Seeds of a Revolution: Malaysian Trans Community Win in High Court’s Landmark Ruling

The Malaysian transgender community achieved another historic win this week when the Kuala Lumpur High Court ordered that the National Registration Department (NRD) to update a trans man’s information on his Identity Card (IC) to better reflect his current name and gender identity.

Previous attempts in Malaysian courts to allow trans people to change their names and gender markers on their ICs, such as Vasudevan Ramoo’s 2015 application to the High Court or the 2013 Court of Appeal case by Kristie Chan, had been unsuccessful. However, William Lim and Muhammad Izzat Md Jonid, counsel for the anonymous trans man, used those cases to argue that their client had “satisfied the thresholds” for affirming their gender identity through surgery and living as male.

Justice S. Nantha Balan noted in his grounds of judgement that the plaintiff’s constitutionally enshrined right to life includes the right to “live with dignity as a male and be legally accorded judicial recognition as a male.” Dismissing the NRD’s concerns of detransitions or the plaintiff changing his mind down the line as “far-fetched [and] reflective of an alarmist mindset”, he also argued that, rather than causing confusion as the NRD claims, officially recognising the plaintiff’s gender identity would avoid conflict and provide certainty.

Nisha Ayub receives award from John Kerry by Giselle Rimong Lidom

Malaysian trans rights activist Nisha Ayub notes in a public Facebook post that while the State will undoubtably attempt to challenge this ruling, the same way they challenged other significant trans-related laws such as the 2014 Court of Appeal declaration of anti-crossdressing Syariah Laws as unconstitutional (Malaysia has a dual court system with both Syariah courts and Civil courts), she hopes that “local and international allies will come forward to give support and hopefully put [an] end towards violation of [one’s] rights towards a [person’s] identity, freedom of expression and most importantly to our own body.”

The 2014 Court of Appeal ruling, while eventually overturned, was especially notable given that it was the first time anyone had challenged the Syariah Court at all, let alone won — and that the win came from a community whose identities and lifestyles are highly criminalized in Malaysia.

Malaysians celebrate 2014 ruling by Al-Jazeera America

The Malaysian Government regularly claim that they won’t support LGBTQ rights as they are supposedly against Islam, even going as far as comparing LGBTQ people to ISIS. Meanwhile they endorse “parenting guides” about identifying “gay and lesbian” traits in children and sponsor an anti-LGBTQ play painting the community as a conspiracy by the Opposition Party and “foreign agents” to corrupt the innocent minds of children.

Public support for the Malaysian LGBTQ community, especially trans people, has grown significantly in the last few years. The I Am You: Be A Trans Ally education and social media campaign, launched in 2013 by Nisha’s group Justice for Sisters and other trans activists, has over 2500 likes on Facebook alone, as well as positive responses from local and international media. When Justice for Sisters called for donations to fund legal support for 16 trans women arrested in mid 2014 for cross-dressing, they quickly raised far more than their projected RM 24,000 [US $7,484].

Justice for Sisters poster

Meanwhile, Nisha Ayub in particular has steadily been gaining international accolades for her trans advocacy work. She was awarded the Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism by Human Rights Watch in 2015, and in 2016 San Diego officially declared April 5 “Nisha Ayub Day” after her receipt of the US Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award — the first trans person to do so.

Other notable Malaysian trans people include I Am You co-founder Dorian Wilde, political secretary Hezreen Shaik Daud, and writer & ex-gay conversion therapy survivor Yuki Vivienne Choe.

I Am You campaign banner by I Am You

The work of these legal practitioners and activists fighting for LGBTQ rights in Malaysia, as well as ever-growing public and institutional support, is heartening to observe. Their willingness to take on the previously untouchable Syariah Court as well as this possibly paradigm-changing ruling on IC changes opens the door for reviews of current anti-LGBTQ laws, especially since those cases have been argued on the basis of upholding the Federal Constitution. A lot of work still needs to be done to make Malaysia safer and more supportive of LGBTQ people, and these wins may seem tiny compared to nationwide same-sex marriage or complete decriminalisation of homosexual activity, but they should not be underestimated or ignored. Malaysia is a rapidly changing country and these are the seeds of a revolution.

Note: the writer has previously fundraised for The Seed Foundation, which is also managed in part by Nisha Ayub.

Black Trans Woman Rae’Lynn Thomas is At Least the 19th Trans Person Murdered This Year

Only two days after I wrote about the death of Trans Latina Erykah Tijerina, we’ve learned that yet another trans woman woman of color has been murdered. Black trans woman Rae’Lynn Thomas was shot by her mother’s ex-boyfriend in her home in Columbus, Ohio. Rae’Lynn is at least the 19th trans person murdered in the United States this year, the fourth trans woman of color to be murdered in the last six weeks.

Rae’Lynn was only 28 years old. Known as “Ray, Rayshawn, my boo Ray Ray, and Rayshawna” to her family, her aunt described her as “a performer, the life of the party and a fashionista.” According to her mother, she transitioned ten years ago and she was a light in all of their lives.

A local Ohio news station first reported on her death, which her family is rightly calling a hate crime. According to the report, Thomas’ death was especially brutal. She was beaten and shot by her mother’s ex, a man who had repeatedly called her the devil and made other transphobic comments. He called her the devil one more time before he shot her. After Thomas was shot, her mother says she said to her, “Mom, I love you. Tell my sisters and my brother I love them. Tell my family I love them. Mom, I’m dying, I’m dying, please don’t leave me.”

Rae’Lynn Thomas is yet another Black trans woman who joins our ever expanding list of trans people murdered this year. This isn’t slowing down. This isn’t getting better. This is just getting worse and more terrifying and more depressing. I am so afraid for my sisters, my friends, my elders, my family. It’s a constant fear, one that never goes away. It just gets worse on days I have to write articles like this and gets a little bit quieter on days that I don’t.

Something needs to happen. Cis people need to hold each other accountable. It will take a systemic change to stop this from happening year after year after year. Feeling sad each time you read an article about a murdered trans woman of color won’t stop it from happening two or three or four times every month. You need to call out transphobia and transmisogyny when you see it. You need to call out racism and anti-blackness when you see it. You need to talk to the men in your life about seeing trans women as women and women as human beings. You need to do what you can to support trans women of color while we’re alive. You need to stop just calling yourself an ally and start acting like members of your LGBTQ family are being murdered once every other week. You need to read these names and realize that they’re more than that, that they’re people who are gone forever and you need to realize just how long forever actually is.

Monica Loera, 43

Jasmine Sierra, 52

Kayden Clarke, 24

Veronica Banks Cano, 40

Maya Young, 25

Demarkis Stansberry, 30

Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson, 16

Kourtney Yochum, 32

Shante Thompson, 34

Keyonna Blakeney, 22

Reecey Walker, 32

Mercedes Successful, 32

Amos Beede, 38

Goddess Diamond, 20

Dee Dee Dodds, 22

Dee Whigham, 25

Skye Mockabee, 26

Erykah Tijerina, 36

Rae’Lynn Thomas, 28

Rae’Lynn Thomas’ murderer called her the devil, but do you know what the devil really is? It’s the plague of violence that trans people, especially trans people of color, especially Black trans women face. It’s a Black trans woman named Deeniquia Dodds being murdered on July 14; another Black trans woman, Dee Whigham, being murdered ten days later; a third, Skye Mockabee being murdered just a week after that; a trans Latina named Erykah Tijerina being murdered less than two weeks later; and then Rae’Lynn Thomas being murdered not even two days later. It’s the fact that we’re guaranteed to see more murders of Black and Latina trans women and other trans women of color this year and probably this month. The devil is the fact that there are a lot of people who will read this headline and think “good riddance” and that even more will look at it without thinking or feeling anything at all.

Erykah Tijerina, Trans Latina, Becomes the Latest Killed in the Plague of Anti-Trans Murders This Year

A trans woman found murdered in an apartment in south central El Paso on Monday, August 9 has been identified as 36-year-old Latina trans woman Erykah Tijerina (warning for misgendering at link). Tijerina becomes the latest in a summer, year, decade and era plagued by violence that targets trans women, especially trans women of color, for being who they are. After we learned about three trans women, all of them Black, being murdered in July, the number of trans people reported murdered in the US this year became 17, now with Tijerina, it’s 18.

Tijernia’s two sisters are afraid this is a hate crime, and say that they don’t know very much about the case. Pearl Tijerina, one of Erykah’s sisters told reporters “We’re still in shock about it. It was unexpected,” and that Erykah was a good sister, “She’s the one that told me to stay strong and not care.” Her sisters added that Tijerina was “funny, giving and unapologetic about the person she was.” Her family has set up a gofundme for her funeral arrangements.

Black trans woman writer, activist and poet Venus Selenite, who was again the one who made me aware of this story, is undoubtedly one of the most important voices on Twitter right now, not just trans twitter, not just queer twitter, but just twitter. She’s regularly one of the very first people to report on the murders of trans women, usually trans women of color, and she always does so with smart and relevant commentary. If you have the ability and the means, please learn more about her and do what you can to support her. It’s important to support trans women of color while we’re alive, not just talk about us after we die.

The list of trans people who’ve been murdered is depressingly getting longer and longer and not slowing down. Most of these names belong to trans women of color.

Monica Loera, 43

Jasmine Sierra, 52

Kayden Clarke, 24

Veronica Banks Cano, 40

Maya Young, 25

Demarkis Stansberry, 30

Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson, 16

Kourtney Yochum, 32

Shante Thompson, 34

Keyonna Blakeney, 22

Reecey Walker, 32

Mercedes Successful, 32

Amos Beede, 38

Goddess Diamond, 20

Dee Dee Dodds, 22

Dee Whigham, 25

Skye Mockabee, 26

Erykah Tijerina, 36

Remember, last year, when we were shocked, terrified and disgusted at how many trans women were being murdered, we saw at least 21 reported murders of trans people. That’s just three more than we already have this year and we still have four months left. Again this year, most of the victims are trans women, most of them are Black, and most of them are Black trans women or other trans women of color who sleep with men. This is just in the United States. In other countries trans women and other trans people are murdered at even higher rates. In Brazil alone, at least 48 trans women were murdered just in January of this year. And I emphasize “at least” because the real number is likely much higher. How are trans women of color supposed to survive this? How are we supposed to function in a society that keeps on targeting, torturing and murdering us? How are we supposed to make it out alive?

In the web series Her Story, Paige, a trans woman character played masterfully by trans actress, entrepreneur and activist Angelica Ross, tells her best friend Violet, “I swear, it never gets easier for girls like us. But we sure get stronger.” Tijerina’s murder is a grim reminder that the first half of that quote rings truer and truer every day. I’m hoping that we can all hold onto the second half of it too.

SCOTUS Temporarily Blocks Trans Teen’s Bathroom Rights as it Weighs Bathroom Bill Battle

In the Supreme Court’s first involvement in legal battles over trans people’s bathroom access, the judicial entity has granted a stay to a Virginia school that wishes to keep a 17-year-old trans boy out of the facilities that are consistent with his gender, meaning that they are allowed to continue to do so for now. Initially the school’s policy had been struck down by a Virginia appeals court, but the Supreme Court has voted 5-3 to temporarily stay that decision until they can issue a fuller ruling.

The most immediate effects of the stay are, of course, a major blow to Gavin Grimm, the student who was hoping to have a safer and more affirming educational environment as a result of this case (although the ACLU is asking a Virginia district judge to block the school from enforcing their policy). Joshua Block, senior ACLU staff attorney, said “We are disappointed that the court has issued a stay and that Gavin will have to begin another school year isolated from his peers and stigmatized by the Gloucester County school board just because he’s a boy who is transgender.” For the rest of the nation, the stay leaves much in limbo; we still have to wait to see whether the court decides to hear the case, and if so, what their real ruling is.

The particular makeup of the current body of Supreme Court justices means that there are a few unusual factors at play in this ruling. First, the fact that the late Antonin Scalia hasn’t been replaced means that a split 4-4 ruling is possible, and given the past leanings of the justices on the bench, maybe even likely. The dissenting 3 votes regarding the stay were Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg; not surprising. The vote that swayed the issue was Stephen Breyer, who said in a one-paragraph opinion that he actually disagreed with the stay, but voted as a “courtesy” to his conservative colleague. This is a weird move! It’s not unheard of to vote as a courtesy, but it’s most often seen in cases regarding the death penalty — as ThinkProgress explains, “when four justices wish to hear a case but a fifth vote is necessary to stay the execution — lest the inmate be executed before their case receives full review.” In this case, there’s seemingly no benefit or value conferred to the deliberation by issuing the stay out of courtesy, so it’s not clear why Breyer did so.

Also notable is the fact that Justice Kennedy voted for the stay, and without the caveat of it being a courtesy vote. Kennedy has traditionally been a conservative justice, but has demonstrated that he’ll occasionally break rank for “socially liberal” issues, like LGBT rights. His vote for the stay may be an indicator that he’s not going to do this when it comes to the pressing legal issue of bathroom bills. As you may recall, 11 states have sued the Obama administration over the Department of Justice’s guidelines asserting that trans students should be able to use facilities and accommodations consistent with their gender. That case may also head to the Supreme Court, meaning that there could be multiple opportunities for the Supreme Court to greatly bolster or harm the rights of trans people in the US this year.

Given the stakes for thousands of people in the US — and pressingly, right now, Gavin Grimm — what happens if the court does decide to hear the case, and it ends up as a 4-4 split vote? Most immediately, it means that the outcome would revert to the lower court’s ruling — in this case, it would mean that the Virginia appeals court’s decision that Gavin should be able to use the boys’ bathroom and locker rooms would be upheld. But the case wouldn’t have any legal precedent, as Slate explains: “When a 4-4 deadlock does occur, the case is not deemed to have set any sort of precedent. Tradition holds that the court’s per curiam opinion in such ties is usually very, very terse, often consisting of no more than a single sentence: “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court.” So, if the SCOTUS hears the case and votes in favor of Grimm, then Gavin Grimm will be able to use the correct bathroom and other cases all over the country will be strengthened enormously by that legal precedent. However, if the vote is split, Gavin Grimm can use the correct bathroom, but the larger legal issue is still in limbo on a national level.

