WST QUIZ 1

The Global Divide on Homosexuality Greater Acceptance in More Secular and Affluent Countries

As the United States and other countries grapple with the issue of same-sex marriage, a new Pew Research Center survey finds huge variance by region on the broader question of whether homosexuality should be accepted or rejected by society. The survey of publics in 39 countries finds broad acceptance of homosexuality in North America, the European Union, and much of Latin America, but equally widespread rejection in predominantly Muslim nations and in Africa, as well as in parts of Asia and in Russia. Opinion about the acceptability of homosexuality is divided in Israel, Poland and Bolivia. Attitudes about homosexuality have been fairly stable in recent years, except in South Korea, the United States and Canada, where the percentage saying homosexuality should be accepted by society has grown by at least ten percentage points since 2007. These are among the key findings of a new survey by the Pew Research Center conducted in 39 countries among 37,653 respondents from March 2 to May 1, 2013.1 The survey also finds that acceptance of homosexuality is particularly widespread in countries where religion is less central in people's lives. These are also among the richest countries in the world. In contrast, in poorer countries with high levels of religiosity, few believe homosexuality should be accepted by society. Age is also a factor in several countries, with younger respondents offering far more tolerant views than older ones. And while gender differences are not prevalent, in those countries where they are, women are consistently more accepting of homosexuality than men. Where Homosexuality Is Most Accepted The view that homosexuality should be accepted by society is prevalent in most of the European Union countries surveyed. About three-quarters or more in Spain (88%), Germany (87%), the Czech Republic (80%), France (77%), Britain (76%), and Italy (74%) share this view, as do more than half in Greece (53%). Poland is the only EU country surveyed where views are mixed; 42% say homosexuality should be accepted by society and 46% believe it should be rejected. Canadians, who already expressed tolerant views in 2007, are now even more likely to say homosexuality should be accepted by society; 80% say this, compared with 70% six years ago. Views are not as positive in the U.S., where a smaller majority (60%) believes homosexuality should be accepted. But Americans are far more tolerant today than they were in 2007, when 49% said homosexuality should be accepted by society and 41% said it should be rejected. Opinions about homosexuality are also positive in parts of Latin America. In Argentina, the first country in the region to legalize gay marriage in 2010, about three-quarters (74%) say homosexuality should be accepted, as do clear majorities in Chile (68%), Mexico (61%) and Brazil (60%); about half of Venezuelans (51%) also express acceptance. In contrast, 62% of Salvadorans say homosexuality should be rejected by society, as do nearly half in Bolivia (49%). In the Asia/Pacific region, where views of homosexuality are mostly negative, more than seven-in-ten in Australia (79%) and the Philippines (73%) say homosexuality should be accepted by society; 54% in Japan agree. Where Homosexuality Is Rejected Publics in Africa and in predominantly Muslim countries remain among the least accepting of homosexuality. In sub-Saharan Africa, at least nine-in-ten in Nigeria (98%), Senegal (96%), Ghana (96%), Uganda (96%) and Kenya (90%) believe homosexuality should not be accepted by society. Even in South Africa where, unlike in many other African countries, homosexual acts are legal and discrimination based on sexual orientation is unconstitutional, 61% say homosexuality should not be accepted by society, while just 32% say it should be accepted. Overwhelming majorities in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed also say homosexuality should be rejected, including 97% in Jordan, 95% in Egypt, 94% in Tunisia, 93% in the Palestinian territories, 93% in Indonesia, 87% in Pakistan, 86% in Malaysia, 80% in Lebanon and 78% in Turkey. Elsewhere, majorities in South Korea (59%) and China (57%) also say homosexuality should not be accepted by society; 39% and 21%, respectively, say it should be accepted. South Korean views, while still negative, have shifted considerably since 2007, when 77% said homosexuality should be rejected and 18% said it should be accepted by society. Religiosity and Views of Homosexuality There is a strong relationship between a country's religiosity and opinions about homosexuality.2 There is far less acceptance of homosexuality in countries where religion is central to people's lives - measured by whether they consider religion to be very important, whether they believe it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral, and whether they pray at least once a day. There are some notable exceptions, however. For example, Russia receives low scores on the religiosity scale, which would suggest higher levels of tolerance for homosexuality. Yet, just 16% of Russians say homosexuality should be accepted by society. Conversely, Brazilians and Filipinos are considerably more tolerant of homosexuality than their countries' relatively high levels of religiosity would suggest. In Israel, where views of homosexuality are mixed, secular Jews are more than twice as likely as those who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox to say homosexuality should be accepted (61% vs. 26%); just 2% of Israeli Muslims share this view. Gender and Age and Views of Homosexuality In most of the countries surveyed, views of homosexuality do not differ significantly between men and women. But in the countries where there is a gender gap, women are considerably more likely than men to say homosexuality should be accepted by society. In Japan, Venezuela and Greece, where about six-in-ten women say homosexuality should be accepted (61% in Japan and 59% in Venezuela and Greece), fewer than half of men share this view (47%, 44% and 47%, respectively). About half of women in Israel (48%) express positive views of homosexuality, compared with just 31% of men. And, while majorities of women and men in Britain, Chile, France and the U.S. say homosexuality should be accepted by society, women are more likely than men to offer this view by at least ten percentage points. In many countries, views of homosexuality also vary across age groups, with younger respondents consistently more likely than older ones to say homosexuality should be accepted by society. Age differences are particularly evident in South Korea, Japan, and Brazil, where those younger than 30 are more accepting than those ages 30-49 who, in turn, are more accepting than those ages 50 and older. For example, in Japan, 83% of those younger than 30 say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with 71% of 30-49 year-olds and just 39% of those 50 and older. Similarly, 71% of South Koreans in the younger age group offer positive views of homosexuality, but just about half of 30-49 year-olds (48%) and 16% of those 50 or older do. In Brazil, about three-quarters of those younger than 30 (74%) say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with 60% of those in the middle category and 46% of those 50 or older. In the EU, solid majorities across age groups in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic express positive views of homosexuality, although Italians and Czechs ages 50 and older are considerably less likely than younger people in these countries to say homosexuality should be accepted. At least eight-in-ten Italians younger than 30 (86%) and ages 30-49 (80%) share this view, compared with 67% of those ages 50 and older. In the Czech Republic, 84% of those ages 18-29 and 87% of those 30-49 say homosexuality should be accepted, while 72% of those ages 50 and older agree. In Greece, where acceptance of homosexuality is not as prevalent as in most of the EU countries surveyed, majorities of 18-29 year-olds (66%) and 30-49 year-olds (62%) say homosexuality should be accepted by society; far fewer Greeks ages 50 and older (40%) share this view. People ages 50 and older in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile are also less likely than those in the two younger age groups to say homosexuality should be accepted by society, although at least half of those 50 and older in all but Bolivia are accepting, including 75% in Canada. In the U.S., 70% of those ages 18-29 and 64% of those ages 30-49 are accepting of homosexuality, compared with about half of Americans ages 50 and older (52%). In Bolivia, however, 53% of 18-29 year-olds and 43% of 30-49 year-olds say homosexuality should be accepted, but just 27% of those in the older group share this view. Mexicans and Chinese ages 18-29 are more likely than those in each of the other two age groups to offer positive views of homosexuality, but there is no significant difference between the views of 30-49 year-olds and those 50 or older. And in Russia, El Salvador and Venezuela, those younger than 30 are more tolerant of homosexuality than are those ages 50 and older, while the views of those ages 30-49 do not vary considerably from those in the youngest and oldest groups. Across the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, as well as in the six sub-Saharan countries, solid majorities across age groups share the view that homosexuality should be rejected by society. In Lebanon, however, there is somewhat more acceptance among younger respondents; 27% of Lebanese younger than 30 say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with 17% of 30-49 year-olds and 10% of those 50 or older.

