Petition to Establish the Fact, Date, and Place of Marriage” in state court, and the court responded with an order declaring that she and Taboada-Hall were married effective June 19, 2013, the day of their wedding.”
International LGBT News
+ In an interview with the Fiji Sun, Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama called same-sex marriage “rubbish” and said lesbians who are interested in getting married “should go and have it done in Iceland and stay and live there.” His comments were made in response to a statement by the head of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre, Shamima Ali, who was calling for marriage equality. Fiji banned same-sex marriage in 2002 and it was only six years ago that they decriminalized gay sex.
+ A gay couple from Israel found out their surrogate child born in Nepal isn’t actually theirs after genetic testing. The surrogacy agency made a mistake. The men were forced to give up the child after being with the baby for a month. Israeli law requires couples using a foreign surrogate must prove the child is biologically related to one of the parents. Only heterosexual couples in Israel can use surrogates.
Grab Bag
+ A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that more men are identifying as bisexual. Two percent of men who took their survey said they were bisexual compared to 1.2 percent in 2010.
+ A recent Center for American Progress and the Equal Rights Center study found transgender woman face discrimination and even more obstacles when seeking housing from a homeless shelter. In the study, out of a 100 shelters across four states, only a fraction of shelters were willing to accommodate trans women. These are some of their findings:
+ After several immigration organizations joined forces to pressure the National LGBT Task Force and the Creating Change conference to take action, the conference announced on Facebook it cancelled a session with presenters from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The National LGBT Task Force also issued a statement calling the Obama administration to put an end to recent ICE raids of undocumented families. As many of you might know, Creating Change is a conference aimed at empowering LGBT people and building an intersectional social justice movement. But Creating Change already failed its mission and queer/trans undocumented people when the organizers of the event invited ICE to speak in the first place. It wasn’t till Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, GetEQUAL, Not1More, the Transgender Law Center, and the TransLatin@ Coalition/Florida stepped up and demanded the conference to not allow ICE to speak at the conference and instead allow undocumented trans and queer people to lead discussions on immigration. “ICE has no place at a conference that, at its basic principle, should be about providing a safe home for all LGBTQ people,” a Not1More petition said. Creating Change did the right thing by uninviting ICE to the conference and hopefully they’ll redeem themselves at the conference and when planning for future conferences.
We have a longstanding commitment to make Creating Change a safe space for all attendees. After listening to concerns…
Posted by Creating Change Conference on Monday, January 11, 2016
Historic Federal Ruling Allows Lesbian Basketball Players To Sue Pepperdine University for Discrimination
Federal Judge Rules “Sexual Orientation” Discrimination is Covered Under “Sex” Discrimination
+ In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind ruling, a California federal judge ruled the nation’s ban on sex discrimination in education under Title IX includes a ban on sexual orientation discrimination too. U.S. District Court Judge Dean Pregerson decided last week “that sexual orientation discrimination is not a category distinct from sex or gender discrimination.” Lesbian couple and former basketball teammates Layana White and Haley Videckis filed a lawsuit against Pepperdine University in 2013, saying their basketball coach mistreated them because of their sexual orientation.
“I was being targeted and some of the treatment, I thought, was just completely unfair,” Videckis told Los Angeles TV station KABC earlier this year. The coach said, “‘Lesbianism isn’t tolerated here. Lesbianism is real and a big problem in women’s basketball.’ And I directly remember the date of that meeting because it just stood out to me that someone could use that word in such a derogatory way,” Videckis told the station.
The women were repeatedly interrogated by their coach about their orientation and relationship and asked invasive questions like whether they slept with their beds pushed together and whether they went on vacations together and also were asked about their gynecological exam records. White says the stress from the discrimination pushed her into severe depression and even attempt suicide. They were driven off the basketball team and lost their scholarships as a result.
Pregerson’s ruling is not final but has allowed the women’s lawsuit to move forward and has explained why “sexual orientation” is covered under “sex” in Title IX which makes for a compelling argument for future cases of LGBT discrimination. Think Progress outlines the judge’s reasoning and explains it a lot better than I can:
“It is absurd to demand a victim of alleged sex discrimination based on sexual orientation prove she is a lesbian,” Pregerson writes in his ruling. “The contrary view would turn a Title IX trial into a broad inquisition into the personal sexual history of the victim. Such an approach should be precluded as not only highly inflammatory and offensive, but also irrelevant for the purposes of the Title IX discrimination analysis.”
Thus, he concluded, “it is impossible to categorically separate ‘sexual orientation discrimination’ from from discrimination on the basis of sex or from gender stereotypes; to do so would result in a false choice.”
Videckis and White were subjected to stereotypes about lesbianism and sexuality, which “stem from a person’s views about the proper roles of men and women — and the relationships between them.” If the staff’s harassment was based on “lesbians’ perceived failure to conform to the staff’s views of acceptable female behavior, actions taken on the basis of these negative biases would constitute gender stereotype discrimination.”
Law & Order
Sandra Bland
+ A grand jury in Texas decided not to indict anyone in connection to the death of Sandra Bland, who was found hanged in her jail cell after a routine traffic stop in Prairie View, Texas outside of Houston. Special prosecutor Darrel Jordan said that “the case is still open” and jurors would convene next month to discuss other aspects of the case. This grand jury was in charge of deciding if they should indict anyone “related only to Ms. Bland’s death and to the conduct of the jail staff.” Jordan says “the case is not over.” Bland, a 28-year-old black Chicago resident, had recently moved back to Texas for a job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University when she was pulled over by police in a routine traffic stop that turned into a heated argument. She was arrested and later found dead in her jail cell.
+ With just a handful of days away from the end of 2015, Ty Underwood, one of the first transgender women murdered in 2015, finally got some justice. A jury in Smith County, Texas sentenced Carlton Ray Champion to life in prison for shooting and killing Underwood in Tyler, Texas, just east of Dallas. A jury convicted Champion and decided in less than 45 minutes to sentence him to life in prison and to pay a fine of $10,000. Champion and Underwood were dating and the motive for the murder was jealousy on Champion’s part.
More Reasons to Hate the GOP
+ Donal Trump has unsurprisingly ignited a fire under the “dying” white supremacist movement, which is indeed terrifying. White Supremacists everywhere are rejoicing in the fact that someone in the mainstream is voicing the exact things they believe in. Just take a look at some of the research in this piece from the Washington Post:
In a recent post on the white nationalist blog Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald — described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic” — wrote that Trump’s candidacy is helping America realize that a “very large number of White people are furious” about the where the country is headed.
“We are living in very exciting times,” MacDonald wrote. “A major political candidate is saying things that have been kept out of the mainstream for decades by a corrupt elite consensus on immigration and multiculturalism that dominates both the GOP and the Democrats.”
CREDIT: DYLAN PETROHILOS/AP PHOTO
+ Six Republican candidates running for president signed a pledge promising to support “religious freedom” legislation during their first 100 days in the White House that would allow individuals and businesses to openly discriminate against LGBT people. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee promised to push for the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) that would allow people and businesses from not serving LGBT people because it interferes with their religious beliefs, aka Christian beliefs, that “marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman” or that “sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.” The pledge is supported by three big conservative groups: the American Principles Project, Heritage Action for America, and Family Research Council Action. The piece of legislation was introduced by Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-ID) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) under the “Marriage and Religious Freedom Act” in June.
International LGBT News
+ In a 21-9 vote, a Mexican state legislature has banned foreigners from using surrogacy programs in the country. They are now only open to Mexican couples. Tabasco, Mexico was the only state that allowed gay and straight couples to hire women as surrogates. Surrogacy programs in Mexico are a cheaper alternative to U.S. programs with costs ranging from $60,000 to $80,000 compared to $100,000 to $150,000 in the U.S. Some state legislators voted against the international surrogacy programs because it was becoming a new way to exploit women and a form of human trafficking. In the past, there have also been complicated legal issues with bringing the child back to the U.S. without proper birth certificates.
