Daily Fix: California First State to Pay for Trans Inmate’s Surgery and More News Stories

Hey, muffins! Here’s some news for you.

Order in the Courts

+ Four lesbian couples in Mississippi are challenging the state’s ban on same-sex couples adopting or fostering children. Mississippi is the last state to have an adoption ban based solely on sexual orientation. The suit claims the ban is unconstitutional in the wake of SCOTUS legalizing same-sex marriage and recognizing their legal benefits. Based on 2010 Census data, 29 percent of same-sex couples had children at home in Mississippi — the highest percentage of any state in the country.

William Widmer for The New York Times

+ Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that a Campeche state law banning same-sex couples from adopting is unconstitutional. Nine out of 10 judges ruled it unconstitutional and cite children’s rights as the basis for their decision. Presiding Judge Luisa Maria Aguila defended the ruling and said, according to TeleSUR:

“I see no problem for a child to be adopted in a society of co-existence, which has precisely this purpose. Are we going to prefer to have children in the street, which according to statistics exceed 100,000? We attend, of course, and perhaps with the same intensity or more, to the interests of the child.”

+ A federal judge ordered South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson to pay more than $135,000 in legal fees for a couple who challenged the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The couple sued last October for a marriage license after the the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a similar law in Virginia.

+ The Supreme Court of Ohio Board of Professional Conduct ruled that Toledo Municipal Court Judge C. Allen McConnell and all judges “may not refuse to perform same-sex marriages while continuing to perform opposite-sex marriages.”

+ New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoed a bill that would have made it a lot easier for trans people to change the gender on their birth certificate. It would’ve allowed trans people to make changes to their documents as long as they had certification from a doctor that they’ve undergone clinically appropriate transition treatment which includes hormone therapy and not limited to surgery. Christie cited concerns about fraud for vetoing the bill.

Prison/Police Violence

Shiloh Quine

+ California will be the first state to cover the cost of an inmate’s gender-confirming surgery after the state Department of Corrections reached a settlement last week, agreeing to pay for the surgery. Shiloh Quine, who’s been serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, kidnapping and robbery since 1980, began hormone therapy in 2009 but has attempted suicide multiple times, with her most recent attempt being after the prison denied her request for surgery.

“After years of unnecessary suffering, Shiloh will finally get the care she desperately needs — and transgender people nationwide will hear a state government affirm that our identities and medical needs are as valid as anyone else’s,” said Kris Hayashi, executive director of the Transgender Law Center, which represented Quine, in a statement.

Shiloh’s win was made possible by another trans inmate, Michelle Norsworthy, who won a federal court order for surgery. However Governor Jerry Brown’s office announced that Norsworthy will be paroled and will not be eligible to have the surgery covered. Quine will be referred to a surgeon as soon as possible and after having surgery she’ll be moved to a women’s facility.

+ Brad Miller, the police officer who killed Christian Taylor, a 19-year-old Angelo State football player, at a car dealership on Friday, was fired for “exercising poor judgement.”

+ Chelsea Manning, a trans US army soldier in prison for sharing secret government information with WikiLeaks, has been charged with four violations while in custody, which may result in indefinite solitary confinement. Manning is accused of showing “disrespect,” displaying “disorderly conduct” by sweeping food on the floor during a meal time, having “prohibited property” in her cell which include books and magazines like Malala Yousafzai’s memoir and the Caitlyn Jenner issue of Vanity Fair, and committing “medicine misuse” all for just having a tube of expired toothpaste in her cell. Manning’s lawyers are denouncing these violations as “absurd and a form of harassment.”

International News

+ After enforcing his party’s opposition to same-sex marriage, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said any minister who breaks ranks will be forced to resign from their position. On Tuesday, Abbott called a special political meeting of Members of Parliament whether members should be able to vote their conscience on a proposed bill to legalize same-sex marriage. The Advocate reports:

“While 72 percent of the Australian public supports marriage equality, after six hours of debate, the conservative ruling party decided to continue to enforce its opposition. Abbott came under fire for including in his threat not only his own Liberal Party members, but also members of the extremely conservative National party who form the other half of the governing coalition.”

Abbott is in favor of a plebiscite or referendum. “Going into the next election, we will finalise another position,” Abbott said. “The disposition of the party room this evening is that our position going into the next election should be that in a subsequent term of parliament, this is a matter that should rightly be put to the Australian people.”

Grab Bag

+ Dallas-based North Texas GLBT Chamber of Commerce recently launched a “Welcome Everyone” campaign with window stickers and counter signs for LGBT-inclusive businesses. Chamber president Tony Vedda says the campaign was launched in response to businesses across the country being hostile to gays, most notably a pizza place in Indiana who publicly declared they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding because of religious beliefs. The Chamber’s goal is to reach businesses who aren’t found in gay-friendly areas in Dallas, like Candelaria’s Bakery, a small, family-owned business in Mesquite. The business was one of the first put up a sticker. Owner Iris Candelaria found out about the program through her gay cousin who works at the bakery. “We are in the business of celebrating life and all the wonderful moments,” she said. “I would hate for somebody to come in here and not feel welcome.”

via Dallas Morning News

+ Target announced they’ll be getting rid of gendered signage in departments like the toy section and kids’ bedding section.

Daily Fix: Senate Democrats Blocked a Republican Bill to Defund Planned Parenthood and More News

It’s time for the news!

+ Here’s some good news for once! Senate Democrats blocked a vote on Monday that would’ve taken away federal funds from Planned Parenthood. But it was a pretty close call with a vote of 53-46, Republican supporters only needed 60 votes to advance it to the Senate floor for debate. The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Joni Ernst, would have prevented Medicaid reimbursements and federal family planning funds from going to Planned Parenthood, who uses these funds to subsidize non-abortion health services for low-income patients. The bill was pushed forward after heavily edited, undercover videos surfaced of Planned Parenthood doctors discussing the donation of fetal tissue for scientific research. Republicans claimed the video was evidence Planned Parenthood was selling fetal parts for profit. The full, unedited video doesn’t show any illegal activity by the organization.

India Clarke via facebook

+ Keith Gaillard, a 18-year-old Tampa resident, has been charged with murder in the death of India Clarke, a 25-year-old trans woman of color. Gaillard turned himself in to Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office last week. Police declined to talk about a motive but believe Gaillard knew Clarke. NBC reports:

“Detectives found a fingerprint on a cigar wrapper inside Clarke’s car, and Gaillard’s public Facebook profile allegedly showed him showing off a small-caliber revolver, the sheriff’s office said.

A witness told investigators that Gaillard had a .22-caliber revolver, and that he told the witness, ‘I think I killed someone,’ according to the sheriff’s office. Another witness allegedly told investigators that Gaillard said, ‘that was me,’ when asked about the body found the park, the sheriff’s office said.”

+ A teen lesbian couple were attacked by two women in an anti-gay crime at the Six Flags New England theme park in Massachusetts. The couple, both students at Bryant University in Rhode Island, were kissing and embracing on a bridge connecting the Six Flags pickup area to Main Street in Agawam, when a woman stopped and stared at them. One of the victims asked her if there was a problem, which the woman replied “No, I’m just waiting for my kid.” As the couple walked away, the woman said, “I wouldn’t care about your gay asses anyway.” The couple ignored her last comment but the woman began to yell anti-gay slurs at them. The couple turned around and one of them asked her what her problem was and “got in her face.” At this point the woman began punching the victim in the face and then kicking her and pulling her hair as she lay on the ground. Meanwhile, another woman punched the victim’s girlfriend and pulled out a knife. The suspects fled the scene once a crowd gathered but they were quickly apprehended in the parking lot. Damarielys Mukhtar, 29, and Nikia L. Butt, 27, were charged with assault and battery and a civil rights violation with injury. Mukhtar faces an additional charge of assault with a dangerous weapon.

+ For about two hours yesterday, more than 30 demonstrators shut down a major intersection in Seattle to denounce a system that provides incentives to detain immigrants. Trans and/or Women’s Action Camp joined with NWDC Resistance and the Not1More movement to protest the terms of ICE’s contract with Geo Group, a private company that operates a detention center in Tacoma. The contract guarantees 800 beds be filled at any time which leads to racial profiling by ICE agents and gives them incentives to fill quotas. The protestors blocked the intersection of Madison Street and Third Avenue, near the ICE office. No arrests were made.

+ Five national organizations released a new guide called “Schools in Transition: A Guide for Supporting Transgender Students in K-12 Schools” in order to provide school officials and parents with information to better support their transgender students. The Advocate reports:

“The authors of Schools in Transition say it contains legal information, research-supported guidance, and real-life narratives from students and educators, spread over six chapters. It addresses basic concepts of gender, advice on approaching unsupportive parents, as well as information regarding the dangers of marginalization in school.”

+ The New Yorker profiled Darren Wilson, the police officer who murdered Michael Brown. Jezebel breaks it down for you:

“The biggest takeaway from the piece seems to be that Wilson had the opportunity to be a dumb kid but didn’t give others like Brown the same chance. And he still doesn’t think race had anything to do with it.”

+ Six people were stabbed, including one 16-year-old girl who was left dead, at Jerusalem’s Gay Pride Parade last week. The man charged with the attack, Yishai Schlissel, an Orthodox Jew, was convicted of stabbing three people at Jerusalem’s Pride parade in 2005. He was recently released from prison after serving a 10 year sentence for the attack. After his release, Schlissel returned to his hometown where he distributed hand-written pamphlets in which he called on faithful Jews to risk “beatings and imprisonment” for the sake of preventing the parade. Police and authorities are under fire for failing to keep Schlissel away from the parade especially since Schlissel hinted he would strike again with his pamphlets.

via The Times of Isreal

Shira Banki, the teen girl who died of knife wounds on Sunday, was remembered by her loved ones as someone full of love and tolerance. “Our Shira was murdered simply because of the fact that she was a happy 16-year-old girl, full of life and love, who came to support her friends and everyone else’s right to live as they please,” her family told The Jerusalem Post. Thousands of Israelis demonstrated across the country to protest the antigay stabbings.

+ Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced last week that the Department of Education and the Department of Justice are beginning a pilot program to give eligible incarcerated students federal funding to get a college degree in an attempt to lower the rate of recidivism. This is the first time since 1994 financial aid is available to state and federal prisoners. These future grants will most likely have a huge effect on people of color, since they are more likely to be incarcerated than white people and less likely to attend college.

Daily Fix: Ray Tensing Is Indicted for Murder of Sam DuBose and More News

Here’s your news of the week!

Police/Violence

+ A week ago in this column we talked about the killing of Sam DuBose, who was shot while inside his car by University of Cincinnati officer Ray Tensing after being pulled over for not having a front license plate. Since then, Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters has indicted Tensing on murder charges. Body camera footage of the incident contradicts Tensing’s account of what happened; Tensing claimed that DuBose had put the car in motion and was trying to “run him over,” but the footage doesn’t support this.

“People want to believe that Mr. DuBose had done something violent towards the officer — he did not. He did not at all. I feel so sorry for his family and what they lost, and I feel sorry for the community, too,” Deters said.

DuBose’s funeral was on Tuesday; his family and over 500 other people attended his service, at which he was remembered as “the guy in the room ‘who on your worst day is going to make you smile.'”

+ Raynette Turner, a 44-year-old mother of eight, was found dead in police custody this week. She felt ill in custody on Sunday, and was taken to the hospital, where she was treated by doctors and released; on Monday she was found unresponsive.

The woman’s husband, Herman Turner, told Westchester News 12 he wanted answers — and he said he wasn’t getting any. “I can’t get any answers from detectives, anyone,” Herman Turner told the website. “She was a wife. She was a mother. She was mine.”

Vernon Turner with a photo of his late wife. Photo credit Joe Marino, New York Daily News

+ Also on the list of people who have died in police custody this week is Sarah Lee Circle Bear, after reporting pain to guards and being told to “quit faking.” When Circle Bear persisted in asking for medical attention, prison staff physically picked her up and moved her to another cell but didn’t find anyone to provide treatment for her; she was later found unresponsive. Sarah Lee Circle Bear was a 24-year-old Lakota mother of two.

Sarah Lee Circle Bear

+ In Chicago, an ordinance has been proposed that would “strengthen oversight of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) by increasing data transparency, in regards specifically to stop and frisk tactics utilized by the CPD.”

Under the STOP Act, the CPD would have to collect and share data on all the stops that it performs, including the demographic information of those stopped, the reason for the stop, the result of the stop, the location of the stop, and the badge numbers of the officers involved in the stop. Officers would also be required to give receipts to those they stop.

This information would be compiled and shared quarterly, and go on to be reviewed and used to evaluate the effectiveness of certain programs.

+ The details of the grand jury investigation that led to Daniel Pantaleo, the officer responsible for Eric Garner’s death, being found not guilty will not be released to the public.

+ An Ottawa mural created by artists Allan André and Kalkidan Assefa to honor Sandra Bland was defaced with the words “All Lives Matter” overnight, meaning the mural wasn’t even up for a full day. The mural has since been restored with some changes.

Law and Order

+ At the New York Times, Sandy Keenan writes about visiting the University of Albany to see how New York’s new affirmative consent law is working in practice.

I approached another table at the Campus Center — three juniors whose fondness for pickup basketball had brought them together as freshmen. None were aware of the consent decree. With some keyword coaching, Malik Alexander found the policy announcement in his old emails and read it aloud. He had his buddies’ attention.

Mr. Alexander warmed to the idea: “This sounds like something that should be done by everyone in everyday life anyway. I’ve always been more of a consensual sort of guy.”

Kevin Miranda shook his head. “I think that could be difficult in practice,” he said. “Can you at least use body language instead of always having to ask out loud?” Yes. California’s definition and the revised language going into effect in the fall in New York are clear on this point. Body language and physical clues (say, a clear nod) would count, but both warn that consent can be revoked at any time.

+ Migrant women released from detention in South Texas earlier this month are still being forced to wear ankle bracelets.

The Associated Press reports that ICE is imposing an unusual set of conditions on the women, according to American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), who sent an open letter to ICE along with several other immigration nonprofits. While they await asylum hearings, an immigration judge offered the women the choice to pay a bond or wear an ankle monitor. But AILA lawyers say that even women who paid the bond are being forced to wear the monitors, which are bulky, extremely visible, need to be charged often, and carry a heavy stigma.

+ The founder of Deti-404, a Russian website for LGBT teenagers, has been fined 50,000 rubles ($839 US) for violating Russia’s “gay propaganda” laws.

+ Matt Salmon, a Republican congressman from Arizona, has introduced legislation concerning fraternities that would provide more protection for students accused of sexual assault, as well as safeguarding Greek organizations from being forced to go co-ed. The bill would require schools to report all reported instances of sexual assault to law enforcement, unless the victim provides a written statement saying they don’t want to go to the police. If passed, the bill could be harmful to sexual assault survivors, who are often re-traumatized by the involvement of law enforcement and who may belong to communities which have historically been harmed by law enforcement and have reason to wish to avoid them. The bill would also conflict with the requirements of Title IX, so we’ll see how that works out.