This is only the most recent time that a case with major implications for a highly marginalized and vulnerable group of people has gone before a Supreme Court that’s missing a justice — in June, SCOTUS issued rulings on Fisher vs. University of Texas, Dollar General, and DACA/DAPA, and the latter two cases saw split rulings that will have major repercussions. In Dollar General, the sovereignty of the tribal courts of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians was upheld, but because of the split vote, unfortunately no legal precedent was set; in the split vote on DAPA/DACA, millions were left vulnerable to deportation. This summer has served to urgently highlight the enormous sway that SCOTUS justices hold over the nation (and the power that a President wields via nominating them), something which only heightens the stakes of an already unprecedented Presidential race. In the meantime, Gavin Grimm’s rights, and those of many other transgender Americans, hang in the balance.

Skye Mockabee Is At Least the Third Black Trans Woman Murdered In July, 17th Trans Person This Year

Not even a week after I reported that Dee Whigham became at least the 16th trans person murdered in the United States this year alone, I’m devastated to have to report the murder of another much-too-young Black trans woman, Skye Mockabee of Cleveland, Ohio. Mockabee was found dead early Saturday morning in a parking lot. (As a warning, that article does misgender trans women and use their birth names). Police said it looked like head trauma was the cause of death. Very few details about her life or murder have come out, but the fact remains, this is a tremendous loss for her family and friends and for the trans community.

Mockabee’s Facebook says that she studied at South University and worked at Chipotle. She has many pictures of her smiling and looking beautiful. According to Cleveland.com, Mockabee is the fourth transgender woman murdered in the county in the last four years. The others were Brittany Stergis, 22, Betty Skinner, 52, and Ce Ce Dove, who was just 20 at the time of her death. Of course, Mockabee was initially identified as a man by police and the Medical Examiner’s Office, reminding trans people everywhere that no matter what we do, there are still people in power who won’t recognize us for who we are and will insist on misgendering us even in death.

Looking at this list will show you that the vast majority of these victims have been trans women of color, and most of them have been Black. This is what happens every year: mostly Black trans women of color are murdered and despite the progress in awareness, protections from laws and visibility, this cycle of violence just continues. As long as women, Black Americans, those who live in poverty, sex workers and trans women are devalued to the point of inhumanity in America, trans women who live at all of these intersections, or even just one or two, will be murdered. Again, these are just the trans people who we know have been murdered this year. Because of the intersections they live at, it’s likely that many have not been reported.

Monica Loera, 43 years old

Jasmine Sierra, 52

Kayden Clarke, 24

Veronica Banks Cano, 40

Maya Young, 25

Demarkis Stansberry, 30

Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson, 16

Kourtney Yochum, 32

Shante Thompson, 34

Keyonna Blakeney, 22

Reecey Walker, 32

Mercedes Successful, 32

Amos Beede, 38

Goddess Diamond, 20

Dee Dee Dodds, 22

Dee Whigham, 25

Skye Mockabee, 26

We’re inching closer and closer to breaking the record of reported murders of trans people that was set last year. Every time it seems like we’re finally falling behind last year’s pace, another trans person is murdered and we’re right back in this awful situation again. Rest in peace and rest in power, Skye.

The Absolute Worst Thing A Boy Could Ever Be

feature image via shutterstock

It’s time for another edition of SE(N)O, an essay series on A+ for personal stories we wish we could tell on the accessible-to-our-employers-and-everyone-we’ve-ever-known mainsite, but can’t for personal and professional reasons.

When I was seven years old, my parents, thinking they were trying to raise a young boy into a man, signed me up for Cub Scouts. It was there that I learned how to whittle a bar of soap into the shape of a whale, how to walk old ladies across the street and how to stop acting like such a little girl.

The scout troop I was in was run through the Catholic Church, and I guess they thought it was more important that we learned how to be Men of God than how to pitch a tent or tie a knot. I may not know how to start a fire without matches, but I did learn how to treat a girl on a date: never let her ask you out; always hold open doors and pull out chairs; refuse to let her pay; only kiss her on the cheek.

Surrounded by nothing but boys my age who were eager to learn these lessons in manhood, I felt completely alone. I felt like I had no one who understood me, who I could relate to, who I belonged with. Except for one boy, Michael.

Michael and I met when we were in the same kindergarten class at St. Anthony’s Catholic School. He was one of two Michaels and I was one of two kids with my name and the four of us bonded over not feeling as unique as the rest of the class.

Michael and I also bonded over how little in common we had with the other scouts and how little we had in common with our scout leaders’ idea of what a Real Man should be. The two of us saw something of ourselves in each other and we latched onto it. Unfortunately, the other scouts saw it too, and they attacked us for it.

At scouts, both of us would get made fun of for the way we dressed, talked and acted. Kids started asking if we were gay before any of us really knew what sexuality even was. They would laugh and point at us each time we need to pick who would be the “queer” in Smear the Queer. They would call us girls, as if that was the absolute worst thing a boy could ever be. The other scouts saw all those things in me because I was a seven-year-old girl who had to get out of bed very morning and pretend to be a boy. I don’t know exactly why Michael was that way, but I was damn thankful that I wasn’t alone.

As Cub Scouts turned to Boy Scouts, things got even worse for the two of us. The boys were older, the lessons stricter and the bullies meaner. But having Michael there with me made things a whole lot easier — or at least I thought it did. But things weren’t so easy for Michael. At scouts I was called a sissy and told that purple, my favorite color, was the official color of AIDS. But Michael heard those same kinds of things everywhere he went.

As we moved through the sixth grade, I knew that scout camp was coming up and I knew that it was going to be hell. Seven days surrounded by boys and men who wanted nothing but to make me less like me and more like them. I was only comforted by the fact that Michael would be there with me.

Four months before camp, on Monday, February 23, 1998, my friend Michael came home from school, found the key to his parents’ gun locker and killed himself.

Michael was the first person in my life who died. It’s a pretty big shock having the first funeral you go to be one for a friend who’s the same age as you. Especially when you’re still in elementary school. Especially when he kills himself. I didn’t know how to process it. I still don’t, really. It was weird and uncomfortable and wrong and stupid. I hated it.

Scout camp came and it was every bit as terrifying as I thought it would be, maybe even more so. At this point in my life I had gotten pretty good, or maybe really just okay, at pretending that I didn’t hate everything about being a boy — that I didn’t go to bed every night and wake up every morning praying that God would use one of His miracles to turn me into a girl. At pretending that I was fine. But I wasn’t good enough to spend a week with the people who most reminded me of how much I needed Michael and act like everything was okay.

I spent most of my time at camp in my tent, crying or hiding or both. I think the only part I enjoyed was a conversation I had with the other Michael, the one from kindergarten. The two Michaels had stayed best friends over the years. Other Michael told me that on days when the bullying was extra bad, Michael would talk about jumping off a cliff, saying that no one would care if he died. Other Michael would tell him to stop joking around, that jokes like that weren’t funny. Other Michael also said that when the neighborhood kids would call Michael a fag, he would make similar claims, only to be told he was too much of a girl to actually do it. He even said this to the bullies right before he went into his house and killed himself. It still didn’t make them stop.

Michael saying those things to the bullies made sense to me. I had had similar thoughts, even if I was too afraid to actually say them out loud. I started to wonder how much we had in common. I wondered if he also secretly wished he was the girl that the bullies said he was, that the reason he hated that kind of bullying so much was because he was afraid that there was some truth to it. I wondered how many more days of bullying I could take before I tried to join Michael. I wondered how I would do it.

I wish that I could see the person Michael was supposed to grow up to be. I wish I could thank him for making one of the most intolerable parts of my life a little more tolerable. I wish I could tell him that just because we were bad at being Boy Scouts or even bad at being boys, that doesn’t mean that we were bad at being ourselves. I would tell him that the world was too ignorant and afraid and mean and that the things it hated about him were the things that made us friends. I would tell him that not all little boys have to grow up to be the kind of men that our leaders and classmates and bullies tried to make us into. Some of us can even grow up to be women who are strong and confident and happy, at least some of the time. And when people call us girls or queers or gays, those people are our friends, not bullies, and it no longer feels like hatred. Now it feel like it fits. Like they’re finally seeing us for who we were all along.

News Fix: Trans Delegates and #BlackLivesMatter Organizers Push for Progress at the DNC

The Democratic National Convention

+ A piece on Sarah McBride and other trans delegates at the DNC!

For Laura Calvo, a trans superdelegate from Oregon, the change in representation is an important one on a policy and personal level. When Calvo first became involved with the Democratic party in Oregon, she said “there was nobody else like me.” “I was always the one person in a crowd of, you know, 600, one thousand people who was openly identified as trans,” said Calvo, who now sits as the vice-chair of the DNC’s LGBT caucus. “And now it’s really wonderful to see that I’m not the only person there, and that we do have a diversity of delegates from around the country.” This year, there are 28 openly transgender Democratic delegates, and moreover, they’ve seen a breakthrough in the party’s platform, too: for the first time, it uses the word “transgender.”

+ On the BLM protests of the DNC in Philly.

Protesters held signs and banners expressing opposition to the DNC, to systemic racism and to police brutality, with messages such as “End stop and frisk”; “We are not starting a race war; we are trying to end one”; “Stop killing black people”; “We have nothing to lose but our chains!”; “Hillary has blood on her hands” and more.

Law and Order

+ The Alaska Supreme court struck down a new state law that required parental notification of teens seeking abortion, ruling the law unconstitutional. Justice Daniel Winfree, writing for the majority, said the court was not deciding whether abortions should be allowed for minors but if the abortion notification law violated the state’s equal protection provisions. In a concurring opinion, Justice Dana Fabe disagreed the law violated the teens’ equal protection rights but believes the law violated their fundamental privacy rights.

+ A federal appeals court has struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law, saying that “we can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent.”

+ A federal court has set a November trial date for dueling lawsuits over North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom law, HB2.

+ Fort Worth ISD made detrimental changes to their guidelines pertaining to transgender students last week after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton concluded the original, nondiscriminatory guidelines violated state law. The original version outlined how the district should respect and accommodate student’s gender identity and instructed teachers and administration not to out students to their parents without their consent. Paxton concluded the guidelines violated “a statute that prohibits a school district employee from ‘encouraging or coercing’ a child to withhold information from the child’s parents.” His decision was non-binding but the school district changed the guidelines anyway, which is now chiseled down to say school personnel are to work with parents and guardians on individual education plans on a case-by-case basis.

+ Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has bypassed a court ruling in order to restore voting rights to 200,000 formerly incarcerated people in his state.

+ On how bathroom bills like HB2 harm disabled people, including disabled trans people and disabled people of all genders who may need someone to enter a bathroom with them to assist them.

Police/Prison/Violence

+ Two Austin police officers are under investigation for dragging and body slamming Breaion King, a black school teacher last summer. Dash cam footage of the violent arrest was released last week. Charges against KIng were dropped after prosecutors watched the video footage.

+ Ohio attorney Andrea Burton refused to remove her “Black Lives Matter” pin when Youngstown Municipal Court Judge Robert Milich asked her take it off in his courtroom. He said she was in contempt of court and sentenced her to five days in jail, but Burton has been released on a stay while the appeal is underway.

+ Charges have been dropped in the remaining three police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray, ruled a homicide. State’s attorney Marilyn Mosby said “There was a reluctance and an obvious bias that was consistently exemplified not by the entire Baltimore Police Department, but by individuals within the police department in every state of the investigation which became blatantly apparent in the subsequent trials.”

+ On July 24, 37-year-old Ottawa man Abdirahman Abdi was killed in what police called a “confrontation;” Abdi’s neighbor described police beating Abdi when he was already on the ground and then cuffing him as he lay bloodied before paramedics arrived and began administering CPR. When Abdi was taken to the hospital, doctors there said that he had already been dead 45 minutes before receiving medical attention. Although Abdi was killed on a Sunday, his family wasn’t notified of his death until Monday afternoon.

Indigenous In/Justice

+ Earlier this year Berta Cáceres, indigenous environmental activist, was assassinated by a group of armed men at her home in Honduras. Cáceres co-founded the organization Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras that fought for the environment, women and indigenous people. She worked tirelessly to fight against a company trying to build a hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River. Before her death, Cáceres blamed Hillary Clinton — former Secretary of State and now Democratic presidential nominee — for her role in the 2009 Honduran coup. Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most violent places in the world. Berta’s daughter, Laura Zuniga Cáceres, along with 20 different organizations, protested the Democratic National Convention in honor of Berta. The activists are trying to gain support and get H.R. 5474, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, passed. The legislation calls for the suspension of US security to Honduras.

“We don’t want the money of the United States to support this violence that is taking our lives,” Laura said, speaking to a crowd. “My mother’s life is a symbol of struggle; it’s a symbol of resistance. And her assassination is a symbol of the violence that we’re living today. She’s not the only one. But she is the one on flags, with which we’ll move forward together.”

+ The Army Corps of Engineers is going to build a 1,172-mile-long pipeline through the Midwest, over the protests of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations. The Indigenous Environmental Network has issued a statement:

“We are saddened to hear of this permit approval but knew the writing was on the wall. The Corps has a long history of going against the wishes and health of Tribal nations. This decision will not deter the resistance against the dirty Bakken pipeline. This decision merely highlights the necessity for the Corps of Engineers to overhaul the Nationwide Permit No. 12 process, which has been used by Big Oil to further place our lands, Indigenous rights, water and air at greater risk for disaster. We demand a revocation of this permit and advocate for the rejection of this pipeline.”

+ In Saskatoon, the Muskoday First Nation has declared a state of emergency after an oil spill has deprived the community of access to safe drinking water.

Mass Violence

+ Kabul, Afghanistan saw a horrific suicide attack that ISIS has claimed responsibility for this week, with more than 80 dead.

+ In Tokyo, a 26-year-old man killed 19 people and injured more than 20 in a stabbing attack at an assisted care facility. The attacker, Satoshi Uematsu, had formerly been an employee of the facility, and reportedly told police “It’s better that the disabled disappear.”