+ The Greek Parliament is set to approve gay civil partnerships soon which has been met with staunch opposition from the Greek Orthodox church. The bill comes two years after Greece was fined by the European court of human rights for failing to extend protective rights to gays and lesbians.
+ Despite being one of the most liberal countries in Eastern Europe, Slovenians rejected a bill that would have allowed same-sex couples to marry. More than half of voters opposed the bill and only 37 percent voted for the referendum. The vote came after a same-sex marriage bill was introduced in March by the country’s government but conservative groups, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, pushed for the public to vote on it by collecting 40,000 signatures against the bill. The majority of Slovenians are Catholic and many of the opponents of the bill said it would’ve allowed gays and lesbians to adopt children which would apparently fuck up traditional family values. The Washington Post reports: “A 2010 Pew Research Center survey also showed Slovenians to be more liberal than other Eastern Europeans. About half of all Slovenians surveyed agreed that ‘gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own lives as they wish.'”
Grab Bag
+ Damn, there was another anti-gay attack in Dallas’ gayborhood, Oak Lawn, on Friday. This time bartender Daniel Luhmann was walking home from Cedar Springs Tap House at 1:30 a.m. when he heard shouts behind him but dismissed them for an argument. Soon after, two men came from behind Luhmann and struck him with a metal pole between his shoulder blades. He fell to the ground and that’s when the two men started kicking him. There have been about 14 anti-gay attacks in the Oak Lawn area since September. Police have ramped up efforts to patrol the area but residents say the police aren’t following up well enough on the reported attacks and aren’t helping to prevent them.
+ On Thursday, I wrote about Martin Shkreli, the big pharma CEO who hiked up the prices of life-saving drugs, getting arrested for securities fraud . Now, he’s resigned from Turing Pharmaceuticals.
US Marine Found Guilty in Jennifer Laude’s Death but Not of Murder, Given Short Sentence
US Marine Convicted of Homicide
After more than a year since transgender woman Jennifer Laude was found dead in a hotel room, a Phillippine court convicted US Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton of killing her after he found out she was trans while they were having sex. Pemberton was on leave in the Philippines after participating in joint military exercises when he met Laude and her friends at a bar in Olongapo. Pemberton was convicted of homicide — and not murder, which is a different charge — for first strangling Laude and then drowning her in a toilet bowl in October 2014. He was only sentenced to 6-12 years in jail and was credited with time he already spent in a military detention camp. The court also ordered Pemberton to pay Laude’s family 4.6 million pesos ($98,000) in damages. The family’s lawyer Harry Roque said that “this is a bittersweet victory because it is not murder.” The AP reports, “The judge said she downgraded the murder charge to homicide because conditions such as cruelty and treachery had not been proven.” Umm, I don’t understand how there wasn’t any cruelty or treachery proven when this US marine squeezed Laude’s neck and then dragged her to the bathroom where he proceeded to dunk her head in the toilet bowl and then just walked away all because he “panicked” after finding out she was trans. He testified in August and admitted to choking Laude but says she was alive when he left her in the shower.
Pemberton’s conviction is just a slap on the wrist compared to what he did to Laude and in addition to his short time, it’s unclear where he’ll spend that time since he’s under the purview of the US military. The AP reports: “The judge said an agreement between the U.S. and the Philippines was ambiguous and failed to state in which facility within the Philippine military headquarters Pemberton would be detained and which government agency would have supervision. She ordered that he be brought to the [New Bilibid Prison] national penitentiary, in accordance with local laws, until it is decided where he should be permanently held.” Pemberton’s lawyers managed to get an appeal and let him stay in military headquarters for five days until a more permanent facility is agreed upon. I mean, if this is any indication of his time locked up, the odds are in his favor being locked up in a US military prison.
International LGBT News
+ Canada will accept 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February and are giving priority to gays and lesbians, “women at risk,” families and single GBT men. The plan is to welcome 10,000 refugees by the end of December and 15,000 by the end of February. Canada plans to “invest up to $678 million over the next six years toward resettling and integrating the 25,000 new arrivals.” “We have a responsibility to significantly expand our refugee targets and give more victims of war a safe haven in Canada,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “The resettling of vulnerable refugees is a clear demonstration of this. While our plan is ambitious, it reflects Canada’s commitment to share responsibility and offer protection to those who need it. Canada must once again be regarded as the compassionate, generous country we’ve always been.”
+ Three men ages 23 to 33 were killed and five were injured at a gay festival in Acapulco, Mexico. It’s unclear if the violence was an anti-gay attack or part of the high rates of violence found in the city. Acapulco has the highest homicide rate in Mexico.
+ Transgender Bolivians can now change their name, sex and gender on legal documents, the Justice Minister announced on Thursday. The law comes three years after Raysa Torriani, the national coordinator of the Bolivian trans movement, proposed the bill to the legislative assembly.
+ Japanese city of Takarazuka will issue certificates that recognizes same-sex partnerships which will be equivalent to a marriage license. The city will set guidelines by March so same-sex couples will be treated the same as opposite-sex married couples in regards to various services. Two other wards in Tokyo were the first local municipalities to introduce the certificate system.
Grab Bag
+ An elementary school in Wisconsin cancelled plans to read a children’s book called I am Jazz written by trans teen Jazz Jennings after a hate group got wind of it and threatened to sue the school. Mount Horeb Primary Center sent a letter to parents explaining they were going to be reading the book because the school wanted to create a more inclusive environment for a transgender student attending the school. Some “concerned parents” called anti-LGBT group Liberty Counsel who then wrote a letter to the school threatening a lawsuit if the reading wasn’t cancelled. In the letter the group misgendered Jazz and said some gibberish about the book “confusing many children” and being “false and misleading.”
+ On Wednesday, The New York Times used the gender-neutral honorific Mx. for the first time in a story about Bluestockings, a collectively-owned and volunteer-run bookstore in New York.
“Are we anarchist?” Senia Hardwick asked. “Technically, yes.” Mx. Hardwick, 27, who prefers not to be assigned a gender — and also insists on the gender-neutral Mx. in place of Ms. or Mr. — is a staff member at Bluestockings, a bookshop and activist center at 172 Allen Street on the Lower East Side.
Even though there’s been an increase in usage of the word and considerations adding it to the Oxford English Dictionary, standards editor Philip B. Corbett says the NYT probably won’t be adopting it soon since it’s still unfamiliar to many people.
+ A federal judge denied a Detroit funeral home’s second request for super personal information about a former trans employee. RG & GR Harris Funeral Homes Inc claimed they needed information about former funeral director Aimee Stephens’ transition including, “whether she still has a penis, her family medical history, and information about her previous sexual relationships” for a lawsuit brought on Stephens’ behalf by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 2014, the funeral home fired Stephens’ after she told her employers she was going to present as a woman to work. U.S. Magistrate Judge David Grand in the Eastern District of Michigan rejected the funeral home’s claims ruling the information wasn’t relevant to Stephens’s discrimination lawsuit.
+ Not a lot of gay people have gotten married in North Dakota. In fact only 60 same-sex marriage licenses have been issued in 18 out of the 53 counties in the state, The Bismarck Tribune reports.
Mourning Paris and Beirut
feature image via shutterstock.com
It’s been a heavy and anxiety-ridden (at least for me) last few days as news of terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, the subsequent media speculations and public commentary on the attacks have completely engrossed our social media news feeds. It’s been hard to sift through all the news since reports and articles on the topic have been frequently updating since Friday. Here’s a bunch of things you should know about the attacks, the aftermath, the victims, some articles on what people think of the internet solidarity (or the non-solidarity) that arose in the last few days and other relevant links you should read to make sense of these tragedies.
The Latest
At least 129 people were killed and more than 350 were injured in seven coordinated terror attacks in sites around Paris on Friday evening including at a concert hall, the Stade de France and at least two restaurants.