Planned Parenthood

+ Planned Parenthood faces one of its most urgent challenges right now; as yet another heavily edited video from the Center for Medical Progress circulates, this one attempting to imply that Planned Parenthood was paid for the “sale” of fetal tissue, Rand Paul is leading a push in the legislature to defund Planned Parenthood entirely. Right now Planned Parenthood receives somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million annually; because of the Hyde Amendment, virtually none of that can go to abortion services, and is almost entirely spent on preventative health services for low-income women, ranging from mammograms to general health screenings. Furthermore, the practices for which CMP is trying to smear Planned Parenthood are entirely legal; a bill passed in 1993 legalizes the donation of fetal tissue from legal abortions to research, and allows for costs of gathering and transporting the tissue to be reimbursed. Frustratingly, several prominent Republicans who are now opposing Planned Parenthood, like Mitch McConnell, actually voted for this bill. Republicans need to gather 60 out of 100 votes in the Senate in order to defund Planned Parenthood, and the vote could happen as early as Monday. If this doesn’t sound like something you want, consider calling your Senator’s office and reminding them of the importance of funding healthcare for low-income women.

+ If I had to read this headline, so do you: “Marco Rubio invokes Cecil the Lion in Planned Parenthood controversy.”

Grab Bag

+ This is an interesting little tidbit if internal House politics interest you; a piece on the odd Republican out, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, who launched a one-man bid to remove John Boehner as the House speaker.

+ On Monday, a working group at the Pentagon will begin figuring out a plan for dismantling the ban on openly trans people serving in the military.

+ In a study that confirms what many know from lived experience with the school-to-prison pipeline, researchers find that when black students misbehave at school, schools are more likely to call the police. In contrast, white students are more likely to be offered medical intervention and/or put into special needs programs.

News Fix: It’s a Rough Week for Anti-Marriage Equality County Clerks and More News Stories

Hello! I’m sorry this daily fix is up a little late — I’ve been traveling all over the nation to make it to our annual editorial retreat. If I missed anything important while trying to silently will the guy next to me on the plane to move his knees back in front of his own seat and out of mine, please let us all know about it in the comments!

Marriage Licenses

In the wake of the SCOTUS ruling on marriage equality, some counties and clerks have predictably been kind of freaked out. The Campaign for Southern Equality reported on July 7th that 13 Alabama counties had stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether, and released a memo about the negative consequences of these closures. Casey Davis, county clerk in Kentucky, made a video about how hard his life is now that he also has to do his job for same-gender couples. Another video was made by a couple who took all the required paperwork as well as printouts of the Supreme Court ruling to their county clerk, only to have her refuse to give them a license and also call the police on them for filming. The ACLU has a lawsuit filed against Kim Davis, the latter county clerk.

Police and State

+ Andrew Loku, a 45-year-old father of five, was shot and killed by Toronto police this week inside his housing complex, which is dedicated as lodging for people living with mental illness. Loku was holding a hammer, and Loku’s neighbor reports that the only thing police did was shout at Loku to drop it before shooting immediately after. “I’m not talking five minutes, or two minutes, I’m talking seconds here. We didn’t get a word in, me or Andrew,” she said.”

Andrew Loku

+ The mayor of Baltimore has fired its police commissioner, citing Freddie Gray’s death and a recent spike in homicides. An outside organization will also review the “civil unrest” following Freddie Gray’s death.

Grab Bag

+ Russia’s United Russia party has created a “straight flag” with an image of a family with two children and different-gender parents as well as the hashtag “#realfamily” in Russian. Aleksey Lisovenko, a deputy head of United Russia, has said that “This is our answer to same sex marriages, this mockery of the very concept of family… We must prevent gay fever in our country and support traditional values.” So! There’s that.

+ The Observer weighs in on the Bernie Sanders Situation; their take is that while Sanders is gaining popularity in a noticeable way, it’s still not going to be enough to upset Hillary for real.

[Larry Sabato, political scientist] argued that recent Democratic and Republican primary history shows that Mr. Sanders will eventually struggle because he lacks so much support from the political establishment. The establishment has a “powerful, formal” role in the Democratic nomination process, Mr. Sabato said, and Ms. Clinton dominates already among support from party leaders and delegates. President Barack Obama, who rose to power after scoring an upset over Ms. Clinton, could count on many more prominent supporters, including Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and then-Virginia Gov. Tim Kane.

+ The Women’s Donors Network Reflective Democracy campaign has released a new study called “Justice for All?”, and its findings are upsetting but not that surprising: prosecutors, who hold powerful positions in the legal system, are overwhelmingly white men at 79%. Another 16% are white women, meaning that only 5% of prosecutors are people of color of any gender. As an example of why this matters, we can look at St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch, who you may remember from the Michael Brown case. His strong personal ties to the police and history of partiality alarmed many; he was ostensibly tasked with prosecuting Darren Wilson, but McCulloch’s background and ideology raised a lot of doubts about whether he would actually do his job or essentially throw the game in Wilson’s favor. This is the kind of power that prosecutors can wield in our justice system, and so these numbers aren’t heartening.

+ This week saw the first-ever Generation Indigenous summit, in which hundreds of Native American youths came together at the White House to work together on empowering themselves and addressing issues within their communities. The youth collectively represented 230 tribes and 42 states; subjects addressed included “economic opportunity, education and cultural and other issues.”

+ New York has become the second state after California to adopt an affirmative consent law as a measure to combat campus sexual assault. The law means that college campuses in New York state need to use a “yes means yes” policy when addressing cases of potential sexual assault; individuals attempting to prove that sex was consensual can’t argue that the other party or parties “didn’t say no” or didn’t try to fight them off.

+ A bill introduced Wednesday, the EACH Woman Act, would require healthcare provided by the federal government to cover abortion care, effectively shutting down the Hyde Amendment (which bars the use of federal funds for abortion, except for very specific cases involving rape). It’s very unlikely that the bill will become a law, and much more likely that Republicans will torpedo it, but it’s neat!

The New Generation Queens: A Zanzibar Soccer Story

While 13.5 million viewers tune into the Women’s World Cup for the next few weeks, watching as the global elite female soccer players battle it out for the title of “Best in the World,”the New Generation Queens practice. On a field of dry brown grass in Zanzibar, a remote island off the coast of Tanzania, they are solemn, focused, and fearless.

Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

Once it was rare to see women playing soccer on this East African Island. The majority of Zanzibaris consider women’s soccer to be uhuni – Swahili for “immoral.” Because 99% of the population is Muslim, many Zanzibaris feel that women shouldn’t wear shorts or participate in soccer, believing that Islam forbids such practices. But in spite of this general opinion, and the verbal, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse that comes with it, the New Generation Queens continue to play, mostly against male teams due to lack of female competition. The women show up for practice in traditional garb, including hijabs. Then they remove their overclothes to reveal the practicewear underneath: Manchester United jerseys.

Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

Megan Shutzer first came to play with the New Generation Queens while working in Zanzibar in 2012. She was amazed by the environment that the team created – one that pushed its boundaries (quite literally) into male spaces. That resonated with her; she’d grown up playing on all boys’ teams.

Compelled to share NGQ’s story, Shutzer roped in a college buddy, Katie Tygielski, a documentary filmmaker and graduate of Harvard University who specialized in visual ethnography and childhood film. Together, and with the encouragement and eager participation of the NGQ, the film “New Generation Queens” came to be.

“It reminded me of my own queer community,” Megan says, “and the empowerment that comes with assuming masculinity. That was just one of the many things I admired about the team in Zanzibar – their willingness to take on masculinity in a way that felt familiar and yet was so uniquely Zanzibari.”

Megan with Senior Captain Riziki
Photo Copyright Megan Shutzer

Men in the community would sometimes make it difficult for the team to practice. In the film, Hawa, one of the team’s strongest defenders, says, “Our biggest problem is that we don’t have a field of our own. We get moved around and chased from one field to another.”

But despite the difficulties, the NGQ women practice in any way possible, under the leadership of Coach Chui and Team Manager Leila.

Coach Chui
Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

One of NGQ’s best players is Sabaha, who first appears in the documentary as a guest speaker on a local radio show. Clad in traditional hijab and tunic, she leans in shyly toward the microphone. “My name is Sabaha Hashim Yusuf,” she says, hesitantly. “My nickname is ‘Messi.'”

She is there to talk about her experience playing with the NGQ at the Copa Coca Cola – a tournament on the mainland of Tanzania – where the team played for the first time in front of scouts for the national team.

But the film isn’t about how the NGQ played in the tournament; rather, it’s about how they got there. From Sabaha’s interview it jumps back in time to before the Copa Coca Cola to record the team’s preparation, both on and off the field: the grueling practices, the pep talks, and, unfortunately, the many stares and declarations of dissent from community members.

In one particular clip, a local elder speaks harshly into the camera. “Your bodies are weak,” he says. “Your bodies are different from men’s bodies. You cannot play soccer.”

Later, Didah, a defender for the NGQ, stoically explains that “we Zanzibaris have our culture. But I don’t think playing soccer causes it to leave you. Because you can play soccer like that player over there, who came wearing a bui bui, because that is part of our culture to wear a bui bui.” (A bui bui is a piece of cloth worn by Zanzibari Muslim women as a shawl.)

Shutzer is also quick to emphasize the inclusivity the team’s existence continues to signify to this day – that it is possible to be female, an athlete, and a practicing Muslim simultaneously, without any of the three labels negating another.

Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

Still, dismantling, even penetrating, the religious taboos associated with Zanzibari women playing soccer doesn’t happen overnight. For some, it doesn’t happen at all.

Sabaha’s family had been particularly difficult to convince. In fact, she might not have ever been permitted to play were it not for the tactful intervention of her former coach, Nasra Juma Mohamed. Coach Juma is one of Zanzibar’s first ever female soccer players; she knows the members of the NGQ well. Coach Juma visited Sabaha’s family and convinced them to allow her to play.

“She is a very talented player,” she says. “She could do something better in a future time.”

And there is a reason they call Sabaha “Messi.” She can weave and dance around defenders with the same grace and agility as her male counterparts. Sabaha knows this. In one clip she looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “For now I play with the New Generation Queens and study. But one day I hope to play for the national team.”

Sabaha
Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

Outside of practice, most of the women lead lives at home. But the team’s senior captain, Riziki Abu Bakkar, has a full-time job.

“In the morning, I leave by 8 a.m. for work,” she says. “I get to work by 8:30. Many players at this point work at home, because those with jobs are few…” Then she pauses: “Just me.”

Riziki
Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

At last, the team makes it to Copa Coca Cola. The minute they get to their room they start dancing. They sing and clap as players from the mainland stand by and watch, stunned.

It has taken the NGQ more to get to that moment than many of the mainland players realize, let alone Westerners like Megan and Katie. They’ve been kicked off fields; they’ve defied years of religious tradition to stand strong as proud Muslim women who play soccer, in spite of their families’ opposition, in spite of the threat of a partner’s separation, and in spite of actual divorce. Their celebration is a manifestation of victory over all of these hardships.

“In spite of the challenges,” Shutzer says, “these women continue to play and hope for bigger things.” And they deserve them.

Photo Copyright Bonica Ayala

New Generation Queens debuted on June 17 at Players Theatre during the Manhattan Film Festival. From there the documentary will screen at the Girl Power in Play symposium in Ottawa, Canada, June 18-19. Then, in July, the film will travel back to Tanzania where it will be shown in myriad theaters across the country between July 18-23.

Learn more about this compelling film here.

News Fix: Nine Killed in Racist Attack at Black Charleston Church and More News

Buckle up for this week’s news, because most of it is difficult to read about.

+ Last night at about 9 pm, a white gunman opened fire on a bible study group at predominantly black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina after spending about an hour sitting with the congregation. Nine people are reported dead, eight at the scene and one later on at the hospital. Those lost include State Senator Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor; the names of the other eight victims aren’t public yet. [Update: some of the victims are now identified here. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, and Clementa Pinckney.] A five-year-old child survived the massacre, apparently by playing dead, and is now recovering in the hospital; it’s reported that at least three people survived the attack overall. The shooting suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof was arrested this morning in Shelby, North Carolina. The shooting is being investigated as a hate crime.

Dylann Storm Roof, from his Facebook

The attack echoes a long, violent history in the US of racist violence toward the black community being directed at religious spaces and worshipers. Perhaps most famous is the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, which targeted the 16th St Baptist Church and killed four young girls: 14-year-old Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson and 11-year-old Denise McNair. The Emanuel AME Church itself carries history of black liberation and state violence. Founded by freed slaves in 1791, the church was burned to the ground in 1822 after local white slaveowners became suspicious that its congregants were planning a slave revolt. It was rebuilt, but all-black churches were outlawed in 1834; its congregants still met in secret until they were able to worship together legally again. Today, Emanuel AME has the largest capacity of any black church in Charleston.

With such a weighted legacy of violence directed at Black churches and Black bodies, this act of terrorism is horrifying and deeply harmful, making what’s already been a tragic year marked by anti-Black violence even harder. It’s also, as Chauncey DeVega writes at Salon, an opportunity for us to take a serious look at the epidemic of white violence.

As shown on MSNBC Wednesday night, a local Charleston reporter asked a group of African-American activists, community leaders what the black community could do to prevent events like the mass shooting at Emanuel Baptist. This bizarre moment continued with the reporter seemingly rejecting the obvious – that racism is an obvious element in the white-on-black murders committed at Emanuel Baptist… there are several phrases and words that are likely to not be used by the corporate news media in the discussions of the Charleston mass murders at the Emanuel Baptist Church.

They include:

1. What is radicalizing white men to commit such acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings? Are Fox News and the right-wing media encouraging violence?

2. Is something wrong with the white family? Why are their sons and men so violent?

3. What should law enforcement and white politicians do about white crime?

Donations can be made to the Emanuel AME church directly through their website. If you’re in need of mental health support after this traumatic incident, Feminista Jones is coordinating a service to connect people in need with mental health volunteers.

+ As of Wednesday, Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent face possible deportation from the Dominican Republic thanks to a new immigration law. Ostensibly the law is meant to target those who have immigrated illegally from Haiti, but critics of the law say that it might just as easily affect those born in the Dominican Republic who don’t happen to have the required identification papers. Reports indicate that the process of implementing the new law is already not going as was described, with people being forcibly deported before they had a chance to register and supposedly protect themselves from deportation. Many see this law not as an effort to combat illegal immigration, but as an effort by the state to distance the country from Haitians, who have long faced marginalization in the Dominican Republic. The Washington Post has a piece providing some context on the violence that has historically characterized the experience of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

+ The UN refugee agency has reported that the number of people displaced by war, conflict or persecution worldwide reached a record high in 2014: almost 60 million.

UNHCR head Antonio Guterres told the BBC the “world is a mess”. “The drama is that if people think that humanitarians can clean up the mess. It’s no longer possible. We have no capacities to pick up the pieces. “More and more people are suffering, and unfortunately for many of them there is no chance to support them.”