+ Fort Myers police believe the club shooting at a teen party that left two teenagers dead and 18 injured may have been gang-related violence. “There are multiple shooters. There are multiple locations they were shooting from. Exactly what triggered it, we do not know,” said Fort Myers interim police chief Dennis Eads.

Grab Bag

+ A Hilton ad features a same-sex couple, and predictably, conservatives are mad about it.

+ The World Health Organization is considering how it can change its diagnostic classification of trans people and move away from the medical and cultural understanding of trans identity as a mental illness while also still allowing trans people to access the care they need through insurers and healthcare providers, many of which require a diagnosis of a “gender-related mental disorder” for access to transition-related care.

+ Teju Cole on the superhero photographs of the Black Lives Matter movement.

+ On Donald Trump’s fractured, contradictory stance towards LGBT people.

It’s worth asking, however: When do the lives of LGBT people matter to Donald Trump? His support for LGBT protections appear to extend solely to terrorist attacks. Take heart: If you, as a queer person, should be targeted by ISIS, Trump is on your side. But that’s about it. Should you want to be able to marry your partner, patronize a business without being openly discriminated against, be out at work without the fear of losing your job, adopt children, get HIV medication, or escape the horror of conversion therapy as a minor, Trump represents a profound threat to your basic human rights.

+ Christina Xu used Twitter to organize an open letter from young Asian-Americans to their families about why they need to care about police violence against Black Americans.

+ Unsurprisingly but still significantly, a study found that schools with gay-straight alliances had fewer incidences of bullying and students felt safer.

+ Six more city officials have been charged in connection with the Flint water crisis, bringing the total number of people charged to nine.

Dee Whigham, Black Trans Woman, Becomes At Least The 16th Trans Person Murdered in 2016

For the second time this month, we’re reporting on the murder of a Black trans woman in America. This time I’m sorry to say that it was 25 year old Dee Whigham of Shubuta, Mississippi. She’s at least the 16th trans person murdered in America this year, and continues the trend of mostly Black trans women being victims of violence. Her family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for her burial (warning for misgendering).

Whagham was found murdered, stabbed to death, at a Best Western in Ocean Springs, Mississippi on Saturday night, July 23rd. While she was, like so many of our slain trans sisters, initially identified as a man by police, thankfully her sisters corrected that information and had her identified as the woman that she was. The murder is being investigated as a possible hate crime. Thanks to hotel security cameras, police have released a photo of a man they think may be connected to the murder and are asking for help in identifying him.

Dee Whigham was just 25 years old when she was murdered.

According to her family, Whigham was a newly graduated RN who was a hard worker and was even working extra shifts, overtime and a second job to help take care of her mother. According to her sister, Denisha, she was “truly a special person to [her] friends and family.” She was on a vacation with friends to visit the 7th Annual Gulf Coast Black Rodeo over the weekend when her life was taken from her.

Why the fuck is this still going on? Why don’t people see Black trans women as human beings? Why don’t Black Lives Matter? I’m tired of this. I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I breathe a sigh of relief when I see a name and realize it isn’t one of my friends. Honestly, cis people, and especially cis men, step it the fuck up. I’m trying to be optimistic about the progress that we’re making, about the good things that are happening and the allies and protections we’re gaining, but it’s hard when this keeps happening every couple weeks.

Another Black trans woman, Dee Dee Dodds, was murdered not even two weeks ago. At this point last year, we knew about fifteen trans women who had been murdered, which means that despite all the “progress” that trans people have been making in the media, in courthouses and in the halls of Congress, trans people are being murdered at the same rate they were last year, when we had a record number of reported trans murders. So far this year, we have this list of known trans people who have been murdered, but we can’t be sure how many more we’ve lost.

Monica Loera, 43 years old

Jasmine Sierra, 52

Kayden Clarke, 24

Veronica Banks Cano, 40

Maya Young, 25

Demarkis Stansberry, 30

Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson, 16

Kourtney Yochum, 32

Shante Thompson, 34

Keyonna Blakeney, 22

Reecey Walker, 32

Mercedes Successful, 32

Amos Beede, 38

Goddess Diamond, 20

Dee Dee Dodds, 22

And now Dee Whigham, 25

Again, I have to give credit to Venus Selenite, a Black trans woman writer and poet, who tweeted about Whigham’s murder this morning and brought it to my attention. She’s doing amazingly important work, and if you can support her in any way, please do. It’s important that we not just mourn Black trans women when they are murdered, but support and uplift them in life.

News Fix: Federal Lawsuits Take On Trans Students’ Rights in Wisconsin and Maryland

feature image via shutterstock

Two Lawsuits Regarding Trans Students Rights

+ Two major federal lawsuits, one out of Wisconsin and one out of Maryland, will highlight issues of trans students’ bathroom access in schools. In both cases, schools have attempted to force trans students to either use unisex bathrooms or the bathroom/locker room associated with the gender they were assigned at birth. In both cases, the trans students in question have articulated how this policy is harming them and their educational experience:

The Talbot County, Maryland student, called M.A.B. in the lawsuit, is interested in joining the school soccer team but said the lack of locker room access makes it difficult to participate or bond with other boys. The single-occupancy bathroom is also far from his classes, forcing him to wait longer to use the bathroom than other students and has made him late to physical education class. The Kenosha, Wisconsin student, Ash Whitaker, who, due to medical issues, has to drink a lot of water, tried to stop going to the bathroom at school, endangering his health.

One very disturbing detail of the Wisconsin lawsuit is the school district was apparently requiring school staff to make openly trans students wear green “identifying” bracelets, a terrifying prospect given the risk that trans students are often at for violence from other students and staff without being explicitly labeled.

There likely won’t be a verdict in these suits for some time, but the legal precedent set by them may be significant in the years to come.

Election News

+ Black women are the US demographic most concerned about the outcome of the presidential election, polling finds, with 3 out of 4 Black women “strongly afraid” of what will happen if Trump wins.

+ Donald Trump gave a speech at the last night of the Republican National Convention last night. It was very scary, both intentionally and not, and also very, very factually incorrect. Here’s the annotated and fact-checked version from NPR.

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Sports & Justice

+ The NBA has announced it will move its 2017 All-Star Game out of North Carolina to protest HB2, causing North Carolina to lose “millions” in revenue from hosting. New Orleans is considered a likely new location.

+ New York Liberty and Indiana Fever WNBA players are uniting to support Black Lives Matter and draw attention to the movement, and aren’t backing down even after being fined by the WNBA and criticized in the media. They’ve staged a strategic media blackout, refusing to answer reporters’ questions about basketball and instead inviting them to ask questions about their stance.

“We feel like America has a problem with the police brutality that’s going on with black lives around here, and we just want to use our voices and use our platform to advocate for that,” said [Tanisha Wright of the New York Liberty]. “Just because someone says ‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean that other lives don’t matter. People put out this imaginary ‘black lives only matter’ whenever people say, ‘Black lives matter.’ What we’re saying is, ‘Black lives matter, too.’ Period.”

Police/Prison

+ This week the Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter DC, and Million Hoodies NYC coordinated protest actions in DC and NY calling for “officers who are interested in justice” to stop paying dues to the Fraternal Order of Police and in NY, for the firing of Wayne Isaacs, the officer who killed Delrawn Small. As of Wednesday, ten activists were arrested at the action in NYC.

+ A woman with bipolar disorder broke down while testifying in court about her traumatic rape and ran out of the courtroom; her mother was told she would be taken to be “treated in a mental health facility,” but she was instead taken to county jail and held there for a month under a witness bond, “a law that allows a witness to be held without bail to ensure they show up to testify.”

+ Police Lt. Brian Rice, the highest-ranking officer involved with Freddie Gray’s death in a police van in Baltimore, MD, was found not guilty on all charges. He had been charged with involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office.

+ On how environmental justice and police brutality are crucially interconnected issues.

+ Earlier this week the North Miami police department was very terse and vague about why one of their officers fired three times at a 23-year-old unarmed autistic man and an unarmed behavioral therapist who was working with him, saying they needed to investigate what had happened; now they’re saying that the officer had perceived Rinaldo, the autistic man, to be a threat to Charles Kinsey, his behavioral therapist, and was trying to “protect” Kinsey — even though Kinsey is the one who ended up shot, and Kinsey is on video clearly articulating to officers that he’s in no danger, Rinaldo is unarmed, and that there was no need to use force.

Voter ID Laws

+ A Milwaukee federal court has ruled against a restrictive voter ID law, and says in their decision that “voters who could not provide acceptable photo identification must be allowed to seek and use an affidavit that confirms their identity.” The voter ID law and others like it have long been criticized for disenfranchising marginalized voters who may be poor, young, of color, and/or all of the above.

+ In Texas, a federal appeals court has ruled that a voter ID law there discriminates against minority voters, and has told the lower court to “devise a remedy” by November.

Law & Order

+ NC legislators have made “minor changes” to discriminatory law HB2, which “[restore] workers’ ability to use state law to sue over workplace discrimination, but leaves sexual orientation and gender identity unprotected.”

+ Pakistan will pass legislation to prevent “honor killings;” the law will do away with a loophole that “permits the family of the victim to legally pardon the killer.”

+ Two people, Rashad Deihim and Kailyn Bonia, were convicted in the case of raping a then-16 year old girl and broadcasting it over Snapchat in 2014.

+ In Georgia, the practice of “upskirting” — taking a photo or video up someone’s skirt without their consent — has been ruled legal. The judges say that the act isn’t technically criminal — even though it’s only because the technology used to take these photos or videos wasn’t invented yet when the state’s peeping tom laws were written.

+ The US Justice Department is suing to stop a merger between healthcare giants Aetna and Humana, saying that it violates antitrust laws and would raise healthcare costs for the average citizen.

Grab Bag

+ Corey Menafee is a dishwasher at Yale University who broke a decorative window panel out of opposition to the scene it depicted, which depicted enslaved Africans laboring, and was subsequently fired. Now Yale has rehired him, although they’re not acknowledging any validity to his act of protest and are instead framing Menafee as remorseful.

+ New England prep school Philips-Exeter Academy is facing criticism about its handling of sexual assault between students, including a case where administrators decided to have an assailant bake bread each week and deliver it to his victim, which forced her to come in direct contact with him at least weekly.

+ Crystal Raquel Cash, a trans woman in Indiana, was shot in the jaw by Gerald Duane Lewis, who is allegedly affiliated with a hate group according to the SPLC. Fortunately, Cash survived the attack.

+ Roger Ailes, former chair and CEO of Fox News, has been ousted at Fox after accusations of sexual harassment; he will be replaced by Rupert Murdoch, who is also truly, truly awful.

+ Planes from a US-led coalition killed “dozens” of Syrian citizens in an airstrike this week, with estimates of the deaths ranging from “at least 56” to “above 120.” Syria is calling for an end to the airstrike campaign said to target ISIS, and for development of better guidelines and accountability from the West.

In a statement, the president of the Syrian opposition coalition, Anas Alabdah, said the bloodshed indicates “a major loophole in the current operational rules followed by the international coalition in conducting strikes in populated areas.”

He added: “It is essential that such investigation not only result in revised rules of procedure for future operations, but also inform accountability for those responsible for such major violations.”

+ Leslie Jones talked with Seth Myers about Ghostbusters and about her recent experiences with gendered racist harassment on Twitter, and about Twitter’s failure to address it. She says that she’s spoken with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and that “the social media network needs to make the reformation of their weak harassment policy a bigger priority to protect users that don’t have Jones’ access and platform.”

News Fix: Life Sentence for Gang Member Who Killed Trans Teen Mercedes Williamson

We’re trying a new approach with our news coverage starting this week! Instead of posting two link roundups per week, as we’ve been doing, we will instead post at least two stand-alone stories throughout the week, with one longer link roundup at the end of each week. Thank you for reading!

by Yvonne and Rachel

Man Pleads Guilty to the Murder of Mercedes Williamson

via the Sun Herald

+ On Tuesday, Josh Vallum, a member of the Latin Kings gang, pled guilty to the murder of 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson in an Alabama court. He was sentenced to life in prison. The murder remains under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice to determine if it was a hate crime. Vallum tried to use a “panic defense” in court, saying he beat Williamson with a hammer once he found out she was trans. However witnesses say he was in a sexual relationship with Williamson and said Williamson would be killed if the Latin Kings found out he was in a relationship with her.

The Daily Dot interviewed members of the trans community about their thoughts on Vallum’s sentencing. Elizabeth Marie Rivera, a member of New York’s vogue ballroom community, expressed complex concerns about the sentencing.

“It’s a double-edged sword: At least something was done, but at the same time it doesn’t heal that pain,” Rivera told the Daily Dot.

“I started thinking about all my black and brown transgender sisters, and how their cases lay cold,” said Rivera. “Why does this case suddenly get this outcome? Was it because he was affiliated with the Latin Kings? Is it because Mercedes was white?”

Protests and Police Violence

+ Diamond Reynolds, who filmed the death of her boyfriend Philando Castile at the hands of police, went on The View to talk about the experience.

+ Protesters across the globe took to the streets this past weekend to demonstrate against police violence; in Baton Rouge, where Alton Sterling was killed, dozens were arrested, including activist DeRay McKesson.

+ Several countries, including the Bahamas, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates have warned their citizens about traveling to the US due to the danger of police violence.

+ WNBA team the Minnesota Lynx wore shirts that said “Change Starts With Us: Justice and Accountability,” as well as Alton Sterling and Philando Castile’s name and “Black Lives Matter” before their game on Saturday; four off-duty police officers who were hired as security for the game walked off the job in response.

+ NBA stars Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James opened the ESPY awards with a statement about the state of race relations and gun violence in America.

“The four of us are talking to our fellow athletes with the county watching because we cannot ignore the realities of the current state of America,” Anthony began. “The events of the past week have put a spotlight on the injustice, distrust and anger that have plagued so many of us. The system is broken, the problems are not new, the violence is not new and the racial divide definitely is not new. But, the urgency to create change is at an all-time high.”

