Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
News
Largo, Florida just fired City Manager Steve Stanton for being transsexual.
Look, how hard is it to understand that the prevailing ethic of this country is that we don’t fire people for who they are? Granted, we don’t have specific transgender/gender ID protection yet, dammit, but really, isn’t that a bit “letter” & not “spirit” of the law?
This isn’t a difficult concept, folks.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Innocenti Research Center released a report yesterday ranking the well-being of children in the world’s most economically advanced countries. Out of 21 countries, the United States came in second-to-last, at number 20.
The study focused on six areas: material well-being, health, education, relationships with peers and family members, risky behavior, and their own sense of happiness.
And damned embarrassing, too.
Congrats to Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University – first in a 371 year history.
National Organization for Women (NOW) President Kim Gandy said of the announcement, “NOW is so pleased that Harvard will finally have a female president — and it has only taken them 371 years. Larry Summers, we couldn’t have done it without you.”
I’m really astonished at the remarks Tim Hardaway made, in public, as a public figure. I’m glad to hear he got canned from the All Star game as a result, but I’m just really surprised. I probably shouldn’t be: after all, it was the jocks who often made me nervous in high school because I was different. But I also knew a lot of jocks who were really cool guys & who used their status to stand up for people who were different.
But wow. Tim Hardaway is a bigot. For some reason, that’s always so much more disappointing when it comes from a woman or a person of color or whatever other form of minority. & Yet years ago, when I was working at City College, bell hooks told me she’d never teach a class about James Baldwin again because she was so horrified by the homophobia expressed by her (largely African-American) students. I hope she has, & does, anyway.
I hope someone sat him down to watch Brother Outsider by now, at least, and that John Amaechi sells a truckload of books and educates as many basketball fans as Hardaway represents.
The Senate and House voted to approve an increase in the Minimum Wage, finally. The good news is that the increase will help working women – especially all those single mothers – who are struggling to get by. Now that’s family values.
… At least to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Three female journalists who are also feminist activists have been arrested for trying to attend a workshop on journalism in India. Trying to attend, because they never got to: they were arrested at the airport.
“The arrest of these online journalists demonstrates President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s security and ideological paranoia which prompts him to ban all contact between journalists and foreign organizations and media,” said Reporters Without Borders (RSF), adding that the incident reveals “the fear that the women’s rights movement produces within the regime.” The three journalists are members of the Women’s Cultural Center, which runs a “One Million Signatures” campaign aimed at repealing Iran’s sexist laws. Recently, the campaign’s website was reportedly blocked by Iranian authorities, according to the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.
Good thing they’ve got a kick-ass lawyer.
The Task Force has put up a blog entry by Jason Cianciotto about the recent study showing that a very high percentage of homeless youth are LGBT.
“In anticipation of the 2008 renewal of the Runaway, Homeless and Missing Children Protection Act (RHMCPA), the primary piece of federal legislation that directs funding and programming guidelines to homeless youth service providers nationwide, the Congressional Research Service released its own report on youth homelessness in the US. Their report did not include a single mention of LGBT youth.” (emphasis his)
Really, do read it. Because as I mentioned in my other post about this, it’s not just about providing services once these kids are homeless. It’s about keeping them from becoming homeless in the first place, & that’s the kind of project that’s going to take a large national commitment, a commitment that can’t be made if the powers that be are avoiding, or unaware, of the problem.
Molly Ivins died tonight after being defeated by her third go-round with breast cancer. She left the hospital to die at home. She was 62.
I have three women in my life right now who are undergoing biopsies on breast tissue. A fourth just had hers metastasize into lung cancer.
I don’t know what else to say.
I saw Molly Ivins speak once, at a Nation event. She was funny, she was smart, & she was a genuine populist. But she was also a bona fide political journalist. To lose a woman of her age, her experience, her seniority, when there are so few women working in political journalism… it’s such a loss, more gigantic than we can know right now. How long does it take for a woman like her to achieve the level of respect she got? A very, very long time.
Her final column is here. A bunch of her other columns are here.
But you know, what you want to do in her memory is raise some hell, or, in her own words:
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
Cheerleaders in upstate New York quit the cheerleading team in droves when they were told the laws in the state made them do something they didn’t want to do.
The thing they didn’t want to do?…. cheer! But the catch was that they had to cheer for the girls’ teams in addition to cheering on the boys’ teams.
I can’t figure out if women are their own worst enemies or if this is about homophobia or if (frankly) they’re just being princesses and don’t want to cheer for less-well-attended events. But no matter what it is, it’s a pretty sucky attitude for a cheerleader to have, no?
(Thanks to Dana at BlogHer for the clever title to this post.)
Two women are being considered for Larry Summers’ old job at Harvard.