At least seven men, mostly in their twenties and all believed to be Europeans, were identified as the culprits, with one of those men, Salah Abdeslam, still on the run while the rest are dead.
The attacks come a day after two suicide bombings struck Beirut, killing 43 and wounding more than 230 people. The attacks in both cities are said to be connected to ISIS. As a result, France enacted raids and arrests in France and Belgium in connection to the attacks and airstrikes in Raqqa, Syria aimed at ISIS targets.
I found this video on the history of Syria’s war and the rise of ISIS and this overview of Syria’s civil war to be very helpful in understanding the gist of what’s been happening and what fueled these attacks.
On Islamophobia
+ French Muslims fear that attacks against them will increase in the aftermath, just like it did with the Charlie Hebdo killings. “As a French Muslim, I worry that this massacre will be used against the French Muslim community by politicians, like it happened back in January when Charlie Hebdo was attacked,” a 19-year-old Muslim woman told Aljazeera America. “But I also worry that refugees, especially those coming from Syria, will be the next target of conservative politics and racist acts.”
+ Columnist Omid Safi gathered his thoughts on the attacks in Paris and Beirut and wrote some profound things that you should read. He touches on various points including the huge difference between ISIS and Islam and how ISIS intends to create a false divide between Muslims and the West in order “to create a culture of backlash against Muslims in Europe, to foster a situation of persecution of Muslims there that will bolster future recruitment of extremists.”
“I don’t know how to say it more directly than this: Yes, the members of ISIS come from Muslim backgrounds. No, their actions cannot be justified on the basis of the 1400 years of Islamic tradition. Every serious scholar of Islam has confirmed this clearly, and unambiguously. ISIS is about as Muslim as the KKK is Christian. If you don’t look to the KKK to tell you about God’s message of love as expressed through Jesus, don’t look to ISIS to tell you about God’s mercy as expressed through Muhammad.”
On Syrian Refugees
French authorities found a Syrian passport outside the Stade de France where a suicide bomber was supposed to detonate an explosive vest inside. The passport turned out to be a fake. The attacker posed as a Syrian refugee and entered through Greece. The discovery has created a fear that terrorists could pose as refugees and infiltrate the West which has inspired many right-wing politicians to call a close of borders and to refuse entry to all Syrian refugees. So far 23 US governors said they’d block any attempts to resettle Syrian refugees in their states. This is exactly what ISIS wants. ThinkProgress has a piece on why there’s no legal basis for US governors to do what they’re threatening to.
Ben Rhodes, one of President Obama’s top security advisers said in an interview the US will not halt its efforts to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees. “Let’s remember though Chuck, we’re also dealing with people who’ve suffered the horrors of war, women and children, orphans. We can’t just shut our doors to those people. We need to sort out how to focus on the terrorists that we need to keep out of the country. But I think we do need to do our part to take those refugees who are in need.”
Just to put into context why Syrians are fleeing the country, according to conservative estimates about 210,060 people have died in the civil war since 2011, or about 144 people in Syria have died each day, with more than half being civilians.
On Media Criticism and Backlash
+ Over at Vox, Max Fisher, writes about the backlash against media from readers who say they neglected to cover the Beirut bombings. He says journalists have been covering bombings in the area and in nearby countries for years but nobody is paying attention or reading their stories.
“It’s not just me, of course: My peers throughout the media have dutifully and diligently covered such attacks for years. Local reporters and foreign correspondents out in the field have of course done far more than I have, spending days interviewing victims and painstakingly reconstructing events — despite knowing that readers were all but certain to ignore the stories. “Nobody is going to read this” is a phrase we’ve grown accustomed to hearing.”
Fisher does say he understands the underlying anger behind the criticism which is the world at large has largely ignored Beirut’s trauma since it’s not in a wealthy or Western country. He says pointing the finger at media is a cop out and instead we should take a look at our own role in how we prioritize one country over another.
“It would be easy to blame the media for this, to say that if only media outlets covered Beirut rather than ignoring it, the world might pay attention. I have bad news: The media does cover Beirut, just as it has been covering Lebanon’s refugee plight for years. That’s an uncomfortable truth, because rather than giving us an easy villain, it forces us to ask what our own role might be in the world’s disproportionate care and concern for one country over another.”
On Facebook’s Safety Checks and Profile Filters
Over at Wired, Molly McHugh writes about the criticism towards Facebook’s Safety Check In and temporary French flag filters on profile pictures. People wondered why Facebook didn’t do the same for Beirut or for Kenya or Syria and other countries with similar tragedies. McHugh postulates Facebook’s algorithm is what picks which crisis is spotlighted over other crises on the site, which is unsettling. She also mentions how fighting over who changed their profile picture isn’t worthwhile, instead we should be asking how others can be supported in the same way Paris was.
“But each school shooting and each hurricane is not going to trigger Facebook’s algorithm or attention. The alarm of sorts that Facebook has created won’t sound for every terrible thing that happens. That doesn’t necessarily mean individual efforts in the form of features and filters are without merit, but in responding to some tragedies and not others, Facebook has put itself in the business of ranking human suffering, and that’s a fraught business to be in. Facebook is built on ranking things that matter and how much, like which BuzzFeed quizzes you see in your News Feed or which friends’ photos show up the most. But it’s deeply uncomfortable — disturbing, really — when that same idea is applied (even with what I have to imagine are different metrics) to disaster and death.”
LGBT News
+ A Utah judge reversed his decision to take away a foster baby from a lesbian couple.
+ A Costa Rican woman was able to marry her same-sex partner, briefly, because a mistake on her birth certificate marked her as male.
+ Months after Ireland won a referendum on same-sex marriage, yesterday was the first day gay and lesbian couples could marry in Ireland.
+ About 1,500 Mormons resigned from the church in Salt Lake City after the church announced it wouldn’t baptize children of same-sex couples.
Racial Justice News
+ Colorline reports: “[T]he Obama administration announced that Prosperity Together, a group of women’s foundations, will dedicate $100 million over the next five years to improving the economic status of low-income girls and women of color.”
+ 51 protestors were arrested yesterday after they shut down a highway in Minneapolis. They were demanding justice for 24-year-old Jamar Clark who was shot by the police over the weekend. Police say he was a suspect in a domestic assault and interfered with paramedics. Witnesses say Clark was shot after he was already handcuffed.
Sunday Funday Is Watching Ellen Crash the GOP Debate and Cows Take Down Kim Davis
Happy Sunday Funday! I wrote this from Nashville, Tennessee, where every bar has live music. But in case you’re not being serenaded today, here’s some good gay news to make this week bright and beautiful!
Paging Kim Davis
I consider this the ultimate mic drop. Bless your hearts, Planting Peace.
Rick Perry Isn’t Gonna Be President
Rick Perry is out of the race! THIS CALLS FOR A MILLION PRAISE HANDS EMOJI.
via Wikimedia
Out of the Closets, Into the Bathroom
Every single-occupant bathroom in Philadelphia may soon be legally required to be gender-neutral.
via James Green
Philadelphia’s bill is an effort to make good on promises set down in the LGBT equal rights law that Mayor Michael Nutter signed two years ago to fulfill his stated goal “for Philadelphia to be one of, if not the most, LGBT-friendly cities in the world and a leader on equality issues,” according to a report in The Advocate. The newly introduced legislation does not apply to multiple-occupancy public bathrooms in the city.
Council member Anthony Squilla introduced the bill on behalf of the Nutter administration, the Daily News reports. “It’s making it comfortable for everyone, whether you’re a transgender person, whether you’re a straight person or a gay person,” Squilla said.
This Is Video Footage of Ellen Crashing the GOP Debate
It’s Time for Pride Again in Peoria
It’s been five years since the last pride celebration in Peoria. This year, the party returned.
via Wikimedia
There was no shortage of smiling faces at the Peoria gay pride expo Saturday afternoon.