+ Alva Braziel of Houston was killed by police officers in the early hours of Saturday morning this week. Officers say that they saw him in the street with revolver; Braziel’s wife says he was out with his gun because someone had stolen a horse of his.

+ Chris LeDay, an Air Force veteran who posted the first video of Alton Sterling’s death by police, was detained for 26 hours after sharing the video. Police detained him at his job at Dobbins Air Reserve Base and was led out in shackles. He was only released after paying $1,200 in traffic fines.

+ Why the deaths of Latinos at the hands of police haven’t drawn as much attention

Law & Order

+ Following UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s resignation, Theresa May will be the UK’s new prime minister, and will be the first woman to hold the office since Margaret Thatcher.

+ Chelsea Manning’s attorneys have been able to speak with Chelsea after initially being denied contact after she was hospitalized last week; they are now confirming reports that she attempted to take her own life, and continue to express dismay that that confidential medical information was leaked to news media. They say that Chelsea would like to focus on her recovery and not be burdened by further concerns about invasive breaches of her privacy.

+ A longform piece on the frequency with which police still use a cheap, unreliable drug test that’s been proven to produce high rates of false positives.

+ A coalition of LGBT rights groups will air an ad spot about trans bathroom rights at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality says “The night Donald Trump accepts the nomination, America will be watching …And the people we really need to reach will be watching Fox News.”

The Attack in Nice, France

+ 84 people are dead and 202 are injured after a large truck plowed through a crowded street of people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. The truck drove for 1.1 miles through the street of people, before police shot and killed the suspect. He’s been identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a delivery truck driver and native of Tunisia. No organized group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

LGBT Rights

+ More people than ever before are seeking gender confirmation surgery in Britain, and wait times are increasing as a result.

+ Gay and bisexual men in France can now donate blood after the country lifted the 33-year-old ban. However, like in the U.S., “men who have sex with men” are still required to have abstained from sex for a year before donating blood.

+ On Wednesday Cleveland city council members unanimously approved an ordinance that allows trans people to use restrooms that is consistent with their gender.

+ The YMCA of Metro Chicago crafted guidelines to accommodate transgender patrons, which include allowing them to access restroom and locker rooms that match their gender.

Grab Bag

+ An inmate killed two bailiffs at a Michigan courthouse during an escape attempt before officers fatally shot him. Larry Darnell Gordon was facing possible life in prison for rape and kidnapping charges involving a 17-year-old girl.

+ On the anti-choice proponents trying to hijack Black Lives Matter.

+ A new study in Boston explores whether the air inside Boston’s Black hair salons is safe, finding that “levels of the carcinogen benzene were higher than the EPA’s acceptable levels in all 10 salons [tested].”

+ The black man found hanging from a tree in Piedmont Park has been identified as 22-year-old gay man, Michael George Smith Jr. Authorities have confirmed his death as a suicide. Based on his social media posts, his family did not accept him and that might have been a motive for killing himself.

+ Orlando Cruz, the first openly gay boxer, will be dedicating his fight on July 15, to the victims of the Pulse shooting, which claimed the lives of four of his friends.

+ Construction of an LGBT senior apartments began in San Diego. The project will be completed in two years and will have “have 76 rent-controlled units for qualified people 55 and older.”

Black Trans Woman Deeniquia Dodds Is At Least The 15th Trans Person Murdered In The U.S. This Year

Feature image via Deeniquia Dodds Facebook

The devastating trend continues: Today, NBC News reported that Black trans woman Deeniquia Dodds was shot in Washington D.C. on the fourth of July. Deeniquia, known as “Dee Dee” to her friends, was taken to the hospital where she was kept alive on life support for ten days before passing away yesterday. According to Dee Dee’s Facebook page, she attended Woodson High School in the greater D.C. area and graduated in 2012. She was 22 years old.

LGBT rights activist and family spokesperson Earline Budd told NBC: “Her murder reminds us all of how often the transgender community is targeted for violence in our society.”

Indeed, Dee Dee became at least the 15th trans person murdered in the United States this year, adding her name to the following heartbreaking list.

Monica Loera (Austin, TX), 43 years old

Jasmine Sierra (Bakersfield, CA), 52 years old

Kayden Clarke (Mesa, AZ), 24 years old

Veronica Banks Cano (San Antonio, TX) 40 years old

Maya Young (Philadelphia, PA), 25 years old

Demarkis Stansberry (Baton Rouge, LA), 30 years old

Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson (Burlington, IA), 16 years old

Kourtney Yochum (Los Angeles, CA), 32 years old

Shante Thompson (Houston, TX), 34 years old

Keyonna Blakeney (Washington D.C.), 22 years old

Reecey Walker (Wichita, Kansas), 32 years old

Mercedes Successful (Haines City, FL), 32 old

Amos Beede (Burrlington, VT), 38 years old

Goddess Diamond (New Orleans, LA), 20 years old

Dee Dee Dodds (Washington D.C.), 22 years old

While transgender rights and representation move slowly forward in this country, trans people continue to be targets of political scapegoating. This year’s Republican National Committee platform, which began publicly taking shape this week, has added amendments to deny trans people the right to use restrooms that match their gender identity and apparently uses regressive and combative language to describe both gay and trans people.

The longer this power-grabbing false propaganda continues against trans people on a national stage, and the longer pop culture portrayals of trans people continue to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, the harder it’s going to be to stop the dehumanization that fuels this pandemic of violence — particularly because the majority of trans people who are murdered are Black trans women who are forced to live at the terrifying intersection of racism and transmisogyny.

Our Trans Editor, Mey Valdivia Rude, added that it’s time for cis people to step up when they say that trans rights are having a moment right now.

Things are supposed to be getting better. Cis people are noticing us and writing about us and making TV shows and movies about us. But really it just seems like things are getting better for our “allies.” Trans people, mostly trans women of color, and again, mostly Black trans women who sleep with men, are being murdered at a higher rate than any measured year before. It’s hard to look at all the articles being written about how this is our time and our moment in history and not explode in anger when so many of our Black and Brown sisters and elders aren’t being allowed to see this “historic moment” happen by the same cis society that is supposedly giving us this moment right now. Trans people, trans women of color, Black trans women need to be protected, prioritized and not fucking murdered.

Here is a list of 24 actions you can take right now to help trans women of color survive.

A vigil to honor Dee Dee will be held near her family’s home in the courtyard at 5255 Clay Terrace NE on Saturday at 6:30 p.m.

Deeniquia Dodds. Say her name.

Misty Snow and Misty Plowright Make History As Openly Trans Women Nominated for Congress

Mistys Make History with Democratic Nominations

+ Misty Snow and Misty Plowright are the first trans people to be nominated by their political parties for a Congressional seat, although it is unlikely that they’ll see victory in November. Misty Snow’s platform included “increasing the minimum wage and [criticizing] her opponent for supporting restrictions on abortion,” whereas Misty Plowright focused on “an anti-establishment platform, pledging to get money out of politics.”

Misty Snow, left; Misty Plowright, right

The races the two women are in — Misty Snow is running for a Utah senate seat and Misty Plowright for Colorado’s conservative 5th Congressional District — are unlikely to be won by Democrats, but some say that nominating historic openly trans candidates is a way to make the races meaningful. “We’re going to lose anyway; we might as well make a statement about inclusion,” Utah state Sen. Jim Dabakis, who is gay, told The Associated Press.”

Law & Order

+ India’s supreme court has refused to hear an appeal of the law that criminalizes gay sex, a major setback to having the law struck down.

+ Rep. Alan Grayson and Rep. Jared Polis want the FDA to stop restricting blood donation from gay and bisexual men and trans women who have sex with men or other trans women.

+ A federal judge has struck down parts of a Mississippi law that would have empowered many groups of people to discriminate against LGBT people if they believed their religion called for it, as well as specific anti-trans language. Although the parts of the law that allow private individuals to do this are still intact, the judge struck down the aspects of the law that dealt with government officials, and would have allowed county clerks to refuse to marry people.

+ Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton thinks schools should be able to out trans kids as trans to their parents, and is opposing current federal guidelines that say trans students (and all students) have a right to privacy.

+ The SCOTUS ruling on abortion restrictions in Texas will likely begin affecting other states quickly, beginning with Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Alabama.

+ ThinkProgress takes a look at states where gun legislation has changed over the past few years, and finds that, among other things, “in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, the number of laws enacted to loosen gun restrictions increased by 75 percent after those states endured a mass shooting. And even in states where Democrats controlled the legislature, mass shootings had no significant effect on laws enacted afterwards.”

+ A NY state senator is advancing bills that would give police more power and individual citizens fewer rights when it comes to “terrorism” — but it’s not even very clear how that’s being defined.

Who exactly would be publicly “outed” in this registry? Croci’s office was unable to provide a clear answer. AlterNet had numerous back-and-forth conversations with Croci’s spokesperson, Christine A. Geed, who first said that only “convicted terrorists” would be included on the list but later proclaimed the following over the phone: “This is giving law enforcement the opportunity to say that a person might not have been convicted of a crime but all the earmarks of this person having allegiance to ISIS are there so you probably want to watch. This is not necessarily for people being convicted, if there is information and documentation that associates them with a terrorist act. I am just assuming those are the type of people they would be looking for.”

+ The Iowa Supreme Court has refused to restore voting rights to more than 20,000 of the state’s ex-felons, saying that “we conclude our constitution permits persons convicted of a felony to be disqualified from voting in Iowa until pardoned or otherwise restored to the rights of citizenship.”

+ Meagan Taylor, the black trans woman who was traveling to Kansas City with a friend to attend a funeral and was instead arrested when hotel staff suspected her of performing sex work and police found Taylor’s own hormones without a prescription, has now settled her lawsuit with the hotel that she was staying in.

+ Washington DC has passed a minimum wage law that will “increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2020 and index it for inflation.”

Police/Prison/Violence

+ Police officers in Tupelo, Mississippi have allegedly “shot and killed an unarmed man and allowed a police dog to mutilate him” after a routine traffic stop. The victim was Antwun “Ronnie” Shumpert, a 37-year-old father of five.

+ Campaign Zero, the anti-police brutality campaign run by Samuel Sinyangwe, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson, has released a data visualization project that shows where police contracts and bill of rights can empower police violence and make it difficult or impossible to find justice when police violence occurs.

*In Nevada, an officer cannot be suspended without pay during the course of an investigation.
*Cleveland’s police union contract erases records of discipline after two years, and only six months for written discipline.
*Louisiana statewide police bill of rights imposing a 30-day delay on interrogating officers.
*Florida police bill of rights giving officers access to all available existing evidence in a case against them before being interrogated.
*And in Wichita, Kan., the police contract gives officers access to the names and addresses of all witnesses before an interrogation, which critics say fosters intimidation and in many cases discourages witnesses from coming forward with police complaints.

+ A piece on the LGBT youth in the adult criminal justice system, many of whom are housed with adults and some of whom haven’t even been tried for a crime yet.

J.W. tells me that he used to identify as bisexual. He says that after he disclosed his sexual orientation, a corrections officer assumed he was promiscuous and called him a “ho.” The message was loud and clear: Bisexual individuals would be singled out. J.W. says he now identifies as straight. As someone who works to educate LGBT youths about their legal rights, I can’t help but wonder if he is avoiding identifying as bisexual to protect himself from more mistreatment. What is certain, and worth remembering during Pride month, is that there are many LGBT youths in adult jails across this country. High rates of family rejection, hostile teachers and classmates at school as well as inappropriate foster care placements take their toll on LGBT youths. They may run away from home, skip school or abuse substances to cope – all activities that increase their chances of a brush with the law. LGBT youths are also more likely to be prosecuted for age-appropriate consensual sexual activity than their peers.

Grab Bag

+ A look at the pastors who celebrated the Orlando shooting.

+ DeRay Mckesson has joined the Baltimore school district as interim chief human capital officer.

+ Donald Trump brags about his philanthropy, but a financial investigation by the Post finds that he’s actually given very little — less than $10,000 over the past seven years, despite grand promises about supporting charitable casues.

+ A piece at Feministing on the increasing rates of anti-LGBT violence and what it means for our community.

LGBT people who experiences multiple forms of marginality experienced increasing incidences of violence, and certain groups were more likely to experience certain kinds of violence. For example, people of color were twice as likely as white people to experience physical violence. Undocumented people were four times as likely as documented people to experience physical violence. Lesbian survivors, on the other hand, were twice as likely as non-lesbians to experience verbal harassment.

+ Black Girls Code is opening a new office in Google’s New York building, which they will use as a classroom and a base for coordination.

+ A piece on how crucial phones are for LGBT homeless youth, and the LGBT Technology Partnership and Institute’s Connect 4 Life pilot program, which works to provide them.

+ Yet another finding that bisexuals are more likely to experience “psychological distress,” “heavy drinking,” and “heavy smoking.”.

Bisexuals reported the highest levels of psychological distress, which researchers believe could be a result of the marginalization they suffer in both mainstream society and the LGBTQ community.
“Combined with the relative scarcity of bisexual communities and organizations, this ostracizing may lead to social isolation, a risk factor for psychological distress,” researchers add.

+ There’s been a significant rise in hate crimes in the UK since the Brexit vote, with “over 100 incidents of racial abuse and hate crimes since the U.K. voted to leave the union last Thursday.”

+ The experiences of a lesbian bookstore owner in North Carolina after HB2, who’s seen business decrease significantly as tourists, authors and others avoid the state.

+ In the United Methodist Church, three openly gay candidates have been nominated to become bishops.

+ 31 scientific groups have written a letter to Congress asking them to take climate change more seriously.

Rebel Girls: These 6 Queer and Trans Trailblazers Made Political History

Hello, just as an introduction: Still not over the whole Hillary Clinton being the Democratic nominee for president situation. Has the magnitude of it set in, or maybe the incredible realization of how casual it is right now that a woman is running for president on a major party ticket? I hope so! Because we’re starting from there.