+ In a story that highlights the danger that many trans and/or gender nonconforming people face when using public restrooms, a Detroit woman was thrown out of a restaurant after using the bathroom and having a security guard perceive her gender incorrectly.

+ In Fairfield, Ohio, this week saw another case of police behaving out of control at a pool and assaulting black children and teens.

According to reports, the altercation began after a minor violation of local rules quickly spun out of control. Krystal Dixon dropped off her children and nieces at the pool, but when one child didn’t have a bathing suit, staff demanded the family leave. It was at that time the police were called and things spun out of control, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

Police slammed a 12-year-old girl against a squad car and pepper sprayed another teen; both were unarmed and not a viable threat to officers’ safety. Two adults were charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest as well as a 15-year-old; the 12-year-old girl was charged with assault. She suffered a jaw fracture and broken ribs. Fairfield’s mayor supports the police’s actions in the case, saying “This is an unfortunate situation and our officers had a tough situation there. But I think they did a good job in showing restraint.” The city of Fairfield, and presumably by extension the mayor’s office, can be reached by phone at (513) 867-5300.

+ Kenlissia Jones, who attempted to terminate her pregnancy by taking misoprostol, was initially charged with murder of the fetus. Those charges have since been dropped because the District Attorney has since realized that Georgia law doesn’t actually allow him to prosecute Jones (although she’s still charged with possession of a dangerous drug, a misdemeanor). Jones’ story is reminiscent of that of Purvi Patel, sentenced to 20 years in jail for feticide after having a miscarriage.

+ Loretta Lynch has been sworn in as our Attorney General.

+ A third grade teacher, Omar Currie, was forced to resign after reading a book about two princes that fall in love to his class, in an effort to comfort a child who came to him crying because he was called gay by a classmate. The assistant principal who lent Currie the book has also been forced into resignation.

+ A bizarre Arizona law that would require doctors to tell their patients seeking medication abortions that those abortions are “reversible” and refer those patients to doctors who can “reverse” their abortions is temporarily blocked. The medical backing for this concept, based entirely on the claims of one doctor whose investigations into the practice do not sound very sound or rigorous, is dubious. The next hearing on the case is scheduled for October.

+ James Cosby, the primary suspect in the murders of Black lesbian couple Britney Cosby and Crystal Jackson, is now facing charges. He was indicted on charges of capital murder on Tuesday.

+ The Treasury Secretary has announced that a woman will be the new face of the US $10 bill. The specific woman has not been chosen yet; the decision will be made later this summer, and in the meantime you can submit your thoughts at thenew10.treasury.gov.

Daily Fix: This Straight Couple Will Divorce If That’s What it Takes to Save Marriage and More News Stories

Prison Industrial Complex

+ Eric Casebolt, the officer who was videotaped threatening and assaulting black teens in McKinney, Texas, has resigned. He had already been placed on administrative leave and was under investigation before this decision. It’s not clear whether Casebolt will face criminal charges.

+ A new report on the incarceration of people of African and African-Caribbean descent in the UK found that “the proportion of black people in jail in the UK was almost seven times their share of the population.”

Experts and politicians said over-representation of black men was a result of decades of racial prejudice in the criminal justice system and an overly punitive approach to penal affairs.

“People will be and should be shocked by this data,” said Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust. “We have a tendency to say we are better than the US, but we have not got prison right.”

So Gay

Here is a bunch of LGBTQ+ specific news!

+ As Pride month rolls on, TIME has a look at how LIFE covered the community in 1964.

June 26, 1964 issue of LIFE

+ Heather already mentioned this issue in yesterday’s pop culture fix, but Salon has a piece about Brittney Griner and Glory Johnson and how their public story fits into a narrative (or lack thereof) about same-sex domestic violence.

There is, at once, both invisibility and hyper-visibility for those of us in the LGBTQ community. For those of us whose relationships don’t fit a heteronormative script, our communities and institutions fail us when we need support, when we need to be seen the most. Traditional, and woefully limited, perspectives about who can be a perpetrator and who’s more likely to be a victim do a great disservice to queer and trans people. Assumptions that perpetrators are male, more masculine, physically bigger/taller/heavier, and that women who are smaller, or more “feminine” (defined by a very narrow definition of femininity) are more likely to be victims, create lazy assessments of relationships where violence can be emotional and have severe psychological and social consequences (threatening to out someone, for example), as well as physical ones.

+ A new study about chore distribution in couples indicates that same-sex couples come out on top. “Researchers at the Families and Work Institute and PriceWaterHouseCoopers wanted to find out if what they suspected is true — that, because same-sex couples don’t experience the same gender-based expectations and economic privilege differences that straight couples do, they would divide household chores more fairly.” Surprise, they were right.

+ I couldn’t make it up if I tried, folks: this different-sex Australian couple is threatening to divorce if gays keep gaining more rights. It has something to do with definition of marriage blah blah blah Scripture. What will their hypothetical divorce accomplish? It doesn’t seem like much:

In case you were worried about how the Jensens’ decision will affect their relationship and their children, the couple has stated that they will divorce legally but not emotionally. So while they’ll happily pull the stunt of getting divorced and blaming homosexuals for their choice (I did not know we had that kind of realultimatepower.net, but apparently we do), they’ll continue living together, loving together, and raising their children together. They’ll also still call each other husband and wife. The only difference is that they’ll do so as single people who have decided to pull a publicity stunt.

Sort of fascinating though! Surely this will be changing the game for high school in-class debates for literally weeks.

This is the face of the sanctity of marriage

Republicans

+ This is a tale of two pieces of birth control legislation! A Senate Democrat introduced a bill to make previously prescription birth control options available OTC; then a Senate Republican, Cory Gardner, introduced a similar piece of legislation very self-righteously. The problem is that the Republican option is less realistic about real birth control access needs; it has an age restriction (over 18 only!) and it’s coexisting with GOP attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which means that even if Gardner’s bill passed, if the GOP efforts succeeded, the people who could now “access” birth control over the counter would be paying through the nose for it. So the Republican version of this plan is sort of misrepresented, but then again also the Democrat plan also doesn’t necessarily deal with affordability either, so! I don’t know, none of it is great.

Sad News

+ Well this is just absolutely heartbreaking: an interview with William Kizer, father of bisexual teen Adam Kizer, who committed suicide in May after longterm bullying in an unsupportive school district. Kizer is considering legal action against Somona Valley High School, who he says were aware of the bullying against his son but did nothing.

+ Some not great news out of Texas: the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld most of HB2, a super restrictive reproductive rights law. Jezebel reports that “all but eight abortion clinics in the state will have to close,” which is extra meaningful because of how enormous Texas is; this would effectively require many people seeking abortions in Texas to drive for an unfeasible length of time, the same as traversing most of New England, for a simple medical procedure. (WaPo has a longread about the realities of an abortion road trip, for context.)

+ Emma Sulkowicz has a new art project, Ceci N’est Pas un Viol, a video hosted online that features Sulkowicz and an anonymous man having what begins as a consensual sexual encounter and then turns violent. This week the site hosting the video was hit by a DoS attack that attempted to take it offline.

Good News

+ India has its first major ad depicting a same-sex couple; in this commercial spot from Anouk Ethnic Apparel, a same-sex female couple prepares to meet one of their sets of parents.

+ Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, a Ugandan lesbian activist, is on the cover of TIME’s Europe edition.

“It’s a great honor for me to be on the cover because it brings attention to the global LGBT struggle,” Nabagesera tells The Advocate. “Now many people will know about the struggles LGBT people go through in Africa and the world over. They will realize that the people they hate most are actually the people they love most when they get to read the article. They could be hating on their beloved family and friend without knowing they are LGBT.”

+ Remember when Apple unveiled its fancy new Health feature, and it totally overlooked reproductive health and menstruation? Apple’s updated HealthKit includes options for “reproductive health,” which seems to include period tracking and could maybe include things like basal body temperature and other fertility features. Apple also made a point of having “more women onstage at an Apple WWDC keynote than in the past five years combined” for the announcement.

Voting Yes: A Guide to the Irish Marriage Equality Referendum

via the guardian.co.uk

On May 22nd, Irish citizens will vote on changing the Constitution to allow anyone to marry regardless of their gender. You might not be aware of the Referendum if you’re living outside of Ireland, but here on this tiny green island, the fight for and against marriage equality is foremost in the national conversation. It’s a conversation you may have heard before, but it’s marked by a monumental first — the ability of a people to directly establish marriage equality in their country’s constitution — and peppered with any number of nuances that make this a different right than the ones I’m familiar with from American-centered media as an American now living in Ireland.

Ireland is undeniably Catholic in its veins, even if fewer than 1 in 5 Catholics attend mass on a Sunday in Dublin. Sure, you can’t throw a stick on this rock without hitting a statue of Mary or any number of favorite saints, but the landscape of altars and outstretched arms is not just for show. The Church has always had a strong influence over the Irish state, which accounts for its continuing conservativism on issues like abortion and birth control. Abortion on demand remains illegal in the Republic. Sales of birth control were banned until 1978, at which point they became available with a prescription. You can now buy condoms in your local pharmacy without much fanfare, but most generations of Irish have grown up without formal sex education and a heap of societal repression.

Marriage is one of the foundational values of Catholicism, and thus has historically held a high standing in the Irish state. Divorce was illegal in Ireland until 1996, outlasting the lift on criminalization of sodomy by three years. In Irish society, marriage still carries a great deal of importance in the legal sense, as it is a Constitutional protection of another value at the heart of Ireland: family. It was unquestionably huge when Ireland passed civil partnerships as a way for non-heterosexual couples to have some legal bindings, but it was not a permanent solution. Civil partnerships are not Constitutionally protected, and they do not offer the legal protections to the family that marriages do — I should know, as I’m in one. It seems that the acceptance of queerness in Ireland, particularly our relationships and family-building, was always going to come down to the issue of marriage. It might just be, as they say, an Irish solution to an Irish problem.

via yesequality.ie by Debbie Hickey – Studio Ten Photography

Ireland is a small country, with a total population smaller than the city of Philadelphia. Size is one of the most important factors in the Referendum – literally everywhere the country is talking, in small conversations and big conversations, about marriage equality. This is a conversation that can be overheard on the bus, at the butcher’s, between your two elderly neighbours or strangers in the Tesco. Every person in the country is aware of this issue, and feels a responsibility to develop an opinion on it. It has become important in a way I could never imagine it becoming important in American terms. In the weeks leading up to the Referendum, business windows have sprouted rainbow flags and supportive posters, every lamppost in Dublin is encouraging one side or both, every third lapel on the street sports a Yes badge. You cannot escape the topic or its eager debaters if you try, a fact both exhilirating and exhausting in the last days coming up to the vote.

It’s true that Irish society has changed rapidly in the past few decades, at a rate faster than almost every other European country. One factor responsible for this change was sudden economic growth – the infamous, and admittedly fleeting, Celtic Tiger. The speedy transformation from one of Europe’s most socially conservative societies to a country liberated by new values and new priorities is largely responsible for the push towards marriage equality, but it does not guarantee a Yes at the polls. Youth voters are notorious for big talk and small turnout. Allyship is a tenuous concept, although I have never in my life seen the kind of passionate and caring allies I have witnessed stepping up for this fight. As the fight has become increasingly personal and significantly louder, it’s been helpful to have people who are willing to stand up and be a buffer so that LGBTQ folks can do some very needed self-care.

That Catholicism I mentioned earlier? It’s a sneaky reason why the opposition to gay marriage rings so differently here than it does in the States. Americans may be used to Old Testament-fueled rants against sodomy, all that brimstone and hellfire and God Hates You Know Whos, but the Irish organizations against marriage equality are less likely to defend themselves with Bible verses than they are to swear they are defending the family itself. Yes, it’s ‘Won’t someone think of the children?’ that dominates the dialogue here, that Irish Catholic family that is so dear to the national heart. I hate to give attention to their undeniable bullshit, but I don’t have room in my heart to let someone claim that hate speech is a valuable component of democracy. Knowing that family and children are so important to the heart of Irish culture, organizations such as the Iona Institute and Mothers and Fathers Matter are blowing a great deal of smoke about surrogacy, an issue that has nothing to do with the Referendum. They’re also throwing up thousands of posters of smiling happy stock photo families, reminding the public in heart-accented typography that children deserve a mother and a father, that two men can never replace a mother’s love, and that a vote for marriage equality is a vote against the rights of children. Never mind, of course, the rights of a child who will not be legally protected when her mothers are unable to marry, and their civil partnership abolished by a future conservative overhaul. Never mind the rights of queer children growing up all over Ireland, seeing these debates about their ability to love, their place in a family, and wondering how their homes and communities will think of them.

Imagine about 3000 of these on every lightpole in Dublin, and you have an idea of my daily commute.

It’s true that not every gay person is looking to get married, and a change in wording to the Irish Constitution will not cure Ireland of all instances of homophobia. It feels ridiculous that I need to state that disclaimer – marriage equality will not solve all of our community’s problems – but I do. If you’re like me, you may be used to an American-centered conversation around marriage equality that feels stifling, divisive, and often erasive of other queer experiences and needs. It would be easy to take this perspective and apply it to the Irish Referendum, but to do so would be to ignore the complicated differences between the two situations. Marriage equality in the United States is decided on different terms, represents a different political situation, and holds a different value than it does in Ireland. I was not always in agreement with the American campaigns for marriage equality, but I would be wrong to apply the situation of my home country to the one in Ireland.

More than anything, I am personally involved. In the United States, by and large political representatives are the ones actually voting for marriage equality, on whatever terms it has arrived in the legislative houses. Before I reach those representatives, they are met by any number of financially gifted lobbyists and interest groups, some of whom share my orientation but not necessarily my values or my experiences. Here in Ireland, my neighbour will decide if I can marry and have legal protection for my children. My colleague will decide, and so will my doctor and my grocer and the people I pass on my way home. I cannot vote because I am not yet a citizen, but I can speak directly to the people making that decision. And hopefully, when and if the time comes, I can thank them for making the rest of my life safer and much more possible.

Daily Fix: Everyone’s Talking About #TalkPay and More News Stories

Hello May flowers! Here’s some news for you cool kids.

Badass Women Corner

+ After Baltimore’s State Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced several criminal charges against the 6 officers who arrested Freddie Gray, she became an overnight internet superstar/hero. Mosby’s announcement was shocking to many, especially in the wake of high-profile police brutality cases where officers didn’t face any charges at all. She acted swiftly and spoke out with intent:

“I will seek justice on your behalf,” she said in closing her remarks. “This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s ensure that we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause. As young people, our time is now.”

Over at Vox, they speculate about why she became the hero of Baltimore:

Some of the attention Mosby is getting is because she announced the charges faster than expected. People are also talking about her because she decided to charge the officers at all; in other recent, high-profile cases when police were involved with the deaths of unarmed black men, the officers were not charged. (See, for example, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.)

Mosby’s central role in a case that’s dominated national headlines for a week, combined with the enthusiasm of those who were surprised by her decision to charge the officers, immediately boosted her popularity. NPR reported that Mosley “had about 10,000 followers on Twitter in the hour after the speech; a few hours later, that number had more than doubled.”