“It’s given us a happy, care-free mood,” Ashley Carney said. Carney, a member of the Gay-Straight Alliance at Richwoods High School, self-identifies as pansexual. “We don’t have to worry about people judging us. We’re just here to have fun with each other.”
Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dragon
Daily Fix: Kim Davis’s BFF Mike Huckabee Says Religious Freedom “Most Important Issue of Election” and More News
Refugee Crisis
Likely you have been seeing a lot about the refugee crisis and/or Europe’s migrant crisis. Here are some things to read about it. This is a general explainer from Vox; this is a series of charts and graphs that also explain some things. This is a piece from CNN about how US presidential candidates have responded to the crisis, and a piece about how the Gulf nations, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, haven’t taken any refugees in. The Guardian looks at why the refugee crisis suddenly seems so heightened when the Syrian war has been going on for four years. From Years of Living Dangerously and Symbolia Magazine, here’s an explanation of how global climate change has played a role. The European Union has released its action plan to relocate refugees; there are also obstacles, however, like how Austria has suspended Hungary-bound trains due to “overburdening” by traveling refugees.
Panel via Years of LIving Dangerously and Symbolia Magazine
Police/Violence
+ A study from the University of Illinois finds that in general, people are more likely to fire a gun when the target was a black person, and also were faster at firing when the target was black as opposed to when the target was white.
+ Deputies will not be charged in the death of Natasha McKenna, who was tasered while restrained and afterwards stopped breathing.
+ James Blake, a black former tennis star, was was tackled by NYPD officers while waiting for a car to take him to the US Open. NYPD claimed that Blake was identified to them as someone involved in an identity theft ring; it appears that they mistook him for someone else. Blake says that only one of the five officers involved apologized to him once the mistake became clear, and that the officer who tackled him wasn’t wearing a badge, didn’t identify himself as a police officer before tackling him, and didn’t speak to him or give him any opportunity to cooperate.
The tennis great said he would like an apology from the department, and he wants to hear there will be repercussions for the officers involved. “I have resources to get to the bottom of this. I have a voice,” Blake said. “But what about someone who doesn’t have those resources and doesn’t have a voice?”
James Blake
+ Three Washington state police officers who shot Antonio Zambrano-Montes 17 times will not face criminal charges.
George Trejo, an attorney representing the wife and children of the slain 35-year-old Zambrano-Montes, said the family was “extremely disappointed” by the prosecutor’s decision not to charge the officers in a shooting relatives described as “the execution of their loved one.” Trejo said: “We are not surprised by this decision but disgusted and disappointed.”
Governor Jay Inslee directed the state’s top lawyer to review Sant’s decision, saying he wanted “to ensure that people have confidence and trust in the decision.”
+ Although the trial for the police officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death hasn’t begun yet (the pretrial hearing is still in progress), the city has announced it’s willing to pay Freddie Gray’s family $6.4 million in restitution. The settlement entails the city accepting “civil liability” for Gray’s death, but carefully avoids admitting to police misconduct. The settlement may also have legal restrictions that block both the city and Gray’s family from talking about the case publicly.
Politics As Usual
+ A new poll shows that Bernie Sanders may currently lead Hillary Clinton among Iowa Democrats who are likely to caucus in February, although his advantage is within the margin of error.
+ In an unprecedented lawsuit, the Republicans of the House of Representatives are suing President Obama for using Congress money for the Affordable Care Act. A US District judge has allowed that the Republicans have legal standing to sue, so this will be interesting. I am, to be honest, a little confused about this case, but many people seem really amazed that the lawsuit is being allowed to proceed at all. If you have legal insight into this matter, please feel free to share!
+ Governor Jerry Brown and other Dems are softening their climate change proposal, facing pushback from the oil industry and other legislators. The original proposal included cutting down petroleum use by 50% in addition to increasing renewable electricity use and energy efficiency.
+ Mike Huckabee is going to ride the Kim Davis train all the way to… somewhere, and talked about how she shows us that religious freedom is the election’s “most important issue.” Ironically, Huckabee tried to claim that incarcerated Muslims in Guantanamo Bay being directed towards Mecca is a reason why Kim Davis shouldn’t have to do her job, seemingly unaware of the fact that for many people, Guantanamo Bay’s continued operation and American incarceration in general are much more pressing issues this election season.
+ An executive order by President Obama that federal contractors must provide up to one week of paid sick leave will go into effect in 2017.
Women of the World
+ It is almost hard to believe this is real but it is: the House Judiciary Committee had a hearing on Planned Parenthood and it was called “Planned Parenthood Exposed: Examining the Horrific Abortion Practices at the Nation’s Largest Abortion Provider.” FOR REAL. No one who actually works at Planned Parenthood was asked to testify, which really calls into question how we’re defining “hearing.” While they were not testifying about how their organization works because they weren’t allowed to, Planned Parenthood released a document breaking down the history of attempts to smear them and their work.
+ A band made up of three teenage girls, Kalliope Jones, competed in a Tri-County Fair Battle of the Bands; one of their judges gave them feedback suggesting that they try to be more “sultry.” The band members, who range from 14 to 16 years old, posted a response on Facebook:
As Amelia Chalfant said, “A woman’s sex appeal, or anyone’s for that matter, should not be the defining factor in their success in the music industry, and in addition to that, WE ARE CHILDREN! WE ARE 14-16 YEARS OLD.” The judges tried to say they meant it as a positive thing; that it was supposed to mean “soulful”. They did not understand why we confronted them about it…
We then asked if they had made similar comments to any of the bands that were made up of only boys. They said, “Oh, no. It is a completely different thing.” Actually, it really isn’t. This conspicuous act of sexist and stereotypical thinking was deplorable and pathetic.
The members of Kalliope Jones
+ Feministing has a piece on how Indigenous women are on the front lines of protests in Ecuador, speaking out against the government that’s been allowing others to mine on Indigenous land without getting their permission.
Daily Fix: Black Lives Matter Calls on Hillary to Stand with Black Trans Women and More News
Black Lives Matter
+ Black Lives Matter activists disrupted a Hillary campaign stop in Cleveland asking her to divest from private prisons and stand with black trans women. Clinton responded that she would be “happy to meet with you all another time.”
“We called on [Clinton] to actually have a conversation with black trans women and take their lead,” said Angela Peoples, one of the women who disrupted the event. Peoples leads the grassroots LGBTQ network at the civil rights group GetEQUAL.
…“Hillary Clinton must stand with Black people, especially Black trans women, by refusing to accept funds from or bundled by executives of or lobbyists for private prison companies—and investing the money she’s already accepted from those companies in the work toward Black trans liberation,” said Rian Brown, an organizer with GetEQUAL, in a statement sent to Fusion. “Until that happens, we cannot for a moment think that Hillary believes Black Lives Matter.”
+ A short piece on how Fox News is trying to manufacture the “story” of whether the Black Lives Matter movement should be classified as a hate group, a story which itself originates with Fox News in a sort of terrible news snake eating its own terrible news snake tail. If you’re thinking “that’s ridiculous, what kind of news station even is this,” you might want to read Heather’s excellent analysis of how Fox News’ rhetoric works!
+ The Democratic National Committee has endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement; the BLM network has repudiated the endorsement, explaining that their movement doesn’t function within the political party system.
A resolution signaling the Democratic National Committee’s endorsement that Black lives matter, in no way implies an endorsement of the DNC by the Black Lives Matter Network, nor was it done in consultation with us. We do not now, nor have we ever, endorsed or affiliated with the Democratic Party, or with any party. The Democratic Party, like the Republican and all political parties, have historically attempted to control or contain Black people’s efforts to liberate ourselves. True change requires real struggle, and that struggle will be in the streets and led by the people, not by a political party.