I’ve been seeing a lot of conversations online in the last two weeks about the women who shaped the path Hillary Clinton is now charting new ends to. There was Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president. There was Geraldine Ferraro, who was a VP on a major party ticket. I mean, I wrote an entire post about the women who had run for president throughout time, including Eileen F*cking Myles, because women running for the highest offices in the land is kind of my bag.

But it’s not just those women and firsts that matter. Women taking up space in politics means women taking up space at every level of the political world and in every branch of government, in every state and in every city. That’s what these six queer and trans women did. In my last installment of Rebel Girls, I briefed you on some of the badass glass ceiling crashers currently serving in office who are queer as f*ck. These six women came before them.

In what we all know by now is a sea of straight white men, these women dared to be out, loud, and proud when they were elected or appointed to office. And in doing so, they made history. These women were firsts on a national level. These women should be in history books. These women should be your new heroes.

Let’s do this thing. (As always. in ABC order.)

Althea Garrison

Sid Limitz/Election Ciddy

Althea Garrison was the first trans person ever elected to a state legislature. She was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1992 as a Republican and served one term there. If she had it her way, though, she would have served a hell of a lot longer: Garrison ran in 1982, 1986, and 2000, 2006, and 2010 for State House; ran for Boston City Council seats in 1991, 2003, and 2005; ran in 2001 to be Boston’s mayor; and ran in 2002 for State Senate.

Deborah Batts

via NYTimes

Deborah Batts currently serves on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, but she made history in 1994 when she became the first-ever openly LGBT African-American federal judge. (Bill Clinton appointed her to a vacant seat in 1989.) Her major cases include a toxic air pollution case related to the 9/11 attacks and also an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye, because that shitty book haunts us all.

Elaine Noble

Racking up more LGBT history points for Massachusetts is Elaine Noble, who was elected in 1975 and then served two terms in the state’s House of Representatives — making her the first openly gay candidate ever elected to a state legislative body. She was an LGBT activist as well as a politician, and braved a lot for her historic win: destruction of her campaign office and car, harassment of her supporters, and even stray bullets hitting windows. In overcoming those adds, she took her place in LGBT history as the second ever LGBT person elected to office, period, and the third openly LGBT elected official of any sort — including those who had come out in office. She later sought a seat in the US Senate and a Cambridge city council seat, but both times was unsuccessful. Oh, right, and she dated Rita Mae Brown for a while, NBFD.

Joanne Conte

Joanne Conte, the first openly trans person to be elected to a city council in the nation’s history, served on Arvada’s City Council for four years. She identified as a “raging activist” and wanted to make government more accessible and transparent. Unfortunately, pressure put on her by a tabloid to out herself as trans ultimately scrapped her political career, although not for lack of trying: She fought like hell to appear on the ballot for the Colorado House in 1994 after initially being denied a spot, although she then lost the campaign. On the bright side, she was able to then dedicate herself to her activism again — and ultimately did a hell of a lot to pave the way for the trans women who would and still will come after her.

Kathy Kozachenko

via Pride.com

Kathy Kozachenko won a seat on the Ann Arbor, Michigan city council in 1974, making her the first openly gay human to run for political office in the United States and motherfucking win win win no matter what. (Bonus points will be awarded for her party affiliation: the Human Rights Party.) Nancy Wechsler, who we will meet in a few seconds, served before her and came out while in office — but didn’t run as an out lesbian, whereas Kozachenko did.

Nancy Wechsler

via Old News

Nancy Wechsler came out as a lesbian while serving on the Ann Arbor City Council in 1973 at the age of 23 after an anti-LGBT hot mess at a local business. She didn’t seek re-election after coming out, paving the way for Kathy Kozachenko who we met a few sentences ago, and instead became a professional lesbian writer. All of this is to say that I am very proud to announce that Nancy Wechsler seems like she could be my soul twin.

Black Trans Woman Goddess Diamond Is The 14th Trans Person Murdered in the U.S. This Year

Feature image via Goddess Diamond’s Facebook

It is with a very heavy heart that I have to add more sad news onto an already devastating week. 20-year-old Black trans woman Goddess Diamond has been found murdered in New Orleans, making her the 14th known trans person killed in the United States this year. The New Orleans Advocate reported the brutal details of her death on June 9th, and though they noted that Goddess does present as a woman on her Facebook page, and though they were corrected about her identity by one of her co-workers the following day, they continue to misname and misgender Goddess throughout their original article and their updates to it. Black trans woman writer Venus Selenite was one of the first to report this as a murder of a trans woman, and has been fiercely advocating for people to pay attention to this horrible crime.

Diamond worked in customer service at Wal-Mart in the French Quarter. “When I asked her if she identified as a man or a woman, she told me that she would answer to both. But being that she was transitioning, I felt that it was the best to refer to her as a woman, and she agreed,” her co-worker, George Melichar, told The New Orleans Advocate. She “was very loved, and was very kind,” Melichar said. “And that’s what makes this more difficult. In addition to losing a friend, we lost an LGBT leader.”

Goddess Diamond via her Facebook

“Beloved,” “kind,” “leader”: These are the words we hear time and time again from the friends and families of trans women who have have been murdered. Yet trans women continue to be dehumanized and have their personhood and womanhood devalued by nearly universally damaging representation in pop culture, scapegoating political legislation, and even misgendering in their own obituaries. As these violent actions against them continue, so will the justifications for their deaths.

If you’d like to help Diamond’s family pay for her funeral costs, you can donate to the GoFundMe they’ve set up.

Since this time last year, 22 known trans people have been killed in this country. That’s a rate of nearly one murder every other week. These are the names we know of the trans people who have been murdered in 2016:

Monica Loera (Austin, TX), 43 years old

Jasmine Sierra (Bakersfield, CA), 52 years old

Kayden Clarke (Mesa, AZ), 24 years old

Veronica Banks Cano (San Antonio, TX) 40

Maya Young (Philadelphia, PA), 25

Demarkis Stansberry (Baton Rouge, LA), 30

Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson (Burlington, IA), 16

Kourtney Yochum (Los Angeles, CA), 32

Shante Thompson (Houston, TX), 34

Keyonna Blakeney (Washington D.C.), 22

Reecey Walker (Wichita, Kansas), 32

Mercedes Successful (Haines City, FL), 32

Amos Beede (Burrlington, VT), 38

Goddess Diamond (New Orleans, LA), 20

I want to leave you with Mey Rude’s thoughts she posted when Mercedes Successful was found murdered just a few weeks ago:

It hurts every single time we hear about another trans woman of color being murdered. It hurts knowing that all of my trans women of color sisters have to fear for their lives just by being themselves. And it just keeps on happening again and again and again. We’re not even halfway through the year and we’re currently on pace to pass the number of trans people murdered all of last year in the US.

Goddess Diamond. Say her name.

Drawn to Comics Interviews “Kim & Kim” Writer Magdelene Visaggio About Punk Rock Sci Fi and Trans Characters

by rory midhani

There are few things that I’m more obsessed with than good representation in media for trans women. I’m desperate for it, I seek it out wherever I can find it, and when I do, I try to spread it as far as I can. As my next installment of that spreading, I’m going to be talking about Kim & Kim, a punk-rock sci-fi bounty hunting adventure starring two awesome women. I know, I know; it already sounds awesome, how could it get even better? One of the Kims (Kim Q) and the writer, Magdalene Visaggio, are trans women, and they’re both really cool.

I’ve read the first issue, which comes out in stores in July, and it is fun, queer and hectic as hell. It throws in pieces of Cowboy Bebop, Tank Girl and grrrl punk and mixes them in a totally new way that draws you in instantly and doesn’t let go. It has the youthfulness of Runaways, but with a little more edge, and the strong queer characters of something written by Marguerite Bennett, and anyone who likes anything that I’ve mentioned will fall instantly in love with this. I interviewed writer Magdalene Visaggio about her new comic from Black Mask and what she, as a trans writer, hopes trans readers will get out of her comic.

click to enlarge

Mey: This is your first work in published comics; what were some of the things that inspired you to write Kim & Kim, whether it’s other comics or something you wanted to contribute to the medium? You just have such a specific world that you’ve created and I’d love to know how you thought it up.

Mags: I wish I could point to a core idea or goal behind Kim & Kim, but really its more an impulse and a decision to do something brazenly fun that doesn’t have a dark sensibility. In a lot of ways, Kim & Kim is a writing exercise for me in getting past the Big Concept. I tend to get really caught up in overarching ideas and big heady themes that intimidate me to the point of paralysis; Kim & Kim’s themes emerged naturally over time instead of being something I set out to accomplish.

The major things that inspired Kim & Kim were books like Squirrel Girl, Mark Waid and Chris Samnees run on Daredevil, which returned the character to his swashbuckling ways after over a decade as the Job of the Marvel universe, and the current run of Silver Surfer by Dan Slott and Mike Allred, alongside shows including Broad City, Cowboy Bebop, and FLCL. It’s kind of got the throwing-a-bunch-of-crap-into-a-pot-until-it-tastes-good approach to writing. And the thing is, I spent so much time writing really relentlessly grim comics. I was super into grimdark when I was in college, so invested in the gritty brutal realism and moral complexity of shows like Battlestar Galactica. I wanted to get away from that; I mean, I have darker books in development, but nothing as frustratingly dour as that. The book also has some serious, serious influences in terms of character and voice from Imogen Binnie’s phenomenal Nevada, although Kim & Kim is about a billion times less intelligent. It also plays with my fascination with subcultures, specifically rock subcultures and the punk aesthetic.

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Mey: How did you come up with these two characters? They play so well off of each other and I’d love to find out how you built that relationship.

Mags: I didn’t have a dynamic in mind when I started, although I mean the crazy one/sensible one structure is pretty sound and has endured for a reason. The original character sketches I wrote out for the Kims don’t really resemble the characters who they turned out to be; originally they were going to be much more damaged human beings. Kim Q was originally very prickly, very dejected, very cynical, and kind of mean, where Kim D was originally much more of a rebel for the sake of rebellion. Their personalities really started emerging as I wrote and I developed a clearer idea of what I wanted the book to feel like. There was never a moment where I decided this is the kind of person Kim D is, or this is their dynamic. They just kind of came alive on the page in a way I didn’t really anticipate.

I mentioned Broad City above, and in really broad (natch) strokes, Kim Q is Ilana and Kim D is Abbi – but these aren’t really clear parallels. Broad City inspired their bickering affection and their aimlessness, and helped me get a much clearer sense of how that aimlessness would play out in a stressful setting; originally the first issue ended with a giant fight scene. But it never felt right. So I cut it, and I found my girls here just smoking out on their van and bitching about their friends. The primary motivator for the Kims is stress and desperation, and in really broad strokes, Kim Q is very nonchalant about stressful things and Kim D is the one who has a fire lit under her ass to get shit sorted. So mainly what she does is she points Kim Q in the right direction and Kim Q ends up breaking things in a productive manner, more or less. At least that’s how they hope it goes. More often than not, though, Kim D loses her motivation halfway through a task or Kim Q breaks all the wrong things and they end up worse off than before, which just gives them another hole to climb out of. But that’s who they are. They’re climbers.

Mey:  What specifically do you hope trans readers will get out of reading this comic?

Mags: Hopefully the same thing I got out of it while writing it: that your shit is worth working out. That you get to have a future. That, hard as it can be to remember sometimes and as all-consuming as it can feel, this isn’t the only thing about you. Kim & Kim was part of my own acceptance process, and one of the biggest things I needed to deal with was that sense of well, okay, there’s another side. There’s an end goal beyond being a woman, and that’s having a life and being a functional human being with like, friends and magazine subscriptions and charges of tax evasion or whatever. I wanted to get into the headspace of a trans woman who wasn’t defined by being trans the way I still feel defined by being trans. Because like, the point with Kim Q’s transness is that it’s just a part of her. She’s trans, that’s a thing you need to know to really get her, but its not something that’s always super relevant to conversations she’s having or shit she’s up to. She’s trans. She’s queer. But she’s got all this other stuff going on, and at the end of the day, that’s what I wanted to communicate to my trans brothers and sisters out there. It’s worth figuring out your shit because when all is said and done, you can go right back to being a real person – just so much more of one than you had been before.

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Mey: I feel like the writing, art and colors and even the lettering really come together super well to create a great punk rock futuristic world and feeling that permeates the entire comic. What was it like working with Claudia Aguirre, Zakk Saam and Eva Cabrera?

Mags: I’ll start with Zakk because letterers don’t get enough credit. Zakk is a workhorse who really makes sure he understands your book and your goals, and then letters it in a way that reinforces that. It’s not just bare lettering; he supports the comic in this really huge way. He went out of his way to develop a fantastic style guide for the book including some really interesting creative choices that, sadly, most people will totally ignore because good lettering is invisible. Zakk is amazing and I love him and his work. Eva and Claudia have this very, very deep collaboration with me and editor Katy Rex. I have to put this out there right at the outset: we’re all super close friends and that makes working together actually really fun and fulfilling and affirming, because were constantly rooting for one another. Eva and Claudia are supremely talented at capturing the mood I’m after in ways I never anticipated, and they love the Kims as much as I do; it comes out in the work they do to give each Kim a unique aesthetic, a unique visual personality that has done a lot to inform my own ongoing conversation with these characters as a writer.

click to enlarge

Mey: Is there anything else you’d like to say to readers or potential readers?

Mags: We live in an extraordinary time in comics, when a weird-ass queer book like Kim & Kim can find a publisher in the mainstream mass market comics market instead of being relegated to the underground press. That’s amazing, and it’s so worth reflecting on. The market right now is in the really intense churn as publishers are reaching after new, different audiences in fits and starts, because its worth doing and it needs to do it to grow. Comics are still dominated by science fiction and fantasy (and there’re a lot of reasons for that) but the growth of the medium, its increasing maturity over the last decade or so, is really fascinating. I have been blown away by the response to this book by the legions of queer women, cis and trans alike, who have really embraced Kim & Kim’s wannabe punk craziness because they’re thrilled to see any books that take them and their experience seriously. I really hope we’re able to keep this momentum moving and see a greater and greater share of comic properties and comic creators who can help communicate to people like us. There are maybe three or four trans women working in mainstream comics, counting myself. That’s a serious poverty of perspective, and if Kim & Kim does well, maybe we can count on publishers giving more opportunities to our community.