Marilyn Mosby

+ Software designer Lauren Voswinkel launched a Twitter campaign called #talkpay last week calling for people to publicly publish their salary history in order to call attention to gender pay gaps, especially in the technology field. Voswinkel drew from her own experiences to create this campaign. She made a $55k salary for six years before she started lying about her salary history to future employers and eventually getting an enormous increase in her salary at her next job.“Knowing that other people were making that much money, and basically having the confidence to just push for it, was what I really needed to advance myself,” she said.

The issue came up again at a technology conference when Voswinkel had a conversation with another attendee who was barely starting out and didn’t know what to ask for in a salary. Voswinkel says she realized this happens because it’s taboo to talk about how much you make and frowned upon by companies. Workers have a right to talk about their salaries but half of employers tell them they can’t talk about it.

Voswinkel believes it’s even more important to put a face to a salary to understand and empower women in believing they deserve to be paid as much as their coworkers.

“When you actually have names attached to everything, and you’ve worked with people… or know them personally, it’s easier to say, ‘Wait, I’m just as good as that person and they’re making $30,000 or $40,000 more than me.”

“It can provide a concrete piece of information that is completely irrefutable for them,” she explained. “We can’t be afraid to talk about these things in order to push for higher wages for everybody.”

The conversation has been dominated by people in the tech field but people in other fields have contributed to the #talkpay hashtag. Emily Dreyfes over at WIRED talks about her experiences with pay inequality in the media world and about the powers that enable us to stay silent about how much we make.

“This aversion to speaking about money is not just harmful in the way it perpetuates inequality by keeping from workers the very basic data we need to negotiate with our employers on our own behalf. It’s also just plain stupid because it asks us to pretend that money is some kind of afterthought. That it is not, in fact, the whole point of employment. Of course it is!”

It’s important to note #talkpay hasn’t opened the discussion to include under-funded women-owned businesses. The hashtag conversation assumes companies are paying their employees as little as they can (which tech companies choose to do) which erases women employers and their struggle to pay their employees a fair salary because nobody wants to fund their endeavors.

advice for women to negotiate a higher salary is useless when women's businesses don't have $$$ for negotiation-worthy salaries #talkpay

— riese (@autowin) May 4, 2015

Ladies and Gentleman, They’re Running for the President of the United States

Sen. Bernie Sanders (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

+ Senator Bernie Sanders, a long-standing independent from Vermont, announced his candidacy for president as a Democrat last week. He’s Hillary Clinton’s first official rival for the party’s nomination. He emailed a statement to supporters that outlined his goals including “reducing income inequality, addressing climate change and scaling back the influence of money in politics.” His political career has largely focused on helping working-class Americans by elevating taxes on the wealthy and fixing income inequality. Sanders told reporters he faces big financial challenges against Clinton’s campaign but is optimistic about the future. A self-proclaimed “Democratic socialist,” Sanders says he’s the longest-serving independent in congressional history but wanted to run as a Democrat to avoid obstacles of getting on state ballots and participating in debates. His presidential bid is considered a long shot but could be useful to push Democrats like Clinton to address important issues, like opposing foreign military interventions, more deeply.

Sanders has been a staunch supporter of LGBT equality from the get-go. The Advocate reports his history.

“…Sanders has also been a steadfast and reliable supporter of LGBT equality, supporting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act when it passed the Senate in 2013 and even calling on President Obama to evolve already and support marriage equality in 2011. He’s a cosponsor of the federal LGBT-inclusive Student Non-Discrimination Act and has consistently voted against bills seeking to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, while cosponsoring a bill that would repeal the remaining portions of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. Sanders has a perfect score of 100 percent on the Human Rights Campaign’s latest Congressional Equality Index.”

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/592773018499309568

+ Rick Santorum, possible Republican presidential candidate, expressed his support for Bruce Jenner at a conservative conference during the weekend.

“If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman,” Santorum told reporters at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Saturday. “My responsibility as a human being is to love and accept everybody. Not to criticize people for who they are. I can criticize, and I do, for what people do, for their behavior. But as far as for who they are, you have to respect everybody, and these are obviously complex issues for businesses, for society,” he continued. “And I think we have to look at it in a way that is compassionate and respectful of everybody.”

Santorum is notoriously anti-gay, making headlines recently for saying he would not attend a same-sex marriage of a friend or loved one to calling LGBT activists Nazis to claiming the “gay agenda” has silenced the church. Like if he gets that Jenner’s trans, then like why can’t he get that some people are gay, bisexual or queer, and would he be as respectful of a non-rich-and-famous trans person’s identity as he is of Jenner’s? Did Jenner’s interview and coming out really change hearts and minds, or is it because Jenner is a Republican? Is this a turning point for conservative politicians that they realize that LGBT people aren’t going anywhere and we’re slowly but surely gaining more rights so conservatives just have to deal with it and accept it? I don’t know, what do y’all think?

+ Just in case you wanted to know, there’s been a shit ton of Republicans who have said they’re going to run for president and only a couple Democrats. The New York Times has a handy interactive infographic with more details. Here’s the rundown:

Republicans that are running:

Ted Cruz
Rand Paul
Marco Rubio
Ben Carson
Carly Fiornia

Democrats that are running:

Hillary Clinton
Bernie Sanders

News Grab Bag

+ The formal gender-neutral honorific title Mx. is joining Ms., Mrs., Mr. as an option in official UK documents and is being considered to be added by the Oxford English Dictionary. Driving licenses, passports, banks and some government departments now accept the title Mx. on their forms. Oxford English Dictionary Assistant Editor Jonathan Dent said this is an example of how English can adapt to people’s changing needs.

+ A gunshot in Baltimore yesterday has tensions running high, although it’s still not clear what exactly happened. At the intersection of Pennsylvania and North, bystanders report police interacting with local Robert Tucker and hearing a gunshot before Tucker was carried away in a stretcher. Police claim the gunshot was an accidental discharge of Tucker’s concealed weapon and no one was injured, including Tucker; some bystanders say they saw police shoot Tucker in the back.

Residents said that the official account didn’t matter in the end because, by now, the trust is so broken between residents and authorities that the word of bystanders – who may or may not have seen the incident – is what will endure. All they know, they said, is that yet another encounter between police and a resident ended with a young man being hauled off on a stretcher. To them, the details are irrelevant.

“At this point, I don’t believe anything the police say,” said Chanel Lee, 20. “I feel like the police shot him and are doing what they did with Freddie Gray: get in a huddle and figure out something to say for the cameras.”

Shy’keira Cannon, 20, said the riots were just “play” compared to what will happen if there are no convictions in the Gray case. Then she stopped herself.

“This isn’t even about Freddie Gray,” she said. “My 3-year-old niece is afraid of the police and she doesn’t even know what the word ‘police’ means. Why should a child think that way?”

by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

+ May Day, aka International Worker’s Day, protests took place all over the world. Many in the U.S. were joined by protests against police violence.

Daily Fix: No New Friends for Scott Walker This Week and More News Stories

Hey magnolia blossoms! It’s been a few days; the world spins madly on. There’s more news! Some good, but let’s be honest, mostly not great.

Updates from the Police State

+ Regarding Freddie Gray’s violent death in Baltimore after his arrest, the Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation. The mayor says she welcomes the investigation; the Fraternal Order of Police is supporting the officers involved in Gray’s arrest.

+ In the wake of Eric Harris’s killing at the hands of a volunteer reserve deputy, Robert Bates, on a ridealong, there are some contradictory reports about Bates’ training and certification. Some sources reported that they were ordered to falsify records certifying that Bates had taken “active shooter training” that he did not in fact take. The sheriff’s office denied these claims, although they also could not initially produce the documentation about Bates’ training. Bates’ lawyer has since released documents that say:

…Bates had one Taser training class over a six-and-a-half-year period, took three firearms training classes and qualified 10 times, from 2009 to 2014, to use a handgun. His evaluations say he got along with other officers and related well with the public.

CNN hasn’t been able to definitively confirm the authenticity of the documentation.

+ Thaddeus McCarroll, of Jennings, Missouri, was killed after a standoff at his mother’s house. He appeared to be struggling with a crisis of mental health, and his mother called the police to have them remove her son from her house. After an hour, McCarroll exited the house allegedly holding a knife; police used a rubber bullet to try to disarm him, but claim that McCarroll charged them. There’s video of the four minutes or so leading up to the shooting.

Thaddeus McCarroll’s school photo

+ Two different standoffs occurred in the same day in Ferguson; one appears to have been the result of a false police report. The second was regarding Lorenzo Foster, who sources say is schizophrenic and who family members say may have been using heroin. Foster allegedly shot his brother, who is expected to survive. Police waited for Foster outside a home they believed him to have barricaded himself into; community members later talked Foster out from inside a church. He has since been taken to a mental hospital.

Laws of the Land

+ Today a major anti-human trafficking bill, the “Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act,” was cleared through the Senate. This is way more complicated than it sounds, and I’m going to try to explain what I understand about it but also admit that what I understand about it is limited and probably flawed, so I apologize for that in advance.

First of all! Laws about human trafficking are tricky because the ways in which human trafficking occurs makes it often undifferentiated from sex work performed by choice. While laws about human trafficking generally intend to rescue people who have been forced into sex work in horrific conditions they can’t escape from, in terms of real-world execution the law cannot always make a distinction between people who are trafficked and people who are not; in this way anti-human trafficking laws can sometimes function as anti-sex worker laws. Relatedly, the way that some laws are designed, the way in which it is imagined trafficking victims will be rescued is by arresting them, because the penal system can help and/or rehabilitate them, which is a whole other issue. Combined with the fact that these laws also impact sex workers by choice, this can mean a lot of people being at risk of carceral justice. I truly do not fully understand in what way this law would be conceived or executed; it’s possible these things are true of this law, it’s possible they’re not. I am going to read more to try to figure that out, and hope that you do the same! Here, Elizabeth Nolan Brown talks about why she’s skeptical of this bill, for one example.

Federal law already prohibits a wide range of conduct related to human trafficking, slavery, and child sexual exploitation… One should always be skeptical when politicians insist on new laws to target things that are already targets. At best, they may be trying to capitalize on a sympathetic issue for attention and kudos. At worst, it belies efforts to grant government agencies new powers and more money without people paying much attention. The “Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act” seems to be a product of both.

Secondly, if we can adjust the lens of our inquiry to an entirely different aspect of this situation for a moment, let’s look at the reason why the JVTA took this long to get as far as it did: because abortion. The bill calls for setting up a fund for the support of rescued trafficking victims; some politicians were so worried that this fund would be used to pay for abortions (which, let’s remember, the bill imagines would be abortions as a result of repeated sexual assault these victims were forced to endure as part of their trafficking) that they stalled the entire thing. The bill only moved forward because it was adjusted such that the fund could only be used for non-medical expenses; for medical issues, rescued trafficking victims would have to be assigned an already-existing federal health plan that already doesn’t cover abortion. So that’s neat.

Thirdly, the OTHER factor in this bill’s lifespan is its association with Loretta Lynch, Obama’s pick to replace Eric Holder as US Attorney General. As far as I understand it, the Senate vote on her nomination was the to-do list item after the JVTA vote; as long as Republicans could stave off the vote on the bill, they could put off having to vote on Lynch’s nomination. Now that the bill has been voted on, the vote on her nomination will go forward, possibly as soon as today.

Off to the (Presidential) Races

+ Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, will launch her presidential campaign as a Republican candidate on May 4. Although her camp has refused to confirm that the announcement will be made, she’s been touring several red states; coincidentally, her book, Rising to the Challenge, is launching on May 5.

+ Scott Walker, the private nightmare of the state I currently live in, is having quite the week. The Koch brothers appear to be politely distancing themselves from him, possibly because he came out as too tough on immigration, a bit of a gaffe when you’re courting big business and also when your party is courting the Latin@ vote. Even more recently, employees of the Department of Natural resources became the latest victims of Walker’s harsh budget cuts (most recent was the public education system, which Walker wants to cut by a whopping $300 million). 57 employees of the DNR were informed on Earth Day that they would likely be laid off as a result of the cuts.

Order in the Court

+ Here are two different articles about What the Deal Is for conservatives as the SCOTUS same-sex marriage decision approacheth. This one asks how Republicans are going to be able to handle the balancing act they’ve been trying to pull off for a couple years now: “how to give tacit approval with one hand, but deny legislative approval with the other.” The sticking point is that we’ve now reached a point where it’s unappealing and negative to be seen as anti-gay, or at least anti marriage equality, and so especially as the presidential nominations approach, Republicans need to figure out how to seem neutral-to-positive towards gays without actually letting them have any more rights. A quandary! Over at the New York Times, it’s speculated that a) the SCOTUS will rule in our favor and b) that the conservative focus will shift to protecting the right of individual pastors, marriage clerks, etc to avoid same-sex weddings.

+ Well this is a lot: a judge in Virginia has thrown out a “sensational” anti-abortion lawsuit. Basically, it seems that a woman went into a women’s health center possibly without knowing she was pregnant, was informed that she was, and was given an abortion. She claims that she changed her mind partway through the procedure and told the doctor to stop, but instead he forced her to finish the procedure, and also that later she went to a different hospital and they found the procedure hadn’t been completed, and there was a baby skull still inside her. The problem is that the doctor who told her this second thing and is heavily involved in the lawsuit is also heavily involved in anti-abortion campaigns, and has a history of falsified scary medical information regarding abortion, like when he publicly stated that he saw two abortion-related injuries a week, but the hospital he was working for “actually catalogued only two abortion-related complications in 2012, the year Calhoun claimed to have seen dozens.” All in all, wild, and also as Jezebel points out important to remember that “[none] of this means that West Virginia as a whole has gotten any less hostile towards abortion rights.”

+ Bill O’Reilly! So wacky! This week his shtick was that Kagan and Ginsburg should recuse themselves from the SCOTUS marriage equality case because they’ve performed same-sex marriages. This crowd doesn’t really need an explanation of why this is silly, but here’s Salon’s explanation anyway.

O’Reilly explained that “these ladies” have no choice but to recuse themselves, because “the Supreme Court is supposed to be an incorruptible institution” and Ginsburg and Kagan have performed gay weddings. He did not, however, demand that the three justice who have performed straight weddings recuse themselves, even though — by his logic — their behavior suggests they already have a strong opinion about and abiding investment in the legitimacy of straight marriage.

Well This Is Horrifying

+ This is SO awful but a Pittsburgh high school teacher allegedly singled out a student as accusing another teacher of sexual assault in front of the entire class, saying that he had had to answer questions from detectives “because of her” while pointing at her and having her walk up to the front of the class before asking her if “she would be OK regarding next week’s topic, which was ‘sexual assault.'” Aside from this reprehensible educator, there are also the two other male teachers at the school who are actually charged with grooming and initiating a relationship with two separate students. Jesus! The district attorney’s office’s take seems accurate: “at worst, it is an intentional effort to use this child’s peers and the school setting to make her uncomfortable and keep her from speaking freely about her victimization.”