[…]
While the Black Lives Matter Network applauds political change towards making the world safer for Black life, our only endorsement goes to the protest movement we’ve built together with Black people nationwide—not the self-interested candidates, parties, or political machine seeking our vote.
Police/Prison/Violence
+ A Maryland judge has refused to drop the charges for the six officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and has confirmed that each of them will face a separate trial. The judge also dismissed “charges due to prosecutorial misconduct” levied at DA Marilyn Mosby, an attempt by the defense to take her off the case.
+ Black Lives Matter activists and the ACLU are speaking out against proposed new rules for attendance at the LAPD Board of Police commissioners; there’s concern that the proposed rules, which include “behaving in a civil manner” and ban “impertinent, personal or profane remarks” can be interpreted to restrict freedom of speech. Speaking of California and the LAPD, new data reveals major racial disparities in California’s policing; black people make up only 6% of Californians, but represent 17% of arrests and a full 25% of in-custody deaths. Also related, some LAPD will begin wearing body cameras, but also officers will be able to review their own body camera footage before making a report of any incident and the footage won’t be available to the public unless there’s a criminal case.
+ A settlement was reached in a federal class action suit concerning California prisons’ use of longterm solitary confinement, with some prisoners in SHU for longer than 10 years. The settlement introduces new guidelines, which could have a major impact for many incarcerated people.
- Offenders can only be sent to solitary confinement for serious rule violations.
- Offenders who are placed in SHU due to gang activity will be moved back to general population via a two-year, four-step process that restores their privileges as they go.
- The state will review the cases of those who are currently in SHU within a year to determine if they can be released from solitary.
- Offender representatives will regularly meet with prison officials to review settlement progress and monitor conditions.
- Virtually no offender can be held in isolation for more than 10 continuous years.
- The state will create a modified general population unit to house repeat offenders and those who have been in solitary more than 10 years and have also committed recent offenses. It will be high-security, but not an isolation environment.
Order in the Court
+ Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who just really, really does not want to give our marriage licenses to same-sex couples, is trying once more to get a judge to back her. Two other Kentucky county clerks, Casey Davis and Kay Schwartz, are also refusing to issue them. It does not seem likely that a judge will back Davis; it’s more probable that she’ll be held in contempt of court.
+ A 16-year-old girl and her 17-year-old boyfriend are both being charged with felonies for consensually exchanging nude photos in texts. Specifically, she was charged with being both the adult perpetrator and minor victim of sexual exploitation of a minor and having her own photo in her possession; her boyfriend was charged with five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, some for possessing his girlfriend’s photos and some for making photos of himself. It doesn’t appear that the couple shared the photos with anyone except each other; they were discovered in the course of “an investigation of other explicit photos that were being shared among teens without the consent of the person or persons pictured.” The sexual exploitation charges were dropped against the girl in favor of the misdemeanor “disseminating harmful material to minors;” she has to “pay $200 in court costs, stay in school, take a class on how to make good decisions, refrain from using illegal drugs or alcohol, not possess a cellular phone for the duration of her probation and to do 30 hours of community service.” Her boyfriend, against whom the felony charges still seem to stand, faces prison time and the possibility of having to register as a sex offender if convicted.
Health
+ Northern Illinois University professor Wendy Bostwick has earned a a National Institutes of Health grant to study health and microaggressions for bisexual women. She’ll work with 125 women from the Chicago area, with a focus on women of color.
+ Along with higher risk of mental illness, poverty, domestic violence and sexual assault, research finds that bisexual and/or questioning women have higher rates of eating disorders than straight women or lesbians.
+ In the backlash after heavily edited videos were released surrounding Planned Parenthood’s participation in fetal tissue donation, fetal tissue donation has begun to decline, threatening the research it goes to. Reuters warns that “efforts to reduce an already-scarce supply could set back research on birth defects, spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease, eye diseases, and vaccines and treatments for HIV/AIDS, to name a few.”
Grab Bag
+ A piece on Chouf, a Tunisian feminist group working for the safety and support of lesbian, bisexual and trans women.
“We founded Chouf [because of] an urgent need to create a safe space, free from lesbophobia and transphobia, where women’s voices find their place and their value,” said one of the organisation’s principal founders, who wished only to be identified as Salander. “Our goal is to work on the double oppression regarding women in our patriarchal and misogynist society and also to focus on bodily and sexual rights.
“Besides, at the beginning we were three people – a lesbian, a bisexual and a transsexual – who felt the need to find themselves in a space that believes in a redefinition of feminism and that gives voice to all Tunisian LGBT women. We also value our ‘Tunisianity’ and our north African, African and Arab origins.”
+ A piece on the situation for men seeking men on Ashley Madison in countries where same-sex relationships are illegal after the hack.
+ Karen Danczuk, a former Labour Councillor for the Kingsway Ward to Rochdale Borough Council, has come out as bisexual in response to what was apparently a former partner trying to extort her by threatening to out her.
I'm sick of people trying to make money off me so let me get it out now. Im bisexual…I admit it. So ex G friend your plan has failed 👊👊 KD
— Karen Danczuk (@KarenDanczuk) August 21, 2015
+ A new study finds that about about 30% of Israelis identify as neither heterosexual nor homosexual.
Daily Fix: New South Wales Education Minister Nixes High School Showing of “Gayby Baby” and More News
Here’s some news for you!
+ Keyshia Blige, a black transgender woman, has become the 19th DMAB trans person murdered in the US this year. She was killed in March, shot while in a moving car, but the details of her true gender were reported only recently. She is joined in this terrible respect by Jasmine Collins, the 18th, killed in a motel parking lot, in Kansas City; Collins was killed in June, but again her gender was only recently reported accurately. It’s hard to find anything to say that will truly honor the deep grief that these deaths deserve from the living and also really communicate the degree of extreme violence against TWOC that these murders represent. We can, however, take action to support and protect TWOC while they’re still alive.
+ At a press conference, Donald Trump refused to answer a question about his immigration plan (“immigration plan”) from Jorge Ramos, a longtime anchor of Noticiero Univision.
When Ramos tried to ask a question about the feasibility of Trump’s ludicrous and harmful proposed policies around immigration, which include ending birthright citizenship, Trump told him he couldn’t speak because he wasn’t called on, and had him escorted out of the the press conference — a press conference, an event which is designed specifically around the phenomenon of journalists asking questions. Ramos was eventually invited back, “where he sparred with Trump over the Republican candidate’s immigration proposals” according to the LA Times.
Jorge Ramos has anchored Noticiero Univision for almost thirty years, which more than 2 million people watch nightly according to Nielsen ratings. In 2012, Ramos wrote an open letter to the GOP, which told them “Unless your party changes its unreasonable anti-immigrant stance, your party will likely be shut out of the White House for generations… We will never forget that the GOP supported the passage of terrible anti-immigrant laws in Arizona, Alabama and Georgia, nor that you backed the actions of Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., who is now being sued by the Justice Department for allegedly engaging in policing practices that singled out Hispanics.”
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who is great, has a piece about Ramos and why his objectivity and commitment to ethical journalism should be respected, and why dismissing his coverage of Trump, any other candidate, or immigration reform because he’s an immigrant from Mexico is racist and flawed. I would recommend reading it.
+ A study from the University of Notre Dame finds that women are more likely to shift their sexual orientation over time, and also more likely to self-identify as bisexual.
+ Rentboy.com, a website upon which male full-service sex workers (often providing services to other men) advertised, has been shut down by the Department of Homeland Security; the charge seems to be “conspiring to promote prostitution.” Many have noted that while criminal prosecution of activities related to sex work is often justified by concerns about sex trafficking, no one seems to have brought up that concern here (even though it’s certainly not inconceivable for men to be trafficked for sex), which may suggest that concerns about sex trafficking aren’t universally sincere and are more often invoked as a reason to control female sex workers.