New Releases (June 8)

Harrow County #13

Adventures of Supergirl #3

Black Canary #12

Harley Quinn and Her Gang of Harleys #3

Supergirl: The Silver Age Omnibus HC

Wonder Woman Rebirth #1

Sex Criminals Vol. 3: Three The Hard Way TP

Shutter #22

The Wicked + The Divine #20

Agents of SHIELD #6

Captain Marvel Vol 1: Earth’s Mightiest Hero TP

Howard the Duck #8

Poe Dameron #3

Adventure Time #53

Goldie Vance #3

Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy #1

Merry Men #1

Princeless: Raven the Pirate Princess Vol 2: Free Women TP

Vampirella #4

Xena Warrior Princess #3

Welcome to Drawn to Comics! From diary comics to superheroes, from webcomics to graphic novels – this is where we’ll be taking a look at comics by, featuring and for queer ladies. So whether you love to look at detailed personal accounts of other people’s lives, explore new and creative worlds, or you just love to see hot ladies in spandex, we’ve got something for you.

If you have a comic that you’d like to see me review, you can email me at mey [at] autostraddle [dot] com.

Sometime In June

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Those were the words of my first literary heroine, Anais Nin. Her expurgated diary Henry and June was given to me at the start of my medical transition. As I molted into the early stages of femininity, I was a co-conspirator in Nin’s love affairs. Moving between June and Henry Miller, I watched the way her performance for her lovers adapted to their presence. Her desire to know women exceeded her need to love men. Journeying beyond the combative nature of her relationship with Henry, the degree of intimacy she had with June was an oasis. I didn’t know this would be applicable to my life a few years into transition. One can never know in the moment if they have taken notice of what will be essential for the future self. But images embossed on my memories have beseeched me to reveal them. The heat of last summer and the familiarity of a woman made me susceptible to the vulnerabilities present in Nin’s diaries.

Winter bypassed spring and turned into summer, none being able to mark the moment of this shift. The extremities of this adjustment were told by our clothing without a word. Limbs that were once concealed by fleece were brazen in their display. This myriad of palpitating flesh embellished the grid of Manhattan. On a sidewalk seized by restless movements, she and I stepped closer into the space that had separated us. The freshness of the season had not yet worn off; the fragment of our mind that forgets what it’s like in the beginning. Keeping abreast of the passersby, the evidence of our intimacy was in the way we carried our hands. They were strategically placed so when they touched, it could be disguised as a perpetual accident. In honor of our silent dance, those near us were careful to walk around us instead of in-between.

Illustration by Ellie Irineu.

The genesis of this new kinship was overseen by the climate. Heat from the low hanging sun met a barrier of excess clothing on my skin. In response to puberty, I formed this barricade when the swimming pools and foliage of Tennessee had no place for me as a transgender adolescent. Shame, fear, and discomfort were all swaddled in a variety of weather inappropriate clothing. This reflex of being hidden persisted in adulthood. From beneath a canopy of fabric, I turned to look at my companion. With the ease of past summers spent in the sun’s line of vision, beads of sweat on her skin were condensed into droplets. All that was uncomplicated with her was a preoccupation within me.

“Let’s go in here,” were the sounds formed by her pink mouth; the same shade of pink could be traced back to my own lips. The shared tube of lipstick had acted as the liaison for our limited physical contact. She grabbed my hand and extracted me from the cyclical stream of bodies. Our close proximity remained as we entered a store spacious enough for us to separate. She exchanged my hand for a sale rack of clothing, reveling in the unrelenting need for reinvention at the start of a new season. Holding possible reincarnations of who I could be to my body, I scrunched my nose at the pink camisole she chose.

“Aren’t you warm in that? It’s 80 degrees outside,” she asked. If I knew the answer, I wasn’t going to let her know. Answering her question would be submitting an aspect of myself that I was still unfamiliar with. Still, I gave her enough to preserve our dance. “This is just what I like to wear, that’s all.”

She chose a rack full of clothing, circuiting around each category of the shop. Her decisive movements revealed that I wasn’t the only one withholding information. Watching her curate a new identity for me, I feigned an unawareness of being absorbed into her orbit. Standing still as I surveyed a pair of shoes, I felt her eyes on me. Determining the width of my shoulders and the span of my hips, she guessed my size in clothing. Following her, I eased into her lead.

“These are open, come on,” her voice trailed after her, as she made a clear line for the fitting rooms. Trying to understand the confidence in her maneuvers, I mimicked her walk. When I took my place standing next to her once more, one of the two open rooms had been taken. “Let’s just share this one,” she whispered from inside of the room, out of earshot of the fitting room attendant. Without bothering to simulate hesitation, I stepped forward into what would become a two-person incubator.

We were two women facing each other, both of us discerning that this was what the entire afternoon was centered around. The cisgender nonchalance she had to her body was met by my struggle to reconcile the exterior with the mind. She hung the clothing on the walls, securing our fortress from the migrating population of the outside. A Queendom of forms, the objects we carried in with us were our only audience.

The silence of our dance was over. Presentation of the unseen was required for us to continue.

She introduced a white silk georgette blouse by saying, “Try this one on, I think you’ll be able to breathe in it.” The silence of our dance was over. Presentation of the unseen was required for us to continue. Simple in its design, I examined the softness of the blouse in my hands. I wondered if this is was how she saw me. Nodding to accept her invitation, I turned around to change. I sheltered my newly developed body. Having fostered the growth of my breasts, I felt protective of them. They were too small and too far apart, but they were mine. Somewhere behind me her eyes were on me, waiting for signs of discomfort.

“Are you okay, Devan?” Her voice coated my eardrums. “I’m okay, this is where I want to be,” I thought, and I turned around. “Yes, I’m fine. What do you think?”

Stepping forward, she was now only inches away from me. The answer was in her gaze. Newly formed sunburns on her skin were magnified by the starkness of my own. The white silk georgette nearly camouflaged by my flesh but for the movements of my chest rising and falling. Responding on its own, my breathing picked up in its pace. Her eyes were on my shoulders, while mine remained on her movements. She traced the freckles on my shoulders with her fingers. This detail I inherited from my mother hadn’t been seen by the men of my past. Marking the occasion, she pressed her lips on the prime meridian of my ancestry. Pink lipstick now on my shoulder mirrored her sunburns.

She traced the freckles on my shoulders with her fingers. This detail I inherited from my mother hadn’t been seen by the men of my past. Marking the occasion, she pressed her lips on the prime meridian of my ancestry.

A knock on the door.

“Excuse me? Only one person allowed per dressing room. I have to ask one of you ladies to come out.”

No longer unnoticed, our dance came to a halt. Representative of a closeness that immobilized me, I removed the blouse and retreated into my own clothing. Attempting to steady my movements, she grabbed my wrist. The cloud of affinities that once enraptured us was dissipated by the presence just outside of our new home. Withdrawing my wrist back into my person, I opened the door.

“Sorry, there were no rooms,” was the automated explanation flung at the shop worker. Sounds of the voice of my companion reverberated far behind me, sounds that resembled my name. The clear instructions ricocheting in my mind couldn’t be penetrated by her voice.

“Two blocks up, two avenues over. That’s where the train is. It’s going to take us home.”

Merging with the populace of the sidewalk once more, anonymity was my asylum. The phenomenon of the city became a cavity without her. Her presence was the anchor that ensured me that life was really happening.

“One avenue left, and you’ll be on the train.”

Walking through the train’s closing doors, I turned on my heel. As we were hurtled through 100-year-old tunnels beneath the ground, I watched myself in the glass doors. Coercing myself to make eye contact, I considered what the train was moving me away from. I looked at my clothed shoulder, with it’s pink lipstick stain unknown to my fellow passengers. It was a secret beneath my clothes for me to keep.

Behind me in the reflection, a man was looking in my direction. Not at me, but the performance I’ve perfected. He lusted for the interpretation of womanhood that I’d created for the safety that accompanied being perceived as cisgender. I spoke his language in a skirt that was too short and a trafficable mane of long dark hair. These were my tools to paint a portrait for him to be distracted by, so I could be left to my own devices. While his eyes were on this image, I could step out of it and exist as myself. In the dressing room, that was where she found me. I wasn’t ready to be found.

June became July, which stretched into August. Apertures in the rhythm of the summer were growing. Firmly on the other side of the vernal equinox, the breach in time was tugging me away from the girl I was in the dressing room. Resolving to give purpose to the memory, I took my best friend to the ocean for her birthday. For me it was a reunion with the sea, after more than a decade of being unable to face one another. Having been given the gift of being seen, I freed my shoulders for the occasion.

As my best friend collected seashells behind me, I stepped into the waves. Watching my feet disappear into water, the tide picked up in response to my arrival. It’s capability for destruction was undetectable on this clear day in August. Embracing the current, I meditated on what we’d both seen in our 12 years apart. Heartache and hurricanes: necessary components that resulted in this homecoming. As I waved in response to my best friend’s call to come drink more wine, I thanked the afternoon in June for making way to this moment in time.

Nearly a year after that time, the effects a moment can have still occur. Typing this in baggy Levi’s, a tank top, and hair cropped to my ear, I can see her all over me. Colliding with her pillar of vitality as a body in transition stabilized me. Even as I scroll social media feeds to see her moving into an apartment with her new girlfriend, I click like. Because somewhere where the weather’s warm, and a tube of lipstick is shared, our dance continues with new participants.

Girl, It’s Your Time: Trans Artist Vivek Shraya On Finding Freedom and Wholeness

Toronto-based writer and artist Vivek Shraya and I met during one of the most formative years of my (and I think her) life. I was struggling with identity, but in a way I didn’t see reflected in any form of media. People were coming out as gay, bi, trans, agender, genderqueer, etc., and I still didn’t really feel represented. Vivek was the first person with which I even discussed those feelings. I felt powerful being a woman, but I like presenting much more masculine. It feels weird to wear a dress AND it feels weird to wear a suit, but if I’m dressing androgynous, it needs to fall on the side of more masculine, BUT I hate being accidentally called sir. I had no idea what it meant or where I fell. Vivek was also grappling with feelings that didn’t seem to be reflected anywhere. She felt much more comfortable in feminine wardrobe, accessories, and make up, but was overwhelmed with guilt because she could present and pass as male and no one would even think twice. We were both in such difficult and underrepresented positions. Vivek was the only person I really felt understood what I was going through. When she came out as trans this past February, she requested that all who knew her start referring to her using “she / her” pronouns, with the release of her song “Girl It’s Your Time.” It felt much bigger to me than just a coming out day.

It’s almost selfish that I wanted to interview Vivek because I’m still looking for so many answers and she has always been someone I could rely on to put really beautiful and succinct words to anything I feel / think / believe. She interviewed me about racism for her newest book, even this page is white, and it took a lot for me to NOT scream “YOU TAUGHT ME EVERYTHING I KNOW THANK YOU FOR OPENING MY EYES.” She knows and understands the world in a way that I love and admire.

Not to mention she’s one of my favorite artists. Her first novel, She of the Mountains, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2014, and will be followed by her debut collection of poetry, even this page is white, out this spring. Vivek has read and performed at shows, festivals and post-secondary institutions internationally, sharing the stage with Tegan & Sara and Dragonette, and has appeared at NXNE, Word on the Street, and Yale University. She’s a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, a 2015 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award finalist, and a 2015 recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize Honour of Distinction. Vivek’s first children’s picture book, The Boy & the Bindi, will be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2016. Her book on recording artist M.I.A. will be published in 2017 by ECW Press, as part of their Pop Classics series.

Once you’re done reading our interview you absolutely 100% have to check out TRISHA, Vivek’s new photo series featuring nine vintage photos of her mother recaptured with Vivek as the subject. She says it’s “a homage to my mother and the daughter she not allowed to want.” It’s absolutely beautiful.

How did you identify growing up?

As a pre-Internet 80s kid, I didn’t have access to a lot of the terminology that is available now. I was very feminine and gender creative. I wanted to be my mom (still do!) in her appearance and mannerisms, and had many female friends. Consequently, I was identified as gay. Conversations about gender, and its distinction from sexuality, did not happen.

It’s bizarre to think about now, how being a femme child only meant that I was attracted to men, when actually, I was drawn to femininity, and those who were reflecting parts of myself back to me.

How do you identify now?

Artist / South Asian / Trans / Femme / Bisexual

Explain to me the process of feeling trans, but keeping it inside.

The first time I learned about transness, I was in my early/mid twenties. I remember wishing that I had been presented with the option when I was younger. It felt like a ship that had sailed.

After a solid decade of experiencing daily genderphobia and homophobia that I experienced in school, my early twenties was also a period of time when I was very focused on adopting masculinity. I often talk about how it was my mother’s love that prevented me from killing myself as a teenager, which is true, but choosing to live was an act of surrendering to masculinity. I even told myself that becoming a man could be a kind of fun challenge.

But the longer I have lived, the more painful the enforcement of masculinity has felt, especially as I have developed friendships with people who have been eager to celebrate me for who I am. So in a lot of ways, I see my transition as more of a “de-transition,” trying to undo the work I did to survive.

Can you explain what sort of “adjustments” you would make in order to present more masculine. What instincts were you going against?

Every aspect of my attempts to be masculine or present as a man could be a described as an adjustment. Adjusting my voice to sound deeper, adjusting my walk to take up more space by walking with my shoulders as opposed to my hips, adjusting the clothes I bought to be baggy and not bright or colourful, and adjusting my diet to be high protein to build muscle. Each adjustment was going against (my) femininity, and although these adjustments were connected to safety, they were also connected to misogyny.

When you look at the contrast between your young self and who you are now, does it feel more – good that you are where you are now, or does it feel more – sad that little you missed out?

Both. I turned 35 in February and a big part of processing my aging has been tied to mourning. Mourning how long it took to find my way back to myself. Mourning that I will never know what it’s like to be a teenage or twenty-something femme. Trans writer Casey Plett recently tweeted, “Age is a completely different concept for us than it is for cis people,” and this resonated with me.