+ Last week we told you about a group of high schoolers in Pennsylvania who were actively organizing an anti-gay event to combat the Day of Silence; this week, it’s a small group of nuns at Marin Catholic High who walked out of their own classrooms because they were upset that their version of Day of Silence, which was a very general prayer for “students everywhere who have the experience of being ostracized, marginalized or silenced by bullying,” was actually linked to GLSEN.

When some Marin Catholic High students began handing out Day of Silence-related stickers and flyers on campus Friday morning, the five nuns felt “felt compromised, offended and uncomfortable,” Sister Clare Marie, one of the teachers, later wrote in a lengthy e-mail to her students.

She said the sisters “do not support bigotry or any kind of prejudice,” but that they were compelled to act out against an event promoted by a group that “believes actively in promoting homosexuality in all classrooms, K-12.”

It’s unclear how this will impact students and the community in the long run, but the Principal has indicated an interest in “[bringing] authentic dialogue to the campus.”

+ Verônica Bolina, a trans woman, was arrested in São Paulo after allegedly attempting to kill her neighbor. It appears that after being taken into police custody, Bolina was very badly beaten and her head shaved as well as having her shirt removed; a photo of her after her arrest is unrecognizable as Bolina and very difficult to look at. Police claim they aren’t responsible for Bolina’s injuries; that there was an altercation with other inmates and that she attempted to attack a jailer when he entered the cell. There’s allegedly an audio tape of Bolina repeating a statement that confirms this narrative. Associates of Bolina say they don’t believe the taped confession. According to Fusion, “The Centro de Cidadania LGBT Arrouche, a city government organization that interacts with the LGBT community, and the government of the City of São Paulo released a statement on Facebook that said Bolina had suffered aggression at the hands of the police. The Secretary of Public Safety says that the São Paulo civil police is under investigation by the internal affairs division of the civil police and the public ministry.” In the meantime, Bolina remains incarcerated, and is being transferred to a men’s prison. Many worldwide are standing in solidarity with her via the hashtag #somostodasVerônica.

Huh

+ For a brief, confusing moment, two chimps appeared to have the same rights in court as human beings, at least in New York. In a case involving animal cruelty and caged research animals, a judge applied habeas corpus, the right not to be subjected to unlawful imprisonment, to Hercules and Leo, who are chimpanzees. Vice speculated that this be a “huge, watershed moment for proponents of “nonhuman personhood,” but then the judge amended the court order and the term “habeas corpus” was no longer in it, making all of this kind of moot. And that’s the end of that; I don’t have a takeaway there, really, but there you have it.

Daily Fix: Republicans Didn’t Rise to the Occasion for Equal Pay Day and More News Stories

Order in the Court

+ USA Today finds that the court briefs filed regarding the upcoming SCOTUS ruling both “wacky and profound.” Amicus briefs — the instance in which someone files a “friend of the court” brief, essentially just a letter telling the court why you think they should decide a certain way — sometimes seem pretty wacky in and of themselves, you know?

Through the first week in April, 77 had been tendered in favor of the petitioners, while 49 oppose same-sex marriage, including a group of pastors who predict it will bring “God’s judgment on the nation.”

+ Tristan Broussard is suing First Tower Loan LLC for firing him, apparently due to his trans status and his refusal to wear women’s clothes at work. Represented by several firms, Broussard’s case claims that he was discriminated against under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This Police and/or Military State

+ After the reveal of a horrifying domestic “black site” in Chicago, to which prisoners would be secretly spirited without access to an attorney or anyone from the outside world knowing where they were, Chicago has been a real flashpoint for our discourse about police violence. The city of Chicago is now required to pay $5.5 million in reparations to victims of police torture in the 70s and 80s. They will also provide “psychological counseling, job placement aid and other services” thanks to a separate ordinance, meant to address a period of time under the purview of former police commander Jon Burge, who was fired from the department in 1993, but this shouldn’t give us the false impression that torture and other unlawful treatment of arrested and incarcerated persons is unique to Burge or his administration.

Chicago and Cook County have already paid about $100 million in settlements and verdicts for lawsuits related to Burge, who was fired from the police department in 1993 and later convicted of lying about the use of police torture in testimony he gave in civil lawsuits. Burge and detectives under his command were accused of forcing confessions from black suspects by using electric shocks delivered with a homemade device, suffocation with plastic covers and mock executions.

+ Freddie Gray, a 27-year-old Baltimore man arrested by police officers and who received serious injuries, is in the hospital in critical condition. It’s not clear what occurred leading up to Gray’s arrest; Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez has only said that Gray “fled.” He is in an induced coma with spinal injuries; the officers involved have been put on administrative leave. The incident that led to Gray’s injuries has apparently “at least partly” been captured on video.

+ This week four former employees of American security firm Blackwater Worldwide were sentenced for the deaths of 14 unarmed Iraqis in 2007, with sentences ranging from 30 years to life. One other guard involved in the deaths who testified for the prosecution and plead guilty has not yet been charged.

+ In the latest dispatch from the international war on drugs, the Drug Enforcement Agency is in hot water after revelations that “the agency’s history [of] sexual misconduct… was more extensive and egregious than previously reported.”

What Bodily Autonomy?

+ We talked a week ago about Kansas’ law effectively banning second-trimester abortion; now Oklahoma has joined that terrible, terrible party! Jezebel says “The bill, HB 1721 in the House and SB 95 in the Senate, is virtually identical to Kansas’s law, in that the final version doesn’t use medical terminology, only a deliberately shocking description of the procedure.”

+ Columbia University’s anti-rape activist group, No Red Tape, created a protest art installation that projected phrases like “rape happens here” and “Columbia protects rapists” on the campus library around the same time that prospective students were visiting campus. Some accounts say that school administrators showed up to try to stop the projections and berate student activists; some accounts say those first accounts aren’t true.

Laws of the Land

+ In Nevada, a bill designed to restrict the use of the correct bathrooms by trans students has passed its first assembly vote.

If it became law, AB 375 would define a student’s “sex” as “the biological condition of being male or female as determined at birth based on physical differences or, if necessary, at the chromosal level.” The law would then require that this definition determine which sex-segregated facilities a student could use, or else provide trans students a unisex bathroom or separate stall. AB 375 also proposes limits to Nevada’s sex education programs, restricting the ages of students who can take the courses, who can teach the curriculum, and forbidding “explicit depictions of sexual activity.”

The Assembly Judiciary Committee has passed the bill thanks to the backing of Republicans; the vote now moves on to the full assembly.

+ Did you pay attention to Equal Pay Day? It occurred this April 14th, and is supposed to be a marker of how far into the new year a woman (“a woman,” which of course flattens the distinction between the different pay gaps that different women experience, with women of color and trans women making even less than cis white women) must work to make as much as a man made the previous year (again, “a man,” an obfuscating category, etc). Anyways, this Equal Pay Day, Republicans introduced a new version of the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill which is remarkable in its seeming lack of any actual legislative measures that would ensure the fairness of paychecks.

The Republican measure is a tepid endorsement of the “concern” women may have about being discriminated against by their bosses. It also contains language stating that pay disparities are acceptable if they are about “merit” or “any factor other than sex,” which, as evidenced by the slippery and subtle sexism on display in the Ellen Pao case, can be a difficult thing to argue against. (The Paycheck Fairness Act makes exceptions for pay differences based on “education, training or experience.”)

+ Attorney General Elizabeth Barrett-Anderson has ordered Guam to begin allowing same-sex marriages. The marriages aren’t rolling quite yet, as it seems like many marriage officials don’t want to perform them, but it’s a step.

+ Revisiting hot topic state Indiana, this week lawmakers attempted to introduce statewide LGBT protections in a variety of forms, and were shut down. Womp womp.

Teacher, Teacher!

+ A few weeks ago we mentioned that world-famous incarcerated person Mumia Abu-Jamal was hospitalized with serious diabetes complications. Third-grade teacher Marylin Zuniga had her class, which is entirely Black and/or Latino and a number of whom have incarcerated relatives, write him get-well letters. Now she’s facing termination from her job. The school system is attempting to distance itself from Zuniga; some local activists don’t want to let them.

Nyle Fort, a local activist who described himself as a close friend of Zuniga’s, said the idea to write the letters actually came from a group of students in her class who were already aware of Abu-Jamal and recent news that he had been hospitalized due to complications from diabetes… “I think it’s really important to realize that black and brown schools have fundamentally different relationships to prison and the people inside of them than in white neighborhoods,” he said.

“The idea that a young person that’s in third grade should not be talking to an inmate fundamentally does not work in our neighborhoods.” …Fort drew a different parallel, citing the favorable academic treatment of explorer Christopher Columbus, which he said spoke to the “racial dynamics at play” in the issue concerning Zuniga.

“The idea that it’s not controversial to teach children about Christopher Columbus, who is an architect of genocide, who is a serial rapist, who is a founder of white supremacy, but they can’t write letters to Mumia, is unbelievably hypocritical,” he said.

+ Some thoughts about California’s approach to public education and how it’s dealing with educational requirements that are having negative outcomes elsewhere, like standardized testing and Common Core. Is this all true and California is the one happy medium between state budget needs and the needs of students? Probably it’s a bit more complicated than that, especially when we consider that student rallies were being organized across the UC school system at least as recently as November, but this contains interesting interview info with the former State Superintendent of Public Instruction anyway.

News Grab Bag, Read All About It

+ A shooting at a North Carolina community college is being investigated as a hate crime, although police have declined to explain “what specific biases were being considered in the hate crime investigation.”

+ Here’s a chart illustrating the fact that speaking generally, younger people are more likely to support same-sex marriage than older people.

+ This week, Hillary Rodham Clinton ate at Chipotle. Because she wants to prove she’s just like us, or because burrito bowls are delicious and affordable? Regardless, Marco Rubio claims to love EDM and Nicki Minaj. Unfortunately his favorite band, Axwell ^ Ingrosso, does not want him to use their music in his campaign. Wonder how he’s feeling about Nicki’s engagement.

+ China had previously jailed five feminist activists for allegedly “provoking trouble;” now, all of them have been freed.

+ The Atlantic has the story on how conversion therapy has largely fallen out of favor even with Christian communities, tracking from conversion therapy’s grim heyday to Alan Chambers’ public repudiation of it and Obama’s recent statement against it. In a notable exception to the Atlantic’s claim, the UK group Core Issues Trust is claiming that the NHS’s moves to ban conversion therapy are in fact discriminatory against gay people who don’t want to be gay.

Daily Fix: The Tale of the Indiana Wedding Pizza and Other News Stories

feature image Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Turner

Hey Sailor Scouts! Have you ever seen a baby elephant video? I watched one today and it made my day 100% brighter.

Here’s some news for you!

When Will the Saints Go Marching in for LGBT Equality

+ Louisiana State Rep. Mike Johnson filed a “religious freedom” bill on Friday to be considered when the state’s legislative session begins April 13. The bill, HB 707, would shield businesses from penalties if they turned away LGBT people.

+ And Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal supports that “religious freedom” bill. In a Meet the Press interview on Sunday, he said he doesn’t believe anyone should discriminate against anyone but he’s uncomfortable with creating “special legal protections” for LGBT folks.

+ Here’s another anti-gay prom story for you. (I don’t know why everyone is so serious about prom, it’s not that cool you guys! Stay home with your friends, eat pizza and watch Netflix! I promise it will be 150 times better than wasting tons of money on formal wear, hair & makeup, dinner, tickets and photos for one very overrated night. (If you do go, don’t over think it — just have fun!))

Claudetteia Love

Gay honor student Claudetteia Love has decided she won’t be attending her senior prom because her school won’t allow her to wear a tuxedo to the event. The Louisiana high school says it’s in violation of school dress code but Love says she’s being discriminated against because she’s gay. Geraldine Jackson, Love’s mom, talked to her principal:

“He said that the faculty that is working the prom told him they weren’t going to work the prom if (girls) were going to wear tuxes,” she said. “That’s his exact words. ‘Girls wear dresses and boys wear tuxes, and that’s the way it is.’ “

A school board president said he would take the issue to the superintendent on Love’s behalf.

If you say “religious freedom bill” one more time…

+ Rihanna spoke out against Indiana‘s g*ddamn “religious freedom” laws at a concert in Indianapolis as part of the NCAA March Madness Music Fest. Pink News reports:

Referring to the state’s new RFRA inbetween songs, Rihanna said: “Who’s feeling these new bulls**t laws that they’re trying to pass over here?
“I say f**k that s**t… we’re just living our motherf***ing lives, Indiana!”
The singer also got the crowd to chant: “f**k that s**t”.

+ I’m sure y’all heard by now about that one pizza place in Indiana who said they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding and then got a lot a shit about it and were on the verge of closing but then they launched a f*cking GoFundMe campaign that raised over $840,000 (which included a gay woman’s $20 donation!) Well if it’s any consolation, Zach Braff and Donald Faiser will make pizza for your gay wedding in Indiana, if you want.

https://twitter.com/zachbraff/status/584075456221093888/

Law & Order

+ Revenge porn website operator Kevin Bollaert was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Friday. He was convicted in February of 21 counts of identity theft and six counts of extortion. The San Diego man ran the now-defunct website yougotposted.com, which allowed users to anonymously upload nude photos and personal information of other people, mostly women, without their consent. He also ran changemyreputation.com, where people who sought to take down the images and info were asked to cough up $250-$350 if they wanted the content removed.

Michelle-Lael Norsworthy

+ Last Thursday, U.S. District Judge S. Tigar ordered California’s Department of Corrections to grant trans inmate Michelle-Lael Norsworthy access to gender-affirming surgery. Tigar ruled Norsworthy’s constitutional rights were violated when a state prison denied her access to surgery in 2012. Norsworthy is serving a life sentence for a 1987 second-degree murder.

+ The National Union of Teachers, UK’s largest teacher’s union, passed a resolution calling on the next government to make it mandatory to create a positive climate for them to discuss sexuality and gender.

Christine Blower, General Secretary of the NUT, said after the debate: “The NUT calls for all parties standing in the 2015 General Election to show their commitment to tackling the discrimination faced by both LGBT students and teachers in schools by following the ten point action plan outlined in the Motion.

“This includes making it compulsory for all schools’ sex education policies to include a positive portrayal of same sex relationships, promoting LGBT History Month in all schools, and encouraging schools to develop a curriculum that is inclusive of LGBT issues.”

+ An Ontario lesbian couple is suing a Georgia sperm bank after they found out their sperm donor wasn’t who he claimed to be. They thought he was healthy, had bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science, and was working on his PhD in neuroscience engineering. When the company they worked with inadvertently sent the couple six (six!!) emails that included the donor’s name, they researched him and found that he was in fact a college dropout with a criminal record and a hereditary mental illness, and that his donor photo had even been edited. The couple gave birth to a son and is now suing the sperm bank for fraud, negligent misrepresentation, breach of warranty, battery and unfair business practices.

