Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
politics, both trans & otherwise
So it looks like ENDA may come to a vote early next week – according to Harry Reid.
The bill is unlikely to gain much traction in the Republican controlled House, but could provide Democrats with another opportunity to paint the GOP as out of step with most Americans by obstructing a bill aimed at ending workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
So here’s a bunch of interesting reading on that old horse of whether gay and trans politics are bedfellows, allied, or not – a series of pieces in the NYT (the NYT!) from people like Susan Stryker and Laverne Cox and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (who is, by the by, currently on tour).
From Susan Stryker:
Remember that in 1969, rebellion and resistance by the queens and hair fairies of Christopher Street transformed a police raid at the Stonewall Inn into a defiant act of “gay liberation.” Twenty years later, “queer” politics included transgender as another version of what it called “antiheteronormativity.” The ’90s version of “queer” morphed into the L.G.B.T. community of recent years — an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender — and for transfolk, it was politically invaluable to be part of that coalition. It still is.
From John Corvino:
But sometimes the answer is no: It does not always make sense to try to align sexual orientation and gender identity in one coalition. Each group has distinctive needs and challenges. By jumbling them all together into one alphabet soup — L.G.B.T.Q.I.T.S.L.F.A.A.*, anyone? — we run the risk of covering or erasing people’s experiences, especially those who are already most marginalized.
*In case you were wondering, it stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, two-spirit, leather-fetish, asexual and allies.” Even I had to ask about some of the letters.
& From Mattilda:
The gay movement would like us to think that gay marriage will give everyone housing and health care; that openly gay soldiers pressing buttons in Nevada to obliterate Somali villages means homophobia is on the wane; that strengthening the criminal legal system through hate crime legislation will bring murdered queers back to life. This is what we lose when we think of identity as an endpoint – just add “gay” (or even less acceptable terms like “queer” or “trans”) to any oppressive institution, and suddenly you have the new civil rights struggle. Gay marriage, gays in the military, gay members of Congress, gay priests, gay cops — what’s next?
So while a lot of my readers may be very familiar with all of these arguments, it’s a good introduction to the idea – and to the ideas of category & alliance – for newbies.
Some men have been carrying AR-15 rifles to the Appleton Farmer’s Market. They are making a Point about open carry laws and 2nd Amendment rights, etc.
Other people – and yes, these are people I know – decided to carry chickens to the Farmer’s Market instead, because you can’t openly carry a chicken to the Farmer’s Market but you can carry a rifle.
So you can see why some people are upset and protesting the rifles.
The problem is that there’s a weird intersection of city and state laws here. The municipal code bars the chicken. The state law allows the rifles. What you wind up with is a wholly stupid situation, where people will be boycotting the farmer’s market because they don’t want rifles there, you know, near their children and parents and friends, which means the city, or the county, or someone, will have to do something instead of letting a really cool local institution fail.
Oh, and this happened.
APPLETON, Wis. — In a slice of Wisconsin that tends to lean Republican at the polls, Appleton has added its name to a list of cities adopting new housing rules that push past federal protection on gender identity.
12-0 vote, too.
Healthline recently partnered with the Timothy Ray Brown Foundation (TRBF) to launch “You’ve Got This” – a video campaign that encourages HIV patients to give hope and advice to the recently diagnosed.
So I thought it was long overdue to introduce you to the term serophobia, which is, most simply, fear of & prejudice against people who are HIV+. Here’s a good post about what it is and why it is over at Daily Kos, and here’s another article about the ways that a blanket discrimination against having sex with people who are HIV+ just doesn’t make sense.
Those of us who are old enough remember serophobia in its most blatant form. Our next door neighbor never met a grandchild because of it – one of her sons became HIV+ and another of her sons refused to visit him or anyone else in the household – a policy he kept up for the next 20 years.
But here are some of the basic mythologies & superstitions about HIV, & even those of us who “know better” need to learn what people who are HIV+ are up against, from the Daily Kos article. Continue reading “Serophobia”
I know he’s not talking about Syria – he died in ’94 – but this is the clip that came to mind this morning when I read the news.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Outagamie County Legislative Committee will consider adding Domestic Partner Health Coverage for gay and lesbian county employees in a domestic partnership.
You can contact the Committee by emailing them and telling them it’s the right thing to do.
If you’re in Appleton, you can come to the meeting at 2PM, which will be held in the Administration Building, Second Floor, County Board Room
410 S. Walnut St., Appleton.
Thanks to Fair Wisconsin for all this information and for educating government officials as to why this is so necessary.
I’m not sure people are aware of this, but Scott Walker has been having people arrested for singing, or watching people sing, in the state capitol’s rotunda. This is the same place where all the protests happened a few years ago.
Here’s a guy who got arrested today, & yes, he is a firefighter.
The Solidarity Singalong started in March 2011 with the rallies that were staged protests against Walker’s union busting. It’s continued every day since them – at noon, usually with a couple of copies of lyrics for whomever wanted to sing along. Their supposed to get a permit as a group but they are not a group so much as they are people who show up to sing; who comes is pretty irregular, and no one is “in charge”. That is, there is no organization, no group in the legal sense, and so no one who can report how many people will show up on a day to day basis.
But of course that’s not the point. The point is that they’re singing in the rotunda of the capitol of Wisconsin because they should be allowed to.
I have a lot of friends with children, and I’m increasingly chagrined that my own peers are taking their political views on Big Pharma to a place that puts all of us at greater risk of dying of things we don’t have to die of.
So to explain how it all works, what “peer reviewed” means, and to comment on various “But — ” arguments, here’s this very good, clear article about what it all means, including links out about how places with low percentages of vaccination are getting the most diseases, and to this one about how herd immunity works.
That is all.
Well, this is indeed good news:
Today, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the historic School Success and Opportunity Act into law, ensuring transgender youth have the opportunity to fully participate and succeed in schools across the state. Assembly Bill 1266—which goes into effect on January 1, 2014—was authored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and passed the California State Senate and Assembly earlier this summer. The law is the first of its kind in the country, and requires that California public schools respect students’ gender identity and makes sure that students can fully participate in all school activities, sports teams, programs, and facilities that match their gender identity. . .
and
California law already prohibits discrimination in education, but transgender students have been often discriminated against and unfairly excluded from physical education, athletic teams, and other school activities, and facilities. This exclusion negatively impacts students’ ability to succeed in school and graduate with their class. For example, physical education credits are required to graduate, but transgender students often do not have the support they need to fully participate in the courses.
It’s the first law of its kind, but it would be amazing to see this happen in a lot more states.