But on the other hand, I don’t want to lose anymore time than I have by mourning. And at least I got back to this place. I am very grateful for this.

Do you ever thank yourself for protecting little you?

I do! Sometimes I look at photos of myself now and say, “we did ok, didn’t we?”

I have also been enjoying the ways my transition is re-contextualized in my art. The dedication of my book God Loves Hair reads “For the boy who was almost lost” and now I think it should have been “For the girl who was almost lost.”

Please give me all your feelings on selfies.

I don’t know if my transition could have happened without taking selfies. I remember wearing leggings for the first time and taking a selfie. I liked what I saw and that photo inspired me to keep pushing in that direction, exploring more femininity in my appearance. Every selfie revealed to me a new, or rather, a true part of myself, and the more truth I captured, the more I wanted to uncover. At some point during the fall of 2014, I remember thinking that photos of myself finally looked like me. The real and whole me. And honestly, I thought she was long gone.

Selfies are still dismissed and associated as vanity (or instability), but especially during my transition, I have often wished I was a photograph because, as a photo I am not reduced to a pronoun or an identity. As a photo, I don’t have to answer invasive questions and worry about physical violence. As a photo, I get to be me.

Tell me about making the decision to use female pronouns, was there an ‘ah-ha’ moment or conversation?

I think there were many factors, but one that sticks out was a conversation with our friend Kristin Russo who suggested starting to explore female pronouns just with close friends. This felt safe and manageable.

That said, a big challenge throughout this process has been the absence of an “ah-ha” moment. I have been often asked if using female pronouns feels good and the honest answer is, sometimes. But I have lived under “he” and “him” for so long that half the time, it takes me a moment to even realize that someone is talking about me when they use “she” and “her.” And in older relationships where I have played more of a “masculine” role, female pronouns feel foreign. Not feeling completely confident in this space has often left me feeling anxious. After years of hearing transphobic comments in LGBTQ ally workshops from cis-participants who have talked about “the one trans person they knew that kept changing their minds,” I have felt so much pressure to be wholly confident about my choices.

Recently, my friend (and artist) Chase Joynt relieved me of this when he suggested that perhaps confidence shouldn’t be the goal in relation to one’s gender. He acknowledged that the pressure I felt had deep historic roots that are tied to a medical system that has often robbed trans people from the opportunity to explore or to express gender ambiguity by forcing people to prove their gender in order to access medical services. Trans people have often been characterized as “deceptive” or “deceitful.” He also talked about how the men he disliked the most were those who didn’t question their masculinity, which resonated with me. This conversation freed me because I felt like I didn’t have to have ALL the answers and feel certain about anything outside of the desire to be honest with and about myself. My gender also deserves the room to change and evolve, if I so choose. I love this recent quote by Lilly Wachowski:

“To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female. And to ‘transition’ imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality is that I’ve been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary.”

I think we’ve talked about the pronoun “they” before? Like, how it doesn’t really feel right for you. Even though maybe you don’t identify as specifically “he” or “she,” something about “they” doesn’t feel right and it’s hard to explain why. I guess I’m just wondering if you’ve made any headway on that explanation lol

I think “they” is a powerful and important pronoun, especially for non-binary people, and for challenging the gender binary in general. But for me, I feel like I was robbed of my femininity and using “she” and “her” is a way to reclaim this. I love the openness of “they,” but for me, I crave the specificity of “she.” But who knows how I will feel a year from now!

That said, I have really struggled with pronouns and language in general. During this time, friends have said to me, “do what feels good for you.” And this is the best possible advice! Gender self-determination is vital and I can feel great about who I am when I am at home. But I live a life where I engage with other people and doing what feels good for me is a lot more challenging when I step outside the door. With pronouns specifically, it’s hard not to feel like you are dependent on others to “validate” your gender, or rather, it’s hard not to feel like your gender is not valid when people use the wrong pronoun. And with our limited (mainstream & Western) options for pronouns, each pronoun has implications. If I continue to use male pronouns, my gender gets read as performance. If I say I am using both male and female pronouns (which I was saying for over a year), people generally still used only male pronouns because I was assigned male at birth and because the nature of patriarchy is to subsume femininity. If I use female pronouns, the assumption is that I identify as a woman. If I use female pronouns as a gender non-conforming person, am I allowed to use the words “girl” and “woman” to speak about my femininity? Are there other words I could use? Does using “she” and “her” immediately change the names of my relationships and the roles I play? Am I a daughter now? A sister?

What can people do to keep strangers from mis-gendering them? OR how do you suggest feeling alright when it does happen?

I don’t know that I have the power to prevent people from mis-gendering me. I wish I did! I have been exploring strictly female pronouns for the past six months amongst friends and even though everyone has been mostly supportive, it has still been bumpy. So I would like to reword the question: what can people do when they realize they have mis-gendered someone? I find the whole “she, I mean he, I mean she, I mean, omg I’m so sorry” process so awkward, despite good intentions. I would rather a person apologize once and proceed onward as opposed to “fussing” over me.

And I don’t know that I can or will feel alright when it happens, but I try to remind myself of all the times that I have accidentally mis-gendered someone, and try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I know it’s an adjustment for everyone. A friend recently told me that even though mis-gendering will likely continue, over time it won’t feel as jarring or hurtful. I am looking forward to this.

Does it ever feel like you aren’t be allowed to be trans? Or I guess, do people make you feel like you haven’t “done enough” or “gone through enough” to be trans? How does that feel, if it does come up and what do you say?

Throughout my transition, I have struggled with not feeling like I had permission, especially in regards to language and identity. People often conflate the word transition with sex reassignment surgery, so I have even grappled with whether or not I am allowed to use the word “transition” if I am currently not altering my body.

The larger struggle is that not feeling allowed or enough has been a consistent theme in my life. As a person with Indian parents but living in Canada, I don’t always feel I am Indian enough. As a queer person attracted to women, I wasn’t considered gay enough. As a queer person currently in a relationship with a man, I don’t feel bi enough. And so in regards to my gender, I have worried about claiming a trans space that wasn’t mine. With femininity in particular, there is also a pressure to prove or display your femmeness. The other day I was out with a friend, talking about my transition, but wasn’t wearing makeup and I felt like I needed to show photos of myself and say, “look at how I have been dressing lately.”

On the flip side, recalling this history has been useful in regards to gender, if only to remind myself that notions of being enough, or adequacy are completely flawed and unachievable for most people.

How do you reconcile having a feminine identity, while still having male passing privilege?

This is a complicated question because the issue of passing is complicated. Often I feel like my options are either to present how I want and then have to check over my shoulder every thirty seconds because I am worried about my safety, or to “choose” to pass and not feel like I am fully myself. Passing is, and has always been, a survival mechanism for me as opposed to being choice. At the same time, I do feel it’s important that regardless of how I feel and being gender non-conforming, I do get frequently read as male, and while this comes with violence (or the threat of violence) and misogyny, historically I haven’t faced the same kinds of sexism as my women friends.

I do think the more important questions are how do we change systems of power that make “passing” necessary, and how do we shift ideas about gender to a place where assumptions aren’t made solely based around appearance. I love wearing makeup but I shouldn’t have to wear lipstick to prove my femininity, and not wearing lipstick shouldn’t mean I am deliberately trying to access male privilege. My friend Alok Vaid-Menon (of Dark Matter) has talked about how their true friends are the ones who see them for all they are without them having to present a particular way. I dream of a time when this is possible for trans people beyond just our close friends and small bubbles.

What was the process of writing your new song “Girl It’s Your Time“?

I basically bawled the whole time.

It was one of the first songs I wrote after not writing a single song in four years. I needed to step away from music because, despite my efforts, I found that my music wasn’t having the kind of impact I wanted it to make. During this break, I channeled my voice into writing books. Literature allowed me the freedom to talk about issues I was passionate about, like sexuality, race and gender, but hadn’t felt comfortable expressing in music. It’s amazing to see how much has changed in the music industry in the past ten years, in regards to the increased visibility of trans and queer musicians. The flip side is that much of this visibility remains white.

When returning to music this year, my hope was to transfer the freedom and wholeness I had found in writing to songwriting. “Girl It’s Your Time” is a personal anthem, a song I sing to myself when I don’t feel brave, when I don’t feel beautiful.

Download “Girl It’s Your Time” from Bandcamp & iTunes here. All proceeds from this single will go to Supporting Our Youth’s Trans_Fusion Crew program—a grassroots drop-in group in Toronto that works to create social and political spaces that speak to the concerns, struggles, and victories of trans*, 2-spirited, intersex, genderqueer, gender independent, non-binary and questioning people. Follow Vivek on Instagram here.

Black Trans Woman Assaulted by Guard in DC Restroom, Proving Bathroom Bill Fight Is Far from Over

feature image photo credit: Jackie Bensen/NBC Washington

Ebony Belcher, a Black trans woman, just needed to use the restroom at her local Giant grocery store in Washington DC, but a security guard followed her in, told her to get out, “grabbed her and pushed her out of the store.” Belcher said the guard told her “You guys cannot keep coming in here and using our women’s restroom. They did not pass the law yet.” Belcher called the police after leaving the grocery store, and the security guard was arrested for assault.

Ebony Belcher

Although thankfully it doesn’t seem that Belcher was subject to arrest or serious injury, her experience helps highlight the danger of these bills, and how that danger persists in a way that’s disconnected from legal realities — although the DoJ has spoken out against this bill and it likely won’t remain on the books in the long term, that didn’t protect Belcher in the moment. Individual law enforcement officers — or even private citizens! Like we’ve seen with cis men taking it upon themselves to go into women’s restrooms to “protect” them in recent weeks — don’t necessarily fully understand what the law actually means, and they don’t always care to, so for lawmakers and politicians to repeatedly conflate trans women with sexual predation and to imply that they’re men creates a threat for this vulnerable population that the federal government can’t easily undo, no matter what the constitutionality of HB2 is decided to be.

Other Bathroom Bill News

+ How different states have been responding to the DoJ’s assertion that schools need to provide equal facilities access to trans kids or lose federal funding. Many of them are not pleased!

+ On how HB2 and other bathroom bills highlight the need for criminal justice reform and how dangerously trans bodies are criminalized by the state.

+ On the history of gender-segregated bathrooms.

+ The connections between bathroom bills, Title IX, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Election

+ Quite the week in convention news! As best as I can understand it, here’s essentially what happened: the committee that evaluates delegate eligibility for the Nevada convention ruled that 60 of Bernie’s delegates weren’t eligible. The delegates in question weren’t going to swing the nomination toward Bernie, but his camp is hoping to keep every delegate they can get to give them more power in shaping the party’s platform. Bernie supporters say that in addition to this setback, the convention chose a voting methodology that disadvantaged their candidate and “refused to consider motions, petitions, and amendments offered up by his supporters.” In response to these developments, video from the convention seems to show at least one physical altercation, although the details of it are unclear; shots can be heard calling Nevada Democratic Chairwoman Roberta Lange a “bitch,” and voicemails and text messages that Lange received range from further name-calling to death threats, and even threats against her kids and family, as well as posting her address and contact information on social media. The Nevada Democratic Party has filed a complaint against Sanders, saying that he incited “actual violence” amongst his supporters — in his statements following the convention, he condemned the use of violence but reiterated that he agreed with the concerns of his supporters. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has also demanded an apology, with Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver refusing, and both of them using appropriated AAVE incorrectly to such a degree that I can’t repeat it here because thinking about it is giving me a migraine.

+ Ezekiel Kweku on Trump at the California GOP Convention.

The ethos of Trump’s campaign is capitalism. I don’t mean that Trump takes from capitalism confidence in free markets or neoclassical economics. Rather, he takes on the capitalist’s ideological flexibility and monomaniacal focus on the bottom line. Trump approaches ideas like an entrepreneur approaches products: He’s not particularly picky about what he’s selling. If one idea doesn’t sell, he’ll drop it and sell something else. And if it does sell, he will keep selling it, no matter who tells him he can’t.

+ Surprise! Trump’s statements about what rights trans people deserve have been totally contradictory.

Law & Order

+ The Oklahoma Senate has passed a bill that would suspend medical licenses of doctors who perform abortions in addition to making it a felony punishable by 1-3 years in prison, and another bill that requires the State Department of Health to “develop informational material on achieving an abortion-free society,” but no funding was approved for it, so. Anyhow, back to the first item, what??? I’m interested in how that holds up in appeals courts! (Although many Oklahomans and medical professionals will be harmed during the time it takes it to go through the appeals process, so it’s not like that’s a great fix.) Although anything could have happened by the time this news fix is published, as of right now the commenters on this news story are appropriately outraged, so at least that’s nice.

+ In exciting news regarding voter ID laws, a federal judge has ruled that Kansas can’t force people to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

+ Wisconsin has been embroiled in lots of debate and heartbreak over its public education, with governor and former Presidential candidate Scott Walker wanting to cut hundreds of millions from university funding as well as essentially putting the state government and/or cronies chosen by the governor in charge of education curriculum and policy. Anyhow, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that a 2011 Republican law that gave legislators and the governor increased control over education policy is unconstitutional.

+ President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico is submitting a proposal to Congress that would legalize same-sex marriage in his country. The bill, if passed, would expand on an earlier ruling by Mexico’s Supreme Court that it’s unconstitutional for states to ban same-sex marriage, and officially legalize it in the affirmative.

President Enrique Peña Nieto/NOTIMEX/FOTO/JOSÉ PAZOS/JPF/POL/

+ An interesting legal subject I didn’t know much about: in a case that crosses international borders, a lesbian in Australia is suing the estate of her father in British Columbia in Canada, saying that the only reason she wasn’t included in her late father’s will is because of her sexual orientation and arguing that the will should be changed. There’s legal precedent for this in British Columbia; “In 2006 the B.C. Supreme Court corrected the will of a man who didn’t approve of homosexuals and left one of his sons, a homosexual, a fraction of what his brother inherited. ‘Homosexuality is not a factor in today’s society for justifying a judicious parent disinheriting or limiting benefits to his child,’ the court found.”