+ Lauren Brown, a highly-regarded employee at St. Mary’s prep school in Portland OR, appears to have been fired for being gay. Brown was thought highly of when she was offered a job as a guidance counselor at St. Mary’s, but when she asked a school official what would happen if she were to marry her girlfriend, the job offer was withdrawn and she was asked to sign paperwork stating that “her “intent to enter into a same-sex marriage” was why she lost her job.”
St. Mary’s sent her a contract in July. On July 22, Brown received an email from an administrator, asking her to complete a biography. “Tell us about your spouse,” says the email Brown showed WW. “Tell us about your children. Talk to us about YOU! It’s your choice as to what you would like to share!” The next day, Brown says, Clark called to encourage Brown to consider applying for an even more prominent job, director of admissions.
Brown says she asked Clark in that phone call what she should say in her biography, since she has a girlfriend. Brown also asked: Would she be allowed to bring her girlfriend to school events? What if she got married? She says Clark told her that was uncharted territory, but that Clark would support her.
Brown says Clark called back July 30 with a different message: “It may not work out.” Brown met with Clark and Friedhoff at St. Mary’s on Aug. 4. She says the meeting lasted more than three hours, with both women pressuring her to sign a separation agreement that offered her six months’ salary in return for a promise not to sue the school or talk about why she lost the job.
Late last night, the school rescinded the policy it quoted to Brown and has added sexual orientation to its equal employment opportunity policy.
“This evening the board of St. Mary’s Academy voted unanimously to support the administration’s recommendation to amend and broaden St. Mary’s policy on equal employment, bringing our employment policies in line with our mission and beliefs. Effective immediately, St. Mary’s has added sexual orientation to its equal employment opportunity policy. St. Mary’s is a diverse community that welcomes and includes gay and lesbian students, faculty, alumnae, parents and friends, including those that are married. We are proud of our work preparing the next generation of women leaders for service and leadership. We are still deeply committed to our Catholic identity.”
+ A street near Prairie View A&M University, where Sandra Bland had recently accepted a job, will be named after her.
+ Feministing has a piece on Cecilia Pineda and her infographic #FloodTheSystem, which illustrates the links between climate change and the prison system.
+ In Saudi Arabia, two women were registered to vote for the first time; a royal decree in 2011 allowed that women could vote and run in municipal elections starting in 2015. (Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, so no one can vote on national leaders or issues, but local/municipal ones.) Women there still cannot drive, nor can they travel, work outside the home or access other privileges without explicit male permission.
+ Walmart will no longer be selling assault weapons, the high-powered firearms often used in mass shootings in the US, when it restocks its fall merchandise. Walmart says this decision has nothing to do with mass shootings, but is a strictly business-related one.
+ In the ongoing saga of Kim Davis, an appeals court has upheld the original Kentucky court decision and required the Kentucky county clerk to issue marriage licenses, even to same-sex couples. Kim Davis had previously stopped issuing marriage licenses after the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage for religious reasons.
+ Mayor of Venice Luigi Brugnaro, previously featured in this column for his effort to ban children’s books featuring same-sex families, says there will never be a gay pride parade in Venice.
“Venice is not his city. At the moment he is governing it, but he won’t last long given the fool he is making of himself,” said [Italy’s rights group] Arcigay’s president, Flavio Romani. “He is becoming obsessive about this. Venice does not deserve it.”
+ Two gay men from Syria and Iraq respectively, Subhi Nahas and “Adnan,” who used a pseudonym for his own safety, testified in front of the UN this week on the danger that LGBT people face in ISIS-held areas.
Nahas described how attacks on gay people in Syria ramped up in 2011 as rebel militias and armed groups, as well as Syrian government troops, arrested and beat gay men in bars, parks and other locations known for being frequented by LGBT people. In 2012, Nahas was arrested along with 11 others at a government checkpoint while on his way to university. He said he was held longer than the others as soldiers mocked him for being gay before letting him go after a few hours.
After his detention, Nahas went back home. His father became increasingly violent toward him and he was afraid to go out.
A few months later Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian militant group linked to Al-Qaeda, took control of Nahas’s hometown, Idlib, and vowed to cleanse the city “of everyone who was involved in sodomy,” Nahas said. “I was terrified that would be my fate,” Nahas told Newsweek on Tuesday.
+ A girls’ high school in New South Wales, Australia had planned on showing its students a documentary about same-sex parenting called Gayby Baby for Wear It Purple Day, which has been celebrated in schools for years. Although no parents of any pupils complained, the Daily Telegraph covered the screening of the documentary with the claim that there was a “backlash from parents” and that “gay push should be kept out of schools. Thanks to the Daily Telegraph, NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has banned the showing of the film during school hours.
+ Also in Australia, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard says she supports same-sex marriage and does not support having a voter referendum on the issue, which is
what current Prime Minister Tony Abbott wants to have. Unfortunately, Gillard’s stance on these issues is less than super useful now that she is no longer in office.
+ Civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson passed away on Wednesday at the age of 104. Boynton Robinson was in attendance at the march to Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and was among those brutally beaten in 1965. She passed away in Montgomery, Alabama, surrounded by loved ones.
More Brits Than Ever Are In Between on the Kinsey Scale, New Survey Shows
feature image via shutterstock
In poll results published Sunday by YouGov, a full 49% of 18-24 year olds identified as something other than exclusively heterosexual. The online poll asked 1632 adults in Great Britain to identify themselves on the seven-point Kinsey scale. Among respondents of all ages, 72% identified as a 0 (heterosexual), 4% identified as a 6 (homosexual), and 23% identified somewhere in between. Breaking the data down by age group, however, shows a very interesting trend.
According to the report:
With each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18-24 year-olds are particularly striking, as 43% place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52% place themselves at one end or the other. … People of all generations now accept the idea that sexual orientation exists along a continuum rather than a binary choice – overall 60% of heterosexuals support this idea, and 73% of homosexuals. 28% of heterosexuals believe that ‘there is no middle ground – you are either heterosexual or you are not’.
This report is largely in line with existing research, including the 2013 British Social Attitudes survey showing growing acceptance of same-sex relationships in the UK, and the 2014 HRC report showing that 40% of US LGBT youth are non-monosexual.
Interestingly, when asked to label their sexuality, only 2% of all respondents self-identified as bisexual. This remained relatively steady across all age groups, increasing to 4% identification for those 25-39, and down to 1% for those 60+. Comparatively, 89% identified as heterosexual, 6% gay or lesbian, 3% prefer not to say, and 1% other. Even accounting for those listing themselves as “other” and “prefer not to say,” this leaves ~15% of respondents who presumably call themselves straight yet experience some level of same-sex attraction. And in even further proof that straight chicks want to make out with you, a surprising 35% of hetero-identified people responded with a “definitely,” “maybe,” or “very unlikely, but not impossible” when directly asked “If the right person came along at the right time, do you think it is conceivable that you could have a sexual experience with a person of the same sex?”
While collecting solid data about LGBT populations is always a difficult task, it seems telling to me that there’s such a large divide between the number of apparent bisexuals (the 23% plotting themselves as Kinsey 1-5’s) versus the number of people actively laying claim to the label (again, a mere 2%). Kinsey himself never used the word “bisexual” in relation to his work, because he felt it “implied a biological origin of bisexuality rather than a psychic one.” I doubt this is the motivating factor for many survey respondents in 2015.
One possible reason for the disparity is that people experiencing attraction to multiple genders don’t feel comfortable using the label until they’ve had sexual encounters with both same and different sex partners. However, 17% of respondents (20% of females and 14% of males) reported a sexual experience with a person of the same sex. Different-sex experiences were not reported on, but whatever the number, it still leaves a sizeable gap. Are the 1’s and 5’s not counting themselves because they don’t feel bisexual enough? The 2’s and 4’s? Unfortunately we don’t have enough data to say.