Ashley Diamond before she went to prison.

+ The Justice Department regards policies that prohibits hormone treatment for trans inmates to be unconstitutional. On Friday, the Justice Department backed a lawsuit brought by trans woman Ashley Diamond, who says the state of Georgia illegally cut off the hormone treatment she’d been taking for 17 years. Diamond, a first-time inmate charged with burglary, is being held at the Georgia State Prison men’s facility. She sued the Georgia Department of Corrections in February, citing the fact that she was raped multiple times, abused and has undergone drastic physical changes without hormones which has led her to attempt suicide several times.

International News

+ On Thursday, masked al-Shabab gunmen killed 150 at Garissa University College in Kenya’s deadliest attack since the 1998 US Embassy bombing.

Daily Fix: Religious Freedom Restoration Acts Suddenly Less Popular and Other News Stories

Laws of the Land

+ In news that seems too hyperbolically horrifying to be real life and not a deleted scene from A Handmaid’s Tale, Indiana woman Purvi Patel has become the first woman sentenced to prison time (20 years!!!) because she miscarried her pregnancy. It seems like some information must be missing there and that if you can find out more, the situation will be clarified, but no! Actually everything you find out about this case makes things much much worse. From Feministing:

Patel was convicted of two contradictory charges — of both intentionally terminating her pregnancy and delivering a live fetus and abandoning it — neither of which was supported by evidence. The state had no proof that she took abortion pills and no proof that the fetus was born alive.

The New York Times has an equally unsettling take, pointing out that the things that ensured Patel’s conviction — texting a friend about the possibility of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy and later going to an emergency room after losing the fetus — are things that many of us do in the normal course of living life as humans who have bodies which require care, and living in communities which care about us and our bodies. Even aside from the extremely disturbing implications of this case when it comes to bodily autonomy and the value of people with uteruses outside of being human incubators, which are extremely disturbing, this also raises scary questions about how we should be approaching healthcare on a basic level. Do we need to stop discussing our health or medical decisions with others in case those conversations become evidence against us? Should we hesitate to seek medical care that may be lifesaving on the off chance it may be deemed incriminating that we needed it? Isn’t this an efficient way to create a healthcare nightmare wherein scared, uninformed people make decisions in isolation and avoid professional treatment? Ask Indiana, I guess! Seems like the state has a lot of thoughts on this!

RFRAs for All

+ In the wake of all the Indiana hullaballoo, RFRAs are flying off the shelves faster than Furbies in the late 90s.

Arkansas, a state which was the subject of several grave headlines warning that it was “the next Indiana,” is revising its RFRA. Governor Hutchinson asked legislators to “either recall or amend” the bill so that it was in line with the federal RFRA created in 1993, and didn’t have any of the unique features of the original Indiana bill, which made its application alarmingly broad. Like in Indiana, Arkansas realized it was facing a monumental backlash both from individuals and from commercial powerhouses up to and including Wal-Mart, who you have to imagine is really the nail in the coffin if even they’re telling you your bill is discriminatory. But also like Indiana’s, Arkansas’ governor seems to want to have his public perception cake and eat it too, insisting that nothing was really wrong with the bill in the first place.

At its heart, he said, “this bill is not really complicated.” But he cited a “generational gap.” As evidence, the governor said even his own son had signed a petition urging him to veto the bill.

+ Also jumping on the trend is North Carolina, which is putting its religious freedom bill on hold as well. The language in North Carolina’s bill is extra-special; whereas most RFRAs are written to apply to things that would constitute a “substantial burden” to the expression of someone’s faith, NC’s law didn’t include the word “substantial,” meaning that if it were to pass then many sizes of burden, including “extremely minor” and “virtually undetectable,” may have to be accommodated, making the law more broadly applicable and powerful. Good news then that it seems, for now, it’s not on the table.

Arrests & Incarceration

+ An incident on board a St. Louis Metrolink train has led to two arrests after a 43-year-old white man sustained injuries captured on video by another passenger. The alleged assailants have been arrested amid rumors that the incident may have been sparked when the 43-year-old refused to let one of the alleged assailants borrow his cell phone and a discussion about the death of Michael Brown ensued. The two black males arrested will not be charged with a hate crime.

+ Also arrested are five Beijing feminists for making plans to raise awareness about issues of gender equality. (10 women appear to have been detained initially, and five remain imprisoned). What’s especially alarming is that it’s not clear what laws the women have broken; the issues they were advocating for are issues that Chinese law also supports, like opposing sexual harassment.

Their arrest in coordinated raids ahead of International Women’s Day “suggests an escalation of Chinese government paranoia,” says Leta Hong Fincher, author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. “I don’t see how they would have posed any threat to the government in any way — and they did not even carry out the activities. Even under Chinese law, I do not see what they are guilty of.”

+ Mumia Abu-Jamal is currently hospitalized for what appear to be diabetes complications. Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1982 for the murder of white police officer Daniel Faulkner, and has consistently held that he is innocent and his conviction is the result of a racist justice system. Abu-Jamal’s family believes that the state has failed to provide him with adequate medical care in prison, resulting in his current health crisis.

Sad/Bad News

+ Lesley Gore, whose passing we covered last month, is confirmed to have left her estate, about $50,000, to her longtime partner Lois Sasson.

+ Duke University is investigating after a noose was hung from a tree limb inside campus early on Wednesday. 300 people marched in solidarity against what is being called “an act of intimidation.” It’s not the first time bigotry has made students feel unsafe and unwelcome at Duke this year; a black student reports she was subjected to the now-infamous racist chant of the University of Oklahoma chapter of SAE, and in January plans to play the Muslim call to prayer on campus were met with backlash. And Duke itself is far from an isolated player when it comes to on-campus racism at prestigious (or any!) university; for instance, you may recall the racist hoax at Oberlin college that brought the campus to a standstill. The #NotJustSAE hashtag also provides a free education on how prevalent these issues are at institutions of higher education across the country.

+ In an incident in Maryland in which many details are still unknown, two people drove an SUV through a restricted exit that led to a security post at the NSA campus in Fort Meade, an accident which officials say may have just been a mistake. One person in the car died at the scene, and has since been identified by friends as Baltimore trans woman Mya Shawatza Hall. Be aware when navigating and/or sharing coverage of this event that the passengers of the car are widely being referred to as “men dressed as women” in what appears to be inaccurate and transmisogynistic reporting.

The More You Know

+ A new and major study in Europe has found that far from making people lazy or greedy, welfare has a positive impact on people’s desire to work.

Sociologists Dr Kjetil van der Wel and Dr Knut Halvorsen examined responses to the statement “I would enjoy having a paid job even if I did not need the money” and compared responses with the amount the country spent on welfare benefits and employment schemes. The results were adjusted according to population differences between states. The researchers from Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway, found that the more a country paid to the unemployed or sick, and invested in employment schemes, the more likely its people were to say they would enjoy paid work – whether they were in a job or not.

WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT.

+ As California’s terrifying water crisis continues, Governor Brown has announced plans to reduce water usage by 25% across the state. Measures include:

• A plan to replace 50 million square feet of lawns throughout the state with drought-tolerant landscaping.
• Banning the watering of grass on public street medians.
• Forcing ag concerns to report usage to state regulators.
• Water usage cuts on college campuses, golf courses and cemeteries.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like any of these measures will be applicable to Nestlé, the corporation which is literally bottling up all of California’s water to ship it out of state. Because Nestlé’s facilities are inside the Morongo Band of Mission Indians reservation, the extent to which California can legislatively curtail their water usage is very limited, and the company also doesn’t have to disclose information about how much water they’re using. Not ideal, basically.

+ There are 78 women being held at the the federal immigration detention facility in Texas, and about 40 of them are participating in a Holy Week hunger and work strike. Their Spanish-language petition, delivered to Colorlines, says that “some have not been given the opportunity to pay a bond yet to get out of Karnes; others say their bonds are far too high for them to pay… they won’t work, send their children to school or use any services at the facility until they’re given the opportunity to go before a judge and have their asylum pleas heard.”

+ A lucky day for a pregnant NYC cat, who somehow got a bullet put in her leg. She was rescued by a Williamsburg councilman who turned around in traffic to pull over and rescue her. He took her to the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition despite the cat biting him “pretty bad,” where the cat was able to receive medical treatment. Right now it’s not known whether the cat is adoptable, especially as the center is still working to treat other injuries that seem to have resulted from abuse, but the center is taking donations for her care as well as that of other animals.

UK Home Office Says Aderonke Apata Can’t Be Gay Because She Has Children, Duh

Ever slept with or had a relationship with a man?

Congratulations, your sexuality is not deemed an “immutable characteristic” by the U.K’s Home Office and thus you can’t claim asylum on grounds of discrimination since you clearly made a choice to be queer. These revelations come with the London High Court appeal raised by Ms. Aderonke Apata against the Home Office refusal of her asylum case. In fact as Mr. Andrew Bird, representing the Home Office, said “You can’t be a heterosexual one day and a lesbian the next day. Just as you can’t change your race,” Stunningly the same nation which regularly requires queer women provide video proof of their sex lives to confirm their sexuality also participates in bisexual erasure (it should be noted that Ms. Apata herself, as far as I am aware, does not identify as bisexual, although Orashia Edwards was denied asylum essentially because of his bisexuality last year). The titles of the news articles seem like hyperbole — Home Office tells Nigerian asylum seeker: ‘You can’t be a lesbian, you’ve got children’ — and yet that is exactly what was argued.

Aderonke Apata is a Nigerian campaigner who was voted a Positive Role Model at the National Diversity Awards and featured on the Rainbow List 2014. Part of her campaign work is focused on suspending the deportations of LGBT asylum seekers until there is a review of the official processes for dealing with these claims (which are frequently humiliating and with an overwhelming focus on the sexual) and new training is put in place for staff. At the moment the petition directed at Theresa May, Home Secretary, stands at 240,077 signatures.

Nigeria’s federal law currently has homosexuality criminalised, with some states enacting different interpretations of Shari’a law as well. Ms. Apata states that having been married to a Muslim man in a sham marriage, she was reported to police for living with her girlfriend which led to her imprisonment, some of her family members and her ex-girlfriend later being killed in recrimination. Facing more discrimination she fled to the UK, where she applied twice for asylum, and became an active campaigner for asylum seeker rights.

The United Kingdom has a severe problem with how it deals with asylum seekers in general and it doesn’t help that a large proportion of those claims dealing with sexuality concern people of colour. With the rise of the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), immigration is steadily becoming a more prominent topic of discussion in the upcoming election and much of the focus is on reducing the number of people moving into the country. The asylum process is required to make judgement calls on the credibility of each application, and it is here that the cases around sexuality and gender identity become increasingly troubled, as the government is not just making a decision about the strength of a story, but of the “realness” of a person’s identity.

This emphasis on proving the validity of the claim feeds into the idea that sexuality is something that people may unscrupulously fake in order to gain residence – queerness is often seen in wider society as a form of discrimination that can be dodged if the individual in question simply does not show it off. By ignoring the complexities of coming out both those who identify as bisexuals and lesbians with mixed dating histories like Ms. Apata are seen as demonstrating the idea that people can choose their identities with relative ease, and therefore the threat they face is technically self-inflicted.

Even provided an official does not believe that people should hide themselves, tribunal judges have frequently asked offensive or irrelevant questions such as if people have used sex toys or read Oscar Wilde as an attempt to unveil sexuality. One Pakistani Muslim woman was asked “If you are a lesbian you go to clubs – which ones?”, despite not going to any as she did not drink. The assessment relies heavily on each individual official’s notion of what queerness means to them, whether it be a form of dress or particular sex lives, and many people in the system – including Ms. Apata – have felt the need to share videos or photos of private sexual acts to support their claim.

Narratives like these don’t just reinforce harmful notions about “gold star” lesbians, but also tie in with other issues of cultural differences that are seen in the system. One point that has been raised is that though asylum seekers are able to choose the gender of, and have access to translators who are aware of religious and cultural nuances, the translators themselves have no official training in LGBT issues and can sometimes be seen as a detriment, particularly if they are drawn from their home communities (with some people being uncomfortable opening up in these situations, and others fearing abuse or mistranslation). On top of this, asylum seekers who have been denied trial are also frequently isolated in what are effectively detention centres, where there are allegations of a wide variety of abuses, and women in particular are at heightened risk of sexual assault. Ms. Apata met her current partner in the notorious Yarls Wood, an immigration removal centre and the focus of a recent investigation by Channel 4 over the facilities standards (her own experiences can be seen in this interview conducted with Novara Media in April 2014). This physical removal of people from British society is merely a reflection of the current policy where there is a large denial of applications — it was estimated that from 2005-2009 letters rejected 98 to 99% of claims from lesbians and gay men (this was compared to 76.5% of general claims from 2005-2008).

The sexuality of women of colour has often been interpreted by white Western forces, and historically much of the laws against homosexuality in the world were originally imposed by the British during the colonial period, codifying the discrimination that many who seek asylum are running from today. Even with the supposed change in modern UK attitude, and more accepting legislation than at the turn of the century, officials still remain stuck in those days of choosing to assess sexuality against what they deem “correct behaviour” when it comes to dealing with the consequences of the world colonial rule shaped. In their article based on doctoral research published in Forced Migration Review, Claire Bennett and Felicity Thomas state; “… decisions regarding someone’s claim to be a lesbian were frequently based on the extent to which they conformed to Western stereotypes. Failure to meet these preconceived ideas often resulted in asylum claims being refused and women’s individual credibility being questioned.”

There is great danger in allowing decisions which ultimately concern the safety of human lives to be made by people who display such a high level of ignorance on the very topic they are assessing. Focusing on March-June 2014, there was an official report commissioned by the Home Secretary titled ‘An Investigation into the Home Office’s Handling of Asylum Claims Made on the Grounds of Sexual Orientation’ and the first of the recommendations was to improve training so that stereotypical assumptions do not make their way into the interview process. Time will tell if recent events will prompt proper action, but in the meantime the petition remains open to get Theresa May to change course with regard to Aderonke Apata. If those in power don’t feel empathy, at least we have our voices to pressure change — as Ms. Apata’s partner Happiness said, in reference to what might happen next, it would be worth it as “nothing good comes easy.”

Burials in the Mist of Dawn

feature image via Reuters

Silence is a signal of unhappiness, and often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as a clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet. Look at how colonialism has fostered silence.
– from The Soccer War, by R. Kapuscinski

I

Alexander Mora Venancio, a student from Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, had been missing since September 26, 2014. He, along with 43 other male students, disappeared after traveling to Iguala, Guerrero, México. The plan was to commandeer a few local buses and drive to the toll booths that connect Acapulco to México City where the students were to shut down the toll booth, both as an act of protest for discriminatory practices by the Mexican government, but also, in Robin Hood fashion, to collect funds from drivers affected by the blockade to use toward their education. The students, or Normalistas as they are known, come from among the poorest families in the state of Guerrero, and Ayotzinapa is the poorest. These rural teachers’ colleges provide just enough education to their students to continue teaching future generations of the families they come from. Aside from using the blockade to collect money, Normalistas also intended to use the buses to attend an event in México City, Distrito Federal (D.F.), to commemorate the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, which occurred on October 2, 1968, when the Mexican government arrested and killed students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, to squash political opposition just 10 days prior to the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics, which were to be held in D.F.