+ Sadly not all that surprisingly, the middle and high schools of Bolivar County in Cleveland, Mississippi are essentially still racially segregated, with two high schools on literal opposite sides of railroad tracks, one with a black student body and one with white students. Now a federal court is like, hey guys, come on now. You need to fix that.

+ Oh come ON. Anticipating a lack of enthusiasm about a bill that tries to limit the EPA’s power, Republicans just went ahead and renamed it to sound like it’s about the Zika virus. It has nothing to do with Zika. For the love of all that’s holy! Both shameless and very very dumb.

+ South Carolina has become the 17th state to ban abortion after 19 weeks.

+ ThinkProgress thinks that a recent SCOTUS ruling about loan repayment actually benefits vulnerable LGBT populations in its potential legal interpretation.

+ 170,000 undocumented children are now eligible to enroll in healthcare in California.

+ A district judge who argued in his ruling on a trans workplace discrimination case that trans people shouldn’t have to bear the burden of proof and explanation about trans identities before they’re worthy of legal protection, much like how we don’t require a person of religious faith to prove their true dedication to a religion before they’re deserving of religious freedom protections.

Imagine that an employee is fired because she converts from Christianity to Judaism. Imagine too that her employer testifies that he harbors no bias toward either Christians or Jews but only “converts.” That would be a clear case of discrimination “because of religion.” No court would take seriously the notion that “converts” are not covered by the statute. Discrimination “because of religion” easily encompasses discrimination because of a change of religion. But in cases where the plaintiff has changed her sex, and faces discrimination because of the decision to stop presenting as a man and to start appearing as a woman, courts have traditionally carved such persons out of the statute by concluding that “transsexuality” is unprotected by Title VII. In other words, courts have allowed their focus on the label “transsexual” to blind them to the statutory language itself.

Police/Prison

+ Even though a law was passed in Massachusetts two years ago banning the practice of shackling pregnant inmates, prisons are still doing it!

+ Michael Brown Jr.’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, in an interview with Colorlines.

When these things happen, it enrages lots of people and everybody is looking and wondering and asking, “What can I do? What should we do?” If you’re not a family member, the first thing they should do before you take action into your own hands is reach out to the family. Have a conversation with that mother or father or both and try to help them with what they would like to do because that is their loved one.

Lezley McSpadden

+ In his continuing bid to regain any modicum of respect or support from Chicagoans, especially after the repression of information about Laquan McDonald’s shooting death by police was revealed, Rahm Emanuel has announced he will disband the Independent Police Review Authority , which only upheld 2% of claims against officers, and replace it with a Civilian Police Investigation Agency made up of Chicago residents. Not that this means all problems with policing oversight in Chicago will be solved overnight:

Lori Lightfoot, who led the task force investigation, told the Chicago Tribune that while Emanuel’s announcement is an important step, “the devil will be in the details. How it will be different [from IPRA] is a fundamentally important question.”

Grab Bag

+ Eric Fanning has been confirmed as the first openly gay Army secretary of the US.

+ Three Orthodox Jewish men, members of the Shomrim volunteer Jewish security patrol in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will likely not serve time after a plea deal relating to the beating of Taj Patterson, a gay Black man who says the men shouted anti-gay slurs before assaulting him.

+ Gay and bisexual men in southern urban areas are at an especially high risk for HIV, according to a new study that finds that diagnoses of the AIDS virus in those areas are three times the national rate.

+ Protesters engaged in a direct action at the United Methodist Church 2016 General Conference this week, tying their hands and feet together with rainbow ribbons to communicate “their disapproval of the denomination’s lack of acceptance regarding human sexuality.”

+ On the challenging proposition for US companies that do global business when it comes to protecting their gay employees when working with countries where gay people aren’t safe, without alienating those nations (and their potential business).

+ The Library of Congress has stopped using the term “illegal alien,” arguing that it’s demeaning, and Republicans want it reinstated super bad.

+ On increased pressure around marriage equality in Japan from the international community as the Olympics approach.

Mercedes Successful, Black Trans Woman, Becomes 11th Trans Person Murdered This Year In US

Halfway through May and again, we have to mourn another trans woman who’s been murdered and another trans woman who’s been misgendered in death. And again, it’s a Black trans woman who’s been murdered. This time it was 32-year-old Haines City, Florida native Mercedes Successful, who was found shot to death on Sunday in a parking lot. As usual, Cherno Biko and Monica Roberts were two of the first people to have details on this tragic case.

Successful was born in Kingston, Jamaica and represented that country in the 2014 Gay Caribbean USA Pageant. The Gay Caribbean organization posted on Facebook “It is extremely sad that other humans can be so dreadful and take another human’s life this easily. RIP Mercedes Successful.” She was a frequent performer at clubs in the Haines City area and in the pageant scene, and was beloved by many, including people like Felix Ortiz, who said “Such a beautiful person inside and out. You were one of the funniest and one of the kindest people I ever met.” Successful had recently started transitioning and had been on hormones for a little over a month.

As far too often happens, she was misgendered in death, with news reports using her birth name and incorrect pronouns, even when reporting that she was a transgender woman. Misgendering trans women like this continues and supports the violence that so many of us face. Especially in the case of Black trans women and other trans women of color, humanity is often denied to girls like us. When the media and news and society in general disrespect us and refuse to acknowledge our personhood and humanity, it doesn’t really come as a surprise that people think it’s okay to act out in violence against us. When the victim is Black, she has yet another reason for society to dehumanize her. The odds are always stacked against trans women of color, and when a trans woman is brutally murdered and then disrespected repeatedly in death, that becomes abundantly clear.

It hurts every single time we hear about another trans woman of color being murdered. It hurts knowing that all of my trans women of color sisters have to fear for their lives just by being themselves. And it just keeps on happening again and again and again. We’re not even halfway through the year and we’re currently on pace to pass the number of trans people murdered all of last year in the US. Mercedes Successful is the second trans woman murdered this month, after Reecey Walker was murdered on May 1st. The other trans women murdered this year include Keyonna Blakeney, Shante Thompson, Kourtney Yochum, Maya Young, Jasmine Sierra and Monica Loera. Trans men Demarkis Stansberry and Kayden Clarke were also murdered, as was genderfluid teenager Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson, who at just 16 is the youngest to be murdered this year.

Canada Moves Forward to Ban Transgender Discrimination

feature image via The Telegraph

Justin Trudeau Says Canada Must Demand “True Equality”

+ Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced legislation on Monday to protect trans people from hate speech and discrimination. “We must continue to demand true equality,” Trudeau said in a speech at a Montreal event hosted by gay rights group Foundation Emergence. “We must carry on the legacy of those who fought for justice by being bold and ambitious in our actions, and we must work diligently to close the gap between our principles and our reality.” With a liberal majority in the House of Commons, the legislation is most likely to pass. Bill C-16 would add gender identity alongside race, religion, age, sex and sexual orientation under the Canadian Human Rights Act and add transgender people to a list of groups protected under the Criminal Code.

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould officially introduced the legislation today in Parliament surrounded by trans rights advocates. “No one should be refused a job, disadvantaged in the workplace, be unable to access services or be the target of harassment and violence because of their gender identity or gender expression,” said Wilson-Raybould. This is really awesome and the U.S. should take note!

All About Bathroom Bills

+ Eleven protestors were arrested yesterday at North Carolina’s Legislative building. They stormed the office of the House clerk demanding they meet with a legislative leader to discuss HB2.

+ Police officers in North Carolina won’t be enforcing HB2 because they’re not even sure how to enforce it. 

+ The federal government won’t be withholding federal funds from North Carolina just yet because it still needs to play out in court, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

+ The Massachusetts Senate advanced a trans-inclusive public accommodations bill, sending it to the House of Representatives to be reviewed. It would ensure customers couldn’t be turned away because they’re transgender and making sure trans people can use the restroom that matches their gender.

+ The Transgender Law Center filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on behalf of a transgender boy in Wisconsin who has been denied access to the boy’s restroom at his high school.

Law & Order

+ A Colorado judge ruled Robert Lewis Dear Jr., the man who went on a rampage at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood that left three dead, isn’t competent to stand trial. Forensic psychologists ruled Dear’s beliefs that the federal government was persecuting Christians and targeting him for surveillance demonstrated he’s not competent to stand trial. He faces 179 criminal counts, including murder and attempted murder and for now will not immediately stand trial. Dear will be sent to the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo to be treated for a delusional disorder until the court sees fit he’s ready for a trial.

+ Jian Ghomeshi, a former radio host who has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault and harassment, no longer faces any more criminal charges. His second sexual assault trial was slated to begin in June but the plantiff decided not to go through a demanding, difficult trial so she withdrew. Ghomeshi signed a peace bond at Toronto’s Old City Hall courthouse and that was it.

+ A UK court rejected a married Indian lesbian couple’s request to stay in the UK citing India’s lack of same-sex marriage violated their human rights. This is the first time a same-sex couple has tried to get legal permission to say in the UK by citing their same-sex partnership. The couple has lived legally in the UK for years. They emigrated from India as friends in 2007 and then developed a relationship while studying in Scotland in 2008. They married in 2015. Judges at the court of appeal rejected their application because “returning them home would not be a violation of their right to a family life and would be proportionate on the basis of the United Kingdom’s right to immigration control and a lack of evidence that the couple will suffer violence on return.” One of the women in the suit said:

“My wife means the world to me, we are well integrated into UK culture and can live openly as a married couple here. At the end of the day all we want is to live somewhere where our marriage is recognised as having the same legal status as a heterosexual marriage.”

She added: “In India we wouldn’t be allowed to live together or see each other. I can’t imagine life without my wife. The expression of our love for each other is being snatched away from us. It’s a very scary thought.”

+ A calligraphy studio in Phoenix is suing the city over their LGBT non-discrimination ordinance. The two Christian women behind Brush & Nib, a calligraphy studio which sell paintings and calligraphy for weddings and events, believe the ordinance could be used to punish them if they choose not to cater to same-sex couples, thus violating their religious freedom. The business argues since calligraphy is art, it should be considered free speech and shouldn’t be censored or controlled by the government.

International News

+ Norway is considering a bill that would simplify the process of changing one’s legal gender to the equivalent of changing their legal name. The process would only require a form and would also allow parents to change the gender of their child as young as six while teenagers over 16 don’t need parental consent to change their gender. Currently the country requires trans people to jump through various hoops in order to change their legal gender like showing proof of their gender change and undergoing psych/medical evaluations.

(Photo by ANWAR AMRO/AFP/Getty Images)

+ About 50 LGBT activists gathered outside of the Hbeish police station in Beirut, Lebanon and staged a rare protest demanding the abolition of a law that criminalizes homosexuality and the release of four detained trans women. The last LGBT protest was held in 2012. The event was organized by the Helem association.

+ Bangladesh police arrested a suspect who may have been involved in the murder of an LGBT magazine editor and activist, Xulhaz Mannan and his friend, Tonoy Mahbub. The suspect, Shariful Islan Shihab was a former member of a banned Islamic group who then joined another militant group, Ansarullah Bangla Team in 2015. The Associated Press reports: “He said Shihab told police during questioning that he took part in stabbing to death Mannan and his friend as ordered by his group’s high command. There was no independent confirmation of the police officer’s claim.”

+ Mariela Castro, President Raul Castro’s daughter, led Cuba’s largest Pride parade ever to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

Dilma Rousseff

+ Brazil’s first woman president Dilma Rousseff was suspended last Thursday and is now undergoing an impeachment trial. She has been replaced by Vice President Michel Temer, who immediately unveiled an entirely new cabinet made up of all white men which is bad news for a country who is predominantly black or mixed race and has more female voters than male voters. In large part, Rousseff was suspended because of sexism. Before the Senate voted to suspend Rousseff, the lower-chamber voted to impeach her in April, with many holding up signs that said “bye, dear.” And in March during an investigation of the former President, wire-taps of phone conversations of top politicians revealed their use of sexist and vulgar language to describe women including Rousseff.

“There has been, mixed in all of this, a large amount of prejudice against women,” Rousseff said at a news conference last month, as reported by Reuters. “There are attitudes toward me that there would not be with a male president.”

Technically, Rousseff is being accused of “misappropriation of funds to cover budget gaps and boost confidence in Brazil’s failing economy.” However corruption is rife in the country and many of the men in Temer’s cabinet and also Temer himself are suspected of corruption but have never been impeached or tried.

Garbage News

+ In December, a man ordered a Muslim woman to take off her hijab and saying “This is America!” while on a Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to Albuquerque and when she didn’t comply he pulled it off her, exposing her head . The man plead guilty in the District of New Mexico for “using force or threat of force to intentionally obstruct a Muslim woman … in the free exercise of her religious beliefs.”

+ George Zimmerman, the man who killed 17-year-old unarmed Trayvon Martin and was not found guilty in his murder, tried to sell the gun used to kill the teenager on two different gun websites. The websites decided to take down Zimmerman’s posts and didn’t want to be involved with selling the firearm. On both websites Zimmerman provided a sickening description of the gun: “I am honored and humbled to announce the sale of an American firearm icon,” the websites said. “The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012.”

Grab Bag

+ Austin LGBT advocates are pushing for rainbow-colored gay pride crosswalks to be implemented in the city’s warehouse district where the majority of gay nightclubs reside.

+ Immigration activists and trans advocates began a hunger strike to protest the detention of undocumented transgender immigrants and to pressure Santa Ana officials to end their contract to house federal immigration detainees in the city jail. Trans women face disproportionate amounts of violence while in immigration detention centers and currently there are 27 trans women detained at Santa Ana’s jail. There are three initial hunger strikers Jorge Gutierrez, director of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement.; Jennicet Gutiérrez, a trans Latina activist who made headlines for interrupting Obama’s remarks during a LGBT celebration and Deyaneira Garcia, a senior at Segerstrom High School.

+ West Point won’t be punishing any of the black women students who posed in their gray dress uniforms with their raised fists.