Certainly, coming out as bisexual poses unique challenges, and if someone feels more comfortable with an alternate label, they should have the individual agency to do what’s right for them. I personally use different labels in different contexts, as do many others. But there’s power in naming things as they are, and sometimes I wonder what impact avoidance of the term “bisexual” has. For example, would bisexual women have better mental health if more people identified as bi and there was a larger, more visible community? Would the allotment of resources change if all those Kinsey 2-5’s were counted up? What happens if we don’t do anything? I don’t have the answers, but apparently, there are more us than ever. I hope we figure some of it out soon.
Sunday Funday Believes in Queer Love, Even Underwater
Happy Sunday Funday! I’m just here with lots of good news that will last you a whole week, don’t mind me.
The Face(s) of Marriage Equality
It’s been fifty days since the marriage equality decision that gave us something to celebrate. In all fifty states, here’s what marriage equality looks like.
This is P!nk Singing Ellen’s New Theme Song
In case teenage you and modern-day you needed something to bond over.
Madonna to Anti-Gay Russia: F*ck You
Madonna will not perform in Russia again — like, ever again — due to their anti-gay laws. (I wish that this was Twitter so I could put an emoji of hands clapping between every word in that sentence.) In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly that’s published in their August 14 issue, she says that she “[doesn’t] want to perform in places where being homosexual is tantamount to a crime.” She then probably dropped a million mics while some balloons fell in the distance and someone unfurled a banner that said “THIS IS WHAT ALLYSHIP LOOKS LIKE.”
H&M’s Sister Brand Launched a Campaign Starring and Produced by Trans Folks
& Other Stories’ fall campaign stars trans models Hari Nef and Valentijn De Hingh and was created and produced by an all-trans creative team. “We couldn’t help to ask ourselves how the traditional fashion gaze can change if we keep the same normative crew behind the camera,” the company told TIME. “So we invited five amazing creatives, all transgender, to make our latest story.”
Markie Beth Learned to Scuba Dive In Order to Propose Because Queer Love is Beautiful and Cannot Be Tamed
This is actually just everything, you guys.
“The big day was Saturday, June 13. Sarah thought she was just going on a regular dive with her brother and some friends in the Pacific off Redondo Beach, Calif. One of them brought along a camera, which isn’t so unusual. But Sarah had no idea Markie was there too; her familiar features were hidden by all the scuba gear.
Once underwater, Markie maneuvered to her girlfriend and used a series of signs to ask Sarah to marry her.”
Meet Canada’s First-Ever Out Trans Federal Candidate
Jennifer McCreath is making history in her bid for the Avalon with Strength in Democracy. “People need to see the stories of someone who’s floated between low and middle class and has struggled for acceptance,” she told BuzzFeed Canada. “I’m hoping there are voters who can relate to the struggles that I’ve faced.”
Amnesty International’s Policy Calling for Decriminalization of Sex Work is a Move in the Right Direction
Amnesty International has officially adopted a policy on sex work that could lift up and protect some of the most vulnerable and marginalized folks around the world — and feminists and human rights advocates alike could learn a lot from it. The only problem is that they’re too busy speaking over the sex workers and researchers who emphatically support the proposal to really do so.
The policy, which calls for the “full decriminalisation of all aspects of consensual sex work,” passed yesterday at a convening in Dublin of the noted human rights organization’s International Board. It stems from extensive and growing bodies of research by UN agencies, human rights organizations around the world, and social science studies that illuminate how the criminalization of sex work both reinforces social stigma against sex workers and puts their lives at risk. It calls on nations and states with the full weight of Amnesty’s reputation as a human rights organization to repeal laws that make sex workers vulnerable to human rights violations, take action to minimize marginalization to provide sex workers with other options should they want to capitalize on them, and protect them from discriminatory policies and laws.
This policy will be used to demand that nations and states around the world work to eradicate discrimination against sex workers, develop policies and programs that support them, and actively work to protect them from institutional and individual acts of violence. “Human rights belong to everyone inherently by virtue of being human,” Amnesty International wrote on their blog yesterday, “and that includes sex workers.”
Sex workers have long held that criminalizing sex work exacerbates the risks of their work — if a client refuses payment or assaults a sex worker, the worker can be at risk for incarceration or violence from the hands of the police if she attempts to report it or seek legal redress. Sex workers are often also at risk from the police themselves as a result of criminalization, who can freely seek services from sex workers or sexually assault them knowing that if the worker refuses or resists, they can arrest them. A 2012 study found that 42% of Latina transgender sex workers in Los Angeles reported being solicited for sex by police. Criminalization provides an incentive for the state to try to identify potential sex workers by their behaviors; this leads to situations like the one in NYC, where police used the presence of condoms on a woman’s person as evidence of of sex work and reason for arrest. Obviously, this powerfully dissuades both sex workers and non sex workers from carrying condoms, which can put them at great risk. In fact, under the criminalization of sex work, sex workers are often at risk for incarceration and state violence even when the ostensible targets of the police are their clients. Former sex worker Maggie McNeill explains how sex workers are often harmed by law enforcement supposedly meant to either punish johns or rescue trafficking victims:
“…despite the hype, the truth is that even operations framed as “john stings” or “child sex slave rescues” end up with the arrest and conviction of huge numbers of women; for example, 97% of prostitution-related felony convictions in Chicago are of women, and 93% of women arrested in the FBI’s “Innocence Lost” initiatives are consensual adult sex workers rather than the coerced underage ones the program pretends to target.”
Marginalized populations are frequently at risk for violence in interactions with police, and sex workers are no exception. As a highly stigmatized population, sex workers can face violence, whether it’s arrest or sexual assault, from police officers with little legal recourse; criminalization of sex work provides law enforcement a reason to come into contact with sex workers. The experience of Monica Jones, a black transgender sex worker, in 2014 is an example of this system at work. Jones wasn’t engaging in sex work at the time, but accepted a ride home from men who turned out to be undercover police officers; she was then charged with “manifesting prostitution” and was “rescued” into a program called Project ROSE, which required her to spend eight hours a day in programming with no food and no way to compensate for the income she was losing by being there. Although Project ROSE was ostensibly designed to rescue people from trafficking, Jones gained no resources or strategies for leaving sex work from it, even if that’s what she had desired; and if she didn’t complete the programming, she faced jail time. In fact, one doesn’t even need to be a sex worker to face state violence as a result of criminalization; anyone profiled by the police as a sex worker, regardless of whether or not they are, faces the risk of theoretical rescue with the potential of very real incarceration and violence. Jones, who has since gone on to address the United Nations about the rights of sex workers, says that “As long as the police can target my community using these anti-sex-work laws, we will never be safe from violence, including the violence of incarceration.”
Although the policy’s passage doesn’t have an immediate effect, and won’t directly shift any policy — since Amnesty is a social justice organization and not a legal governing body — it does signify a way forward for the sex workers’ rights movement, and it symbolizes a growing consensus that sex workers deserve to live free from violence, harassment, and discrimination. Amnesty’s work has led to a string of victories around the world in the arenas of women’s rights, economic justice, immigrant rights, corporate accountability, and LGBT rights, and certainly their ability to drive change is a huge boon to the collective movement sex workers have built for their own justice. But their endorsement of decriminalization alone is also proof that sex workers have, above all, finally been heard – and truly listened to – in that very push for justice.
This policy is a case study in policy work that is done the right way — with marginalized groups not only in mind, but at the forefront. It’s a policy that echoes the demands sex workers themselves have outlined for years as they organized collectively or separately around the world, and it’s a policy that prioritizes, above all, the safety and well-being of sex workers who live at the intersections of oppression. Amnesty created the policy recommendation after conversations with sex workers from around the world, and hundreds of organizations representing sex workers, individual sex workers, and human rights organizations came forward to support the policy in its infancy, including the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe and the Global Network of Sex Worker Projects.
But many women’s rights organizations and feminist celebrities won’t stand for it.