The same day that the Normalistas were arriving in Iguala, another event was occurring — a celebration organized by María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, the wife of Iguala’s mayor, José Luis Abarca Velázquez. Familiar with the politically radical ideas of the Normalistas and afraid they would disrupt her party, either Abarca or his wife ordered the local police to take care of the students from Ayotzinapa, so that her celebration would not be marred. From that point on, there are varying accounts of the story, but it seems that municipal police surrounded the buses and opened fire, killing five. Many escaped, but 44 did not. They were last seen being loaded into vans by police. A day after, one of the 44 missing was discovered, 23-year-old Julio César Mondragón. His eyes gouged out. The flesh of his face stripped clean.

Journalist Alma Guillermoprieto outlined most of the story as it unfolded. There are conflicting reports about what happened next but the official story from the Mexican government is that after local police kidnapped the students, they were handed over to Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors), a gang that the Abarcas might have affiliations with. On October 17, Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam announced the arrest of Sidronio Casarrubias Salgado, a leader of Guerreros Unidos, who referred to the Ayotzinapa case as “a casual affair.”

It isn’t until November 7 that three assassins tied to Guerreros Unidos are named as the alleged killers. They outline how they led the students to a dump site and then used gasoline and tires to burn the students the same night they were taken. Some of the students were still alive after they were set on fire.

On November 11, plastic bags full of human remains are recovered near a river in Cocula, Guerrero. A few weeks ago, a bone fragment from the dump site was confirmed by a university in Austria as that of Mora. So far, he is the only one of the missing 43 to be positively identified.

The disappearance of the 43 students has led to international condemnation, the arrest of the Abarcas, mass demonstrations across México, especially in the state of Guerrero and in the capital, México City, as well as the resignation of the Governor of Guerreró, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, and México City Police Chief Jesús Rodríguez Almeida. Federal buildings have been set on fire during some of the demonstrations, but none is more symbolic of México’s boiling political climate than the burning of an effigy of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in the Zócalo, the main plaza of D.F.

But it has not quelled protests. More recently, a news story broke from México’s newspaper Proceso that los federales and Peña Nieto’s administration were either involved or at least knew about the disappearances of the 43 — and that Ayotzinapa is truly a crime of the state.

II

Like most things, my involvement with Ayotzinapa starts with politics, of course, but also, a woman and a bar. I met Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera inside the back building of Hole in the Wall, a bar on 26th and Guadalupe Street, across from the University of Texas of Austin campus. Hole in the Wall, established in 1974, is one of the staples of the Drag, as that stretch of Guadalupe is known. I had stopped by for a gin and tonic with a writer friend, who introduced Yoalli to me. A phD student in the Latin American Studies Department at UT, Yoalli had just arrived to Texas not long before we met. It was still August, and still fundamentally hot.

Originally from Puebla, Puebla, México and having completed her undergraduate and masters in Social Anthropology, Yoalli was new to Austin. Every gesture and movement she makes is with fire and intention. Her strong hooded eyes are intense, dark, and deep, similar to a lion. Energy spits off her skin. I knew from the first moments that we exchanged introductions, we would be friends.

After the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43, Yoalli immersed herself into organizing vigils and protests with other students and community members in Austin. I turned to Yoalli to understand the significance of Ayotzinapa.

MTO: Why do you think, in a country with a history of disappearances, fosas clandestinas (clandestine graves) and the Juárez femicides, did the Normalistas strike such a chord across México?

YR: I believe that the particularity of the case of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa, in a country where there exists other 25,000 disappearances and more than 150,000 murders, resides in the power of collective memory. The 43 missing students, in the memory of many Mexicans, is directly related to the massacre of students of 1968. The massacre of 1968 marked a historic moment in México, as a direct and clear proof of the State’s violence. After 1968, nothing like that has happened; until now. This means that in the last 46 years, this level of violence against dissident voices never occurred again. The criminalization of youth nowadays is evident, the students specially, who are one of the most dissident voices against the current government; they are the ones who are being murdered, disappeared or imprisoned. Ayotzinapa’s case also is really particular due to the origins of the students: all are indigenous and poor, from farmer families. This also reflects the racism and the level of repression and racism in the country.

MTO: What similarities do you see between Ayotzinapa and the protests against police brutality occurring now in the US?

YR: The two movements against police decisions in the US and Ayotzinapa in México are tied together because both are a reflection of the racialized society and “system of justice” we live in. The color and ethnicity are part of how there is institutionalized racism and classism in the judicial systems. Certain bodies (because of color and origins) are marked as criminals and delinquents. It also reflective of the impunity of the state exercising violence against particular populations of the society.

I am tired of the racism, sexism and impunity in the juridical system in México but also in the U.S. I think this a global phenomenon. Unfortunately, we live in a pigmentocracy where color influences your experiences and histories. We have to fight against this system of oppression. I believe collective memory is a way of resistance, we cannot forget what is happening.

And queer movements and indigenous movements are involved in every sense. In México, for example, queer collectives such as Bloque Rosa and Feminist collectives stage protests and write about the violence in México; and also, they march as a queer collective, where they particularized the violence perpetrated against queer people, trans, women, etc. In this sense, they are also denouncing the sexism in the Mexican State (femicides), but also in the “left”, which also tend to criticise the system but still use machista language. Indigenous movements such as the Zapatistas, are also asking for justice for the students, but also a lot of other movements as well, considering that the students were me’phaas and na’savis (indigenous groups from Guerrero).

I believe that there won’t be justice initiated by the State. It is because of the protests, the movements, injustice and the search for dignity that we have hope and people are fighting for justice. Justice will come, but it will come from below, from the organized people, from the parents, from the students, from our society.

III

The philosophy of collective memory was further discussed by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1950, in his book La Memoire Collective, published after his death in 1945. He explored the meaning of collective memory as shared information between groups of people typically involving a traumatic event. In Central and Latin America, collective memory is as much a method of survival as it is part of history. Uruguayan journalist and poet Eduardo Galeano spoke of it, saying, “Our collective memory has been mutilated by the controllers of the world, who day after day, also mutilate our present reality.” He might as well have been referring to Ayotzinapa.

I read each update about Ayotzinapa and think about riding a public bus in Juárez, years and years ago. The school bus, gutted inside and painted a dull brown outside, cost me almost nothing to take me from one part of inner Ciudad Juárez back to the international bridge linked to El Paso. While it bounced and took sharp turns, I stared out the window at the city’s landscape, knowing that the bus I sat in resembles the same type of bus that transports maquiladoras to and from the factories. It is the same type of bus involved in their disappearances. For all we know, it is the same type of bus that dumps their bodies in the Juárez Valley. I think about the missing women.

In October, I attended a vigil in Austin for the disappeared 43 Normalistas, and I sat far away from the crowd, from their wreath of candles, from their hum of voices. I sat underneath an old gnarled tree. I thought about a Saturday night in April of 2013. I thought about the 47th hour of a 72 hour trip to México. We had been in Ciudad Acuña all day, which shares the border with Del Rio, Texas. I thought about that night, lining up, single file, so I could crowd into a white van and be driven back to the US Border Patrol Station across the Bridge. I thought about being a US citizen being deported out of México and banned from returning for up to a year. With a record number of immigrant deportations committed by the US government, I couldn’t exactly fault the otherwise stone-faced Mexican guards for smirking at the irony of our deportations as we were handed back our US passports. I was last in line, and as we moved forward, the head of Mexican Immigration, a guy with a faux hawk named Sergio, put his hand out, and stopped me.

“You stay,” he had said.

I hadn’t been afraid. Not any of the nine hours we just spent detained in the small fucking office of Mexican Immigration. How could I have been? Compared to the way the US treats immigrants and detainees, we were on a fucking picnic. We had access to the US consulate, to our cell phones, to the snacks we brought along with us. Several of us even had smoke breaks. We sat in a cramped cold office, and we could see our comrades from the Comite Fronterizo de Obreras across the hallway, through the square window with bars. They had not left our side. But now it was 11:30 pm. Our driver and a few others who were not detained had gone and gathered all of our belongings from the Hotel del Prado close to the Plaza. They had driven back across the border already and were waiting for us. But suddenly, I swallowed the panic that swelled up inside. My mother was a Mexican immigrant. I was being recognized as a Mexican citizen. And being Queer usually makes me acutely aware of the space I inhabit. I had heard enough stories about the way Mexican citizens could be treated. And the border is a special kind of purgatory. Rules do not matter much.

“But why?” I asked. “I’m a US citizen too. Just deport me. With the others.”

“No,” he continued. He didn’t even look up from the clipboard. “You are a Mexican citizen. There is a different process.”

“My mom has been a US citizen for almost 10 years.”

“I’ll be back and we will fill out your paperwork and then you can go,” he said.

So I sat alone in the darkly lit back office of Mexican Immigration, untying and retying my red handkerchief around my neck. The laces of my work boots were loose, and I rested my elbows on my knees, bowing my head, hands in my salty hair, trying not to think about what being in a immigrant detention center in Saltillo, México, would look like. Saltillo was about an hour’s drive from where I waited. This was Ciudad Acuna, the Mexican border town across from Del Rio, Texas, where my father’s family was born and where he grew up. Ciudad Acuña was also the town where my great-grandfather was murdered in 1930. He was stabbed in an alleyway for fucking another man’s wife by the wife’s husband. My grandmother barely remembered him.

I could see the bridge to Del Rio, with lights that flickered like UFO’s. I could see the quiet town I spent many summers of my youth, just a mile away, splashing in the brown water underneath the railroad tracks with my distant cousins — the Andrade part of the family. My father’s kin.

I could also see the four guards in their brown uniforms standing watch over me in the other room as I waited for the return of Sergio, the guy who would be able to keep me or let me go. And at that moment, part of me almost hated being Mexican. My black eyes that an ex-girlfriend described as being full of energy and desire and the stormy black hair that stood up and stuck out and never sat down, sort of like lightning. A symbol of utter resistance to any attempt I made at combing it, the least imperial part of my whole body. My mother, a native of Chihuahua, was the reason I was not deported. It was the reason I would not face a year long ban from reentering the country. It was also the reason I was alone and waiting in the room while everyone else was transported back to Del Rio, to US authorities. I waited to find out if I would be processed and released back into Ciudad Acuña, as I had been assured.

The troubling concept of impunity and collusion crept into my mind as I remained inside the office. I didn’t even know if anyone from the Comite Fronterizo de Obreras in México remained outside. If I would be let go into the dark night of a Mexican border town I didn’t know very well.

Impunity does not believe in right and wrong; impunity believes in its power to operate without redress. Power is the keyword. While I had absolutely none in this situation, I reflected on the power of our friends in the CFO. Our subsequent arrest and detainment by Mexican authorities was purely politically motivated, as an attempt not to frighten visiting US citizens, but to intimidate and harass the organizers of the CFO. Because the work these women do as labor organizers challenges structures of power and money that do not desire to give up their power or their money. The CFO regularly faces danger worse than the small inconvenience faced by our delegation. Add to that, the violent power struggle between rival drug cartels enveloping México, and the historically epic corruption of police and government officials… and it’s clear why a worker’s rights group in a border town could be so threatening.

When Mexican authorities returned after midnight, I was asked to sign a document certifying that my mother, a Mexican citizen, granted me Mexican citizenship through bloodline, and thereby insured my release. I was not deported. A guard escorted me out of the building, into the deserted street. I walked out into the night, wondering how to get in contact with my group, how to return to Del Rio, how I didn’t have a phone with me… across the parking lot waited about 15 people from the CFO. They had waited with us throughout the 9 hours of our detainment, and were still waiting on me. And I thought of a saying my ex-girlfriend, a labor organizer and workers’ rights advocate, used often when referring to people united in love and struggle: this is what solidarity looks like.

But unlike the missing 43, I was going home. And it’s what I store in my memory each time I read an article or update about the disappeared. I am home. They are not.

IV

Each uncovered element in the forced disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43 relates to some aspect of México’s memory of other disappearances, of police impunity, of corruption at the highest levels, and violence perpetrated and sanctioned by the state. From the massacre of 1968 to the unexplained murders and dumping of the bodies of maquiladoras to the murders of immigration activists in Southern México, exists a pool of bloody memories from which Mexicans can choose from.

And I am watching impunity seep its way into the vocabulary of us here in the US too. The increased militarization of US police forces and a culture of impunity have contributed to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, just to name a recent few (the violence leveled against black lives in the US is genocide) and lack of indictments for the police officers involved in their murders. I watch it happen here in my home of Austin, where a group of community members called the People’s Task Force pushes for justice for a similar scenario. In summer of 2013, an Austin Police Department detective named Charles Kleinart chased down and shot and killed Larry Jackson, Jr., a young black man, in the back of his neck, in a tunnel underneath a bridge, in the normally quiet park known as Shoal Creek. And for what? Because Jackson happened to be a black man who showed up at a bank that had closed for a robbery earlier in the day?

In a recent post by two members of Witness for Peace, Julia Duranti and Maggie Evans, write about the connections between Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative (aka Plan México), both of which are spearheaded by US interest in resources that Colombia and México have to offer.

“Presidents Bush and Uribe found a willing ally for the Wars on Drugs and Terror in right-wing Mexican President Felipe Calderoón, elected in 2006 after Mexican drug cartels had risen to prominence. Shortly thereafter, the Mérida Initiative — also known as Plan México — was approved to “fight organized crime and associated violence.” Since that time, nearly $3 billion in U.S. military aid to México have contributed to the massive militarization of the country: Blackhawk helicopters (at $20 million apiece), thousands of U.S. weapons, extensive training of police and military, increased surveillance of the border and ports, and even U.S. Marshals dressing as Mexican marines to carry out special operations on Mexican soil. The toll on México has been devastating: more than 100,000 dead and more than 26,000 disappeared since 2006.”

The implication is clear. Like Colombia, the displaced and the missing and the mass graves in México did not happen overnight. And they are not isolated events. Francis Goldman of the New Yorker has written a series of pieces chronicling different aspects of Ayotzinapa, from their kidnapping and tying it back to Infrarrealistas, a literary movement that involves Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

“In the early nineteen-seventies, [Bolaño] led a group of poets who believed that life in México and in the rest of Latin America was so violent and absurd that poets needed to subvert reality and realism — as well as élitist literary hierarchies — even more than the surrealists had. That attitude has been very much in the air since the Ayotzinapa incident. Indeed, in Reforma earlier this week, the anthropologist and writer Roger Bartra, who is relatively conservative among México’s most prominent public intellectuals, christened “the heterogeneous and radical protest movement that has unleashed massive marches in México City” as “the infrarrealista left.” He chose that name, he writes, “not pejoratively,” but “because this left seems to flow beneath political realities, carving tunnels to topple the government and undermining the cement of a system it considers corrupt and repressive,” just as, he writes, Bolaño and his compatriots sought to “subvert a literary order they considered oppressive.”

