Category: Gender Identity

State Dept. Retroactively Revokes Transgender Women’s Passports

~ mcequality

In what may turn out to be yet another front of the Trump administration’s war on transgender rights, some transgender U.S. passport holders are claiming that the State Department has denied renewal requests even after the applicants already listed their gender as female on previously approved passports.

Two cases of this happening recently were reported by Them’s Mary Emily O’Hara.

In late June, Danni Askini, executive director of the Seattle-based advocacy group Gender Justice League, tweeted that she had been denied a U.S. passport renewal and was being asked to “prove” her U.S. citizenship, along with providing proof of gender transition. This was despite the fact that for 20 years, she had a passport that said she’s female, O’Hara reported. Askini transitioned in 1998 at the age of 16.

via State Dept. Retroactively Revokes Transgender Women’s Passports

The Writer Who Broke the Brandon Teena Story Revisits Her Biggest Mistakes 

~ mcequality

Cisgender journalists have not had (and still don’t really) the best track record when it comes to reporting on the lives of trans people. Frankly, far too many people fuck it up! Included in that history is Donna Minkowitz, The Village Voice reporter who broke the story of 21-year-old Brandon Teena’s brutal murder back in 1994, which inspired director Kimberly Peirce to make the Academy Award-winning 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry. But rather than let her reporting, which posited dangerous theories like Teena’s trans identity was perhaps the result of past sexual abuse, stay uncorrected, Minkowitz is finally “making amends” for how she wrote Teena’s story.

via The Writer Who Broke the Brandon Teena Story Revisits Her Biggest Mistakes 

The Fight Over North Carolina’s Latest Anti-Trans Law Begins 

~ mcequality

It’s been more than a year since North Carolina overturned its anti-trans bathroom law, but activists are going back to court on Monday to fight the law that took its place, the AP reports.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers presented that bill, HB 142, as a compromise after the uproar over HB2, which banned trans people from using bathrooms and public facilities that correspond with their gender identity and overturned and barred local ordinances meant to protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Businesses and organizations, including the NCAA, protested the law, costing North Carolina an estimated $525 million in 2017.

via The Fight Over North Carolina’s Latest Anti-Trans Law Begins 

World Cup 2018: Smuggling the Pride flag into Russia – BBC News

~ mcequality

Six LGBT activists have found a way to fly the Pride flag in Russia – by wearing football shirts in the rainbow colours.
The country has had a law banning the spreading of “gay propaganda” among under-18s since 2013.
The Pride flag is a symbol celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, but displaying it in Russia can get you arrested.

via World Cup 2018: Smuggling the Pride flag into Russia – BBC News

This Report Is a Terrifying Reminder of the Conditions LGBTQ Immigrants Face in ICE Custody 

~ mcequality

LGBTQ immigrants in ICE detention facilities are 97 times more likely to experience sexual assault than other immigrants in these facilities, according to a terrifying new report from the Center for American Progress.

The report, based on information provided in a congressional letter to the Department of Homeland Security, also reveals that ICE has returned to its practice of detaining transgender women with men. This is contrary to its own guidelines, which per the Prison Rape Elimination Act require an individualized placement determination for each trans person being detained.

via This Report Is a Terrifying Reminder of the Conditions LGBTQ Immigrants Face in ICE Custody 

Life as a Gay Man Behind Bars – MEL Magazine

~ mcequality

That’s why Mark advised me to promptly join a gang if I had ultimately been sentenced to prison (luckily, I was not). Gangs are based on race, so as a Whiffenpoof (third from left), my options were probably the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood, both aligned with the hardcore Sureños Latino gang. “I just can’t see you being successful doing that,” Mark says, rightly, when I reach back out to him last week. He adds that someone like me would be better off in the warden’s office as a “trustee,” which means wearing all white and sycophantically shadowing prison guards so that they’ll protect you.

via Life as a Gay Man Behind Bars – MEL Magazine

Can Moana and Rapunzel make women’s sport pay? – BBC News

~ mcequality

At the same time they would pose questions about what it means to be a girl in the modern world, and, using Disney characters and the power of football, examine the concept of “what makes a princess?”
It’s an example of the imaginative steps women’s sport has had to take in a world where it is overshadowed in terms of money and audience by men’s sport.
“We wanted to target more girls to play, and Disney also wanted to reach more girls via their characters,” Marzena Bogdanowicz, head of marketing and commercial for women’s football at the FA, tells me.

via Can Moana and Rapunzel make women’s sport pay? – BBC News

Jeff Sessions’s Racist Whims and the Danger Ahead for Victims of Domestic Violence 

~ mcequality

After arriving in the U.S., A.B. was permitted to seek asylum, but her case has been tied up in the courts for more than four years. In 2016, the Immigration Board of Appeals ruled in her favor, allowing A.B. the right to asylum in the United States as a victim of domestic violence. On Monday, Sessions overturned the decision, writing that most claims “pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum.”

“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes—such as domestic violence or gang violence—or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” he wrote.

via Jeff Sessions’s Racist Whims and the Danger Ahead for Victims of Domestic Violence 

Emily Mortimer interview: I get scared by the sanctimony of #MeToo. Life’s not as simple as that | Times2 | The Times

~ mcequality

In her new film, The Bookshop, Emily Mortimer plays the owner of a bookshop in 1959 who scandalises her small Suffolk town by selling copies of a controversial new novel called Lolita. How quaint, you think. How far we’ve come since then. Or have we? Mortimer is not so sure. “Lolita would have a hard time being published today,” she says, sipping a cappuccino in the drawing room of a hotel in central London. “And there’s something wrong about that.”

She’s talking about the climate surrounding the #MeToo movement, whose achievements she relishes, but which she fears has made us lose some of our boldness when it comes to risky material.

“It’s a weird moment that’s both really exciting and wonderful, and also quite confusing. I get scared by the sanctimony sometimes. When everybody thinks they’re right. Life’s not as simple as that. That’s why we need art, movies and books, because they’re exploring the grey areas of life.”

via Emily Mortimer interview: I get scared by the sanctimony of #MeToo. Life’s not as simple as that | Times2 | The Times

LGBTQ Icons Define What ‘Pride’ Means to Them

~ mcequality

Pride Month is here, and JezeRoot is back!

This month, we celebrate the beauty and vastness of the LGBTQ community and its contributions to this world—and what better way to kick it off than with a conversation about pride?

After all, the word “pride” means many things to many different people. In the African-American community, we often link a sense of pride with our ingenuity and resilience: “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.”

But what does it mean to have pride as a black member of the LGBTQ community?

via LGBTQ Icons Define What ‘Pride’ Means to Them