An open letter from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women about Amnesty’s policy predicts “catastrophic effects” for sex workers worldwide and accuses the organization of supporting “a system of gender apartheid.” Signatories on the letter included Lena Dunham, Eve Ensler, Gloria Steinem, Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and senior staff at organizations like Equality Now, the Women’s Human Rights Education Institute, and Women’s Aid. The signatories are pushing for expansion of the “Swedish model,” in which laws criminalizing the purchase of sex work but not sex work directly are put into place. The only problem is that Amnesty did consider that model before drafting their own policy and recommendations — and decided to scrap supporting it in the face of hard evidence.
The Swedish National National Board for Health and Welfare has be unable to provide evidence that their laws reduce the number of sex workers or the number of trafficking victims. Instead, police have found that massage parlors operating as covers for sexual service sales increased threefold, and sex workers have been pushed underground and deterred from reporting violence or demanding fair labor conditions. In other countries attempting to police sex work, like France, social stigma against sex workers encouraged by criminalization has led to a widespread lack of access to resources, support services, and safety. In Norway, a sex worker told Amnesty researchers that they didn’t report an assault by one of their clients to police because laws make them vulnerable to eviction from their homes if they come forward. Escort Samantha Acosta told Broadly the police straight-up refused to help her when she reported that she was being cyber-stalked and threatened by a man because of the nature of her work.
“As long as sex work is criminalized — directly or indirectly through laws and practices targeting sex workers, clients, or third parties,” ICRSE wrote in a letter to Amnesty supporting the policy, “sex workers will be at risk of police violence, arrests, rape, blackmail and deportations, and will be unable to report abuse committed by clients, third parties, and members of the public.”
For Erika, a Latina sex worker who is queer and trans, criminalization causes her to fear both police action and police inaction. “Without criminalization, survival sex workers would be able to engage in sex work without fear of police arresting us and creating a record that would bar employment in the future in careers and jobs that offer more financial security,” she told me, adding later that criminalization has fed stigmas against sex workers that impede her ability to live free from harassment and violence. “[Clients] assume control over me,” she told me, “knowing that the [laws] support them more than they do me.”
CATW and their allies also muddle the lines between consensual sex work — defined in Amnesty’s policy as work done without coercion or force by someone who is over 18 — and human trafficking (which Amnesty has long opposed) in their work and, more directly, in the arguments they presented to Amnesty. In the eyes of CATW and their signatories, all sex work is gender-based violence. But policies that fail to differentiate between sex work and sex trafficking also put the actual victims of sex trafficking at greater risk of being made invisible and without support by customs and legal practice, and they strip agency from sex workers who — like many other laborers engaging in work that isn’t criminalized — do what they do for a variety of reasons, including survival as well as free choice. Critics of laws that criminalize sex work as an attempt at curbing human trafficking point out that the violent acts inherent in trafficking — like sexual assault and kidnapping — are already illegal, and can already be prosecuted under the law if victims can be found and come forward, but criminalizing sex work and putting those same victims (as well as voluntary sex workers) at risk for incarceration prevents that outcome.
“Conflating consensual sex work and sex trafficking is comparing two completely separate forms of intimate labor,” Erika told me, “[and] criminalization conflates these two intimate labors and has left little room for actual workers and survivors of trafficking to voice their needs and desires. Decriminalization requires having conversations about sex work for consensual and survival workers and their specific needs, and a separate conversation for survivors or current sex trafficked individuals to talk about their needs.”
“When you use trafficking to silence talk about decriminalization, you are using it as a smokescreen for bigger problems to do with borders, police violence, racism, and capitalism,” J, who is a genderqueer femme bisexual disabled neuroatypical and does escorting and BDSM switch work in several countries, pointed out to me. “Decriminalization would massively help in the fight against trafficking for so, so many reasons. Clients are usually the best resource to help find trafficking victims but when they are criminalized, they don’t report. When agents are criminalized, their activities go underground. When sex workers are criminalized, they stay away from all services, healthcare and victim support and the people in abusive situations just can’t be found.“
Melissa Gira Grant covered Amnesty’s proposal for The Nation prior to its passage today and explored the failure of criminalization policies to improve sex workers’ lives. “Criminal laws,” she wrote, “only add to the challenges — poverty, marginalization, access to health care — that many sex workers already face.” She also spotlighted the “intentional danger” government officials advocate when they put these laws in place:
At a 2014 hearing on whether or not Canada should adopt something like Norway’s sex work law, Senator Donald Plett remarked, “We don’t want to make life safe for prostitutes, we want to do away with prostitution.” Sweden’s trafficking unit head Ann Martin has defended their anti-sex work law, from which Norway’s and Canada’s were drawn, telling the London Review of Books, “Of course the law has negative consequences for women in prostitution but that’s also some of the effect that we want to achieve with the law.”
Amnesty’s sex work proposal has drawn the ire of campaigners who support the anti-sex work laws in Sweden, Norway, and Canada precisely because it illustrates how these laws, marketed as compassionate towards sex workers, have exposed them to danger. They argue for more criminalization at a time when on most other issues, the public is turning away from using the police and prisons as a solution.
J sees decriminalization as key in balancing out those power dynamics. “Decriminalization means that we can choose the best and safest ways we want to work depending on our on situations and not be dictated to by people who don’t understand our lives,” J told me. “I can tantalizingly imagine my life under decriminalization. It would change everything, especially as you edge towards the more marginalized edge of sex work. We could work together for safety when we want or need to. We could employ security guards, cleaners or admin people without those people being prosecuted for pimping.”
Ironically, nations that have decriminalized sex work have also produced some of the results women’s groups and feminist celebrities who signed on the CATW’s letter appear to be seeking out. In Germany, where sex work has been legal since 1927, human trafficking is at a record low. In New Zealand, where prostitution was decriminalized in 2003, 70 percent of sex workers say they are more likely to report violence to the police. A sex worker named Kimberlee Cline, who is currently based in California, told ThinkProgress that working in Australia, where prostitution is decriminalized, was her “most ideal scenario,” and that in California she’s been unable to access the free medical screenings, health and safety information relevant to her line of work, protection of her identity, and ease of screening and setting up appointments with clients that she had while she was working in Australia.
But Amnesty’s support of decriminalization is only the first step, and even now as sex workers ring in this huge victory, they know there is a long road ahead. “Decriminalizing doesn’t mean all of our problems disappear,” Erika told me. “It simply means one of the more permanent legal barriers is lifted.” Other barriers, including winning fights for labor rights and anti-discrimination protections, will take longer to lift. And winning the culture war will take even more time.
“Changing cultural values and norms so that sex workers are less stigmatised will take decades or centuries,” Luca Stevenson and Dr. Agata Dziuban oif ICRSE wrote in The Guardian, “but decriminalization can be achieved in our lifetime.”
For sex workers, the bottom line in pushing for decriminalization is that it would allow them more protection and more access to their human rights. Their health and safety would improve, as would their relationships with police and their employers. They could access support resources and find community. Their lives would change. And their opponents are actively, knowingly, advocating against them.
“The current debate is interesting,” Thierry Schaffauser of ICRSE told me, “because it brings more attention to the actual existing evidence and people are more and more seeing how sex workers’ voices are silenced.”
“The only people qualified to explain how best to protect sex workers are sex workers ourselves, and globally we want decriminalization, for exactly that reason — to best protect ourselves,” J told me, mentioning also that having Amnesty support this widely-held goal by sex workers is a “huge deal” that could change the game. “It helps us all to lobby in our own countries for our rights and helps us ideologically fight those who would prefer us dead,” J explained. “Because that’s what criminalization is: preferring dead sex workers.”
It’s time for all of us who are invested in the ability for women to live equitably and free from violence, abuse, and harassment to aid sex workers in their fight for liberation by doing so on their terms. By adopting this policy today, Amnesty showed the world exactly what that looks like.