V

In Spanish, there is a phrase, desde abajo which translates as “from below.” The disappeared students are not just memories or fosas clandestinas (clandestine graves). They are part of a culture, part of a sequence of pulverizing attempts to silence los desde abajo. So this is where we are. Witnessing los desde abajo push back. Not just in México, but in the mass demonstrations across the US against police brutality and the war against black lives, and the global displays of solidarity for Palestine and other oppressive regimes.

Galeano, in the same interview about collective memory, also says, ‘The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or battlefield. I believe that we can be compatriots of many different kinds of people, even though they are born far from our own lands and in other places and in other times.”

Perhaps it is time for that paradigm to shift.

To remember the past.

To change the present.

To rewrite our future.

From Ferguson to Ayotzinapa to Palestine.

To every crack in the earth.

The seeds are starting to grow.

Can Japan Deny Entry To a “Pickup Artist” with a History of Racialized Sexual Violence?

Yesterday, the Australian immigration services announced that it had revoked the immigration visa of an American named Julien Blanc who was hosting a series of ‘pickup artists’ seminars that aim to teach men how to manipulate women into sexual intercourse through psychological, emotional and physical violence. Blanc, who openly brags about his violent history that includes placing women in chokeholds, was deported from Australia overnight.

The movement to deport Blanc was spearheaded by feminist activist Jennifer Li, who started the twitter hashtag #takedownjulienblanc over which much of the organizing was conducted that led to a series of hotels and other venues canceling his scheduled appearances. It was also over this hashtag that activists shared information about the Blanc’s violent history as well as the misogynistic company he represents, Real Social Dynamics (RSD), which bills itself as a “dating coach company.”

However, Blanc reportedly has further RSD events scheduled in Tokyo for Nov. 15-17 of this month (though I have also heard reports that the events are scheduled for Nov. 25-27, so there is still some uncertainty on the specifics).

When we discuss this man’s history here in Japan, it becomes difficult to overstate what a truly disgusting individual Julien Blanc is. In video footage of one of his previous seminars, Blanc talks about the “happiest [he has] ever been,” when he was celebrating his chickenshit pickup artist culture at Tokyo nightclubs by grabbing Japanese women and forcefully shoving their faces into his crotch. And no he isn’t just talking about it, video footage exists not only of him engaging in this behavior, but also of him grabbing a convenience store clerk over the counter in what appears to be a forced sexual embrace.

In his seminar, Blanc advocates that a violent white male misogynist like himself should yell, “Pikachu!” when he grabs a Japanese woman to shove her face into his crotch.

While it remains unclear whether Blanc’s deportation from Australia will affect his November schedule for Japan, the issue has begun to attract local attention and a bilingual petition has been raised demanding that the Japan Department of Immigration deny him entry to the country. The petition has already received over 22,000 signatures (please add your own signature here). A widely shared video has also been created by popular vlogger Rachel of Rachel and Jun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA-SG1jMGZg

I also note from the schedule on their website that RSD has three further events scheduled for Tokyo during the dates Jan. 15-17 of 2015, including one of their pickup artist “bootcamps” designed for idiot heterosexual males who feel the need to psychologically degrade women because those men have no redeeming qualities for which any woman would ever genuinely be attracted to them.

In the meantime, I hope that feminist activists and allies here in Japan can begin trying to find the scheduled locations for these events and attempt to have the venues canceled. Here I think we can take courage from the example set by Jennifer Li and activists in Australia who experienced phenomenal success at pushing not only Julien Blanc but also another RSD employee out of Australia.

Indeed, the organizing conducted on #takedownjulienblanc ultimately led to a dramatic real life standoff on Thursday evening, when Blanc was planning to give one of his pickup seminars to a group of men on a boat (apparently as an alternate location after one of the original venues had canceled). Blanc himself didn’t show (maybe he was already in custody at that point, or maybe he had just chickened out), but his RSD buddy showed up to give the presentation in his place. Protestors surrounded the boat and some attempted to board it in order to disrupt the event; eventually police and the operators of the boat came to an agreement such that the male participants were led off the boat as protestors chanted “Walk of shame!” at them.

Let’s hope the only walk of shame happening in Japan will be the violent misogynist Julien Blanc being walked back onto the plane.

And by the way Julien, as a proud American expat in Japan, I have it on good authority that Pikachu despises everything about you.

There May Be Justice For Jennifer Laude, Trans Filipina Murdered by US Marine

The story of a trans woman of color being murdered is, disturbingly, an all too common one. In fact, since the beginning of October, at least three trans women of color have been murdered and two more have been the victims of high profile violent crimes. One victim is Jennifer Laude, a trans Filipina who was apparently murdered by an American Marine, who was in the Philippines as a part of a military exercise.

Jennifer Laude via Facebook

Reports say Ms. Laude was with a friend and a “foreigner” with a military-style haircut at a hotel after leaving a local disco bar. Laude’s friend told police Laude was nervous that the man would find out the they were both transgender. Unfortunately, her body was later found in the hotel with signs of strangulation after her worst fears came true.

Transmisogyny and racism are dominating and toxic forces in our world, and when the two intersect, the result is often deadly. With this case, there’s an extra dose of Imperialism to make things even worse. Trans people (and mainly trans women of color) are so often the victims of violent crimes and murder that we have a day to mark the violence that has happened during the past year — Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Protesters in Manila via NY Daily News

There have been protests in both the US and in the Philippines demanding justice for Laude and an end to the continued presence of US troops in the Philippines. On the 14th, around 40 protesters showed up and burned an American flag outside the US Embassy in Manila to show that they would not stand by silently. They waved flags and held signs that read “US troops out now!” and “No to US bases in PH!” Corky Hope Maranan, leader of a Filipina trans and lesbian group said that the crime is “…just so abominable. It’s one of the worst hate crimes I’ve seen,” and demanded that an arrest be made.

This month’s barrage of tragic transmisogynistic violence started with the horrifying case of Mayang Prasetyo, an Indonesian trans woman living in Australia who was brutally murdered by her husband, and the murder of Aniya Parker in Los Angeles, both around October 2. Next, this case of a US Marine being charged with the murder of a Filipina trans woman. On October 12, a trans woman was beaten with a 2×4 in New York after some men found out she was trans and started shouting slurs at her. Finally, a trans woman named Alexia Dupree Taylor was attacked in Memphis around the 15th.

So often with murders of and attacks on trans women of color, the police refuse to call it a hate crime or even arrest a suspect and bring charges. However, after the protests, the US Marine is now being held and has been charged with the murder of Jennifer Laude. Private First Class Joseph Scott Pemberton is currently in US custody, but a senior Philippine official said that the Philippine government wants to take custody of him and that this case could damage the military relationship between the US and the Philippines.

South Asian Queers Occupy Heteronormative Space at NYC India Day Parade

Last Sunday afternoon, a large part of Manhattan was people-logged — not by the usual flood of tourists but because the world’s largest democracy was celebrating its 67 years of independence. The India Day Parade organized by the Federation of Indian Associations that took over from 38th Street and Madison Avenue was flanked by numerous floats representing India – from corporate interests and state-owned banks to the Bollywood entertainment TV channels. A probably unexpected participant in the sea of animated celebration was SALGA (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association), which is one of the oldest organizations of its kind in New York City — currently in its 24th year of existence and happily thriving. With an eight-person team at the Parade, SALGA did well to say the least, and I was fortunate to be one of them.

SALGA’s goal was simple: to establish the presence of South Asian queers at the event, and attract attention to the recent recriminalisation of homosexuality by the Indian Supreme Court on the atrocious grounds that Indian queers are too minuscule a minority to warrant any protection of their rights. That SALGA was able to participate at the NYC India Day Parade this year is significant especially given its de facto ban for the past few years.

Queer rights in India currently remain in a limbo. The previous government had filed a curative petition against the Indian Supreme Court on which there has yet not been a verdict. One probably has little reason to be hopeful for in the coming five years of the present government. This is because not only does New Delhi currently have a Hindu right conservative government in power with an absolute majority unprecedented in the history of Indian democracy since 1984 — this obviously makes the government harder to get rid of — but members of this government have explicitly opposed homosexuality as antithetical to good Hindu values.

Despite the bleak prospects for queer rights in India, the support that we received last Sunday from the spectators at the NYC India Day Parade touched a chord in our hearts. Several teenage kids and young couples burst out in cheers when they saw the national flag and the rainbow flag fluttering side by side. Some guys even said, “We are so proud of you for doing this!” The brochures and pamphlets that we carried got distributed very quickly, and it seemed that we had fallen short on our “educational stationaries”.

It is to be remembered that the India Day Parade was not a Pride March. It was occupying the heteronormative space with one’s countrypeople in an almost patriotic and diasporic/expatriate spirit. If I let my imagination loose, it may be comparable to Irish queers marching at St. Patty’s Day Parade. Hence, sniggers and confused frozen looks were commonplace. The state-owned bank, which was behind us with their gigantic float first tried to run us down, and then decided to maintain a more than safe distance. A handful of people refused to take our flyers, probably anxious that there might not be enough trashcans in New York City to get rid of them.

Notwithstanding such bouts of frustration, which we had been prepared for, the Parade was fun. We went home feeling at least slightly accomplished, and already planning how to improve SALGA’s presence at the Parade in 2015. As for me, it was both my first time at a SALGA event as well as my debut in a publicly queer space in the United States. My other experiences have mostly been in Europe. Moreover, I was lucky to find such a friendly bunch of young folks to hang out with, and do something for a cause close to my heart.

Denmark’s New Law Makes Legal Gender Recognition A Lot Easier

Gay Star News asks “Is Denmark’s new trans law the best of its kind in the world?” and the short answer is well, no. Not because the new law, which came into effect this week and allows people to change their legal gender without having to fulfill any surgical, psychiatric or medical requirements, isn’t a great step forward for trans rights and self-determination — but because Argentina beat them to the punch two years ago.

Nevertheless, the law is the first of its kind in Europe and could hopefully set a new precedent for the fair and humane treatment of trans people in the region. It turns the individual battle for legal gender recognition from a harrowing, invasive experience of “proving” your identity to skeptical doctors or judges to a straightforward administrative procedure that allows you to receive a new personal identification number and matching personal documents, like passports and driving licenses. While far from being a panacea for anti-trans discrimination, legal recognition goes a long way in facilitating trans citizens’ access to public services and employment.

via Transgender Europe

“It will make life easier and more dignified for the individual, for example when you are asked for ID in shops,” said Minister for Economics and the Interior Margrethe Vestager when the law was passed in June. The Danish government added that the move was part of an international trend towards “easing the conditions for legal sex change(s),” possibly referring to a World Health Organisation (WHO) report released earlier this year which condemned the forced sterilisation of trans and intersex people.

Europe doesn’t have a great track record on trans rights: while Sweden was the first country in the world to allow legal gender changes in 1972, sterilisation was mandatory until the law was amended in 2013. Twenty European countries still enforce sterilisation as a legal prerequisite for gender recognition, including Finland and Norway (where only one hospital is authorised to issue psychiatric diagnoses and perform gender confirmation surgery), and many require that trans people divorce their partners or convert their marriages to civil partnerships due to laws governing same-sex relationships. Other countries like Ireland and Belarus lack provisions for trans people altogether. In December 2013, the Netherlands passed a law eliminating hormonal therapy or surgical requirements for legal gender changes, but trans people must still apply for a medical document.

via Transgender Europe

Transgender Europe (TGEU), which runs a Europe-wide campaign advocating legal gender recognition, welcomes Denmark’s latest move. However, some aspects of the law still leave much to be desired.

First, the law requires that applicants wait out a six-month “reflection period,” ostensibly to stop people making “hasty decisions they would later regret.” TGEU argues that this makes it difficult for trans people to change their documents quickly when necessary while also “[perpetuating] misconceptions of trans people as being ‘confused’ about their gender.” Many, if not most, people are secure in their gender identity and should be trusted to know what they want reflected on their personal documents. Yet it’s also true that some people just aren’t sure, get it “wrong” or change their minds later on — but why not codify, instead of condemn, this fluidity in gender laws, allowing people to make changes as they see necessary? After all, there’s still a lot of weight given to genders assigned at birth and the state doesn’t paternalistically tell parents to hold off on that even though it surely counts as a “hasty decision” that some later regret.

Second, legal gender recognition procedures are available only to those over the age of 18, which excludes a particularly vulnerable group of young trans people from education and employment opportunities as well as impeding their self-determination. In contrast, Argentina’s laws have been applied to a girl as young as 6 as the Children, Youth and Family Secretary ruled that children under 14 are capable of giving consent.

Finally, the law still does not recognise non-binary genders or intersex identities, or allow the gender field to be left blank. Australia and New Zealand allow people to mark their passports with “X” instead of “M” or “F,” Pakistan recognises the khawaja sara as having a “third gender” on identity documents, while Germany and New Zealand allow the gender field on birth certificates to be left blank for later self-determination.

TGEU “encourages the Danish government to closely monitor the implementation of the law and to remove all provisions that delay quick access to legal gender recognition.”

Female Students Arrested in Malaysia, Suspected of Criminal “Same-Sex Relations”

Two female students, aged 20 and 21, were arrested early Sunday morning by enforcement officers of the Johor Islamic Religious Department (JAIJ) on suspicion of having had “same-sex relations” in a hotel room in Johor. The pair was among eight couples detained in Operasi Ambang Merdeka on the dawn of Malaysia’s Independence Day, 31 August.

Members of Johor’s Islamic Religious Department
via Isu Terkini

Sinar Harian reported that when officers came to the door, one answered while the other was in the bathroom. While the authorities initially had no reason to be suspicious of khalwat (unlawful close proximity), they became suspicious when the pair remained silent as their room was searched. They then found a sex toy, which was seized together with a laptop.

One of the students said that the toy had only recently been bought online and unpackaged, and that they had not yet used it. They were then booked at the Johor Jaya Police Station before being taken to the JAIJ office.

According to JAIJ’s Assistant Director of the Enforcement Division Mohd Zamri Kambari, who led the morning’s raids, the pair has been arrested under Section 26 of Johor’s Syariah Criminal Offences Enactment 1997, which criminalises lesbian sex. They may be subject to a fine of up to RM5,000, jailed up to three years and subject to six strokes of the cane.

Sisters in Islam (SIS), a non-governmental organisation that works to protect Muslim women’s rights and challenge discriminatory syariah laws and practices in Malaysia, condemns irresponsible reporting by Sinar Harian, which broke the story, and wants proper legal representation for the two women. The Malay daily identified the students’ school and published a (partially censored) photo, further identifying them not only as a lesbian couple but also alleging that they had committed musahaqah, the sin (and crime) of female same-sex sexual relations.

SIS legal officer Rashidi Abd Rahim argues that prosecutors must prove that a criminal act had actually taken place. “The investigation has not even concluded and the paper is already judging them guilty.”