White Gay Men Are Hindering Our Progress as a Queer Community

At this year's Pride Parade in Washington, D.C., there was not only pride but also conflict. As revelers strolled down P Street toward Logan Circle at around 5:30 p.m. on June 10, a chain of demonstrators handcuffed together spread along 15th Street to halt them, anchored to a railing at one end and a car at the other. Radical protest group No Justice, No Pride had come to stop the party. "What side are my people? What side are you on?" chanted other members of the group, which consists of "black, brown, queer, trans, gender nonconforming, bisexual, indigenous, two-spirit, formerly incarcerated, disabled, [and] white allies." As LGBT editor at ThinkProgress Zack Ford reported at the time, protesters not participating in the blockage handed out pink flyers enumerating their demands. Chief among them: the expulsion of D.C. police and corporate sponsors like Wells Fargo, which has come under fire for helping to finance the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor and weapons manufacturer. "Capital Pride will honor the legacy of Pride and the trans women of color who inspired it by ensuring that trans women of color play a central role in decision-making processes," began the list. The partygoers were not pleased. As the parade backed up at a turn two blocks back, spectators jeered from balconies overhead. Others flipped protesters the bird and shouted, "Shame!" "**** you for ruining a nice parade!" yelled a blond older guy from the sidewalk, who then made an abortive attempt to start a counter-chant: "No respect, no pride!" No Justice, No Pride and Black Lives Matter-affiliated groups reprised the protest in cities across the country throughout the summer. The Capital Pride confrontation and others like it have laid bare a growing chasm within the LGBTQ+ community between older activists and younger; between gay white cisgender men who feel like they can celebrate post-marriage equality and those who fear for their lives under a Trump administration; between those whose biggest stumbling block in life is being gay and those who feel their freedom is contingent not only on LGBTQ+ rights but also on issues like police reform, reproductive rights, and economic inequality. It is, in sum, a rift between the intersectionalists and the non-intersectionalists. As Marc Stein, a professor of LGBTQ+ history at San Francisco State University said about our current era, "'Intersectionality' has become the buzzword." Intersectionality and Its Discontents First coined by the American scholar and civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989, the term "intersectionality" posits that people experience oppression on multiple, "intersecting" fronts, and that activism focused narrowly on, say, LGBTQ+ rights will fail to address the needs of someone who is, for instance, transgender, black, and a woman. Even if the LGBTQ+ movement wins all its goals, that black trans woman will continue to suffer the consequences of racism and sexism, which include crippling poverty and pervasive discrimination. Critics like New York magazine's Andrew Sullivan have dismissed intersectionality as a neo-Marxist "academic craze" and a form of secular religion. But for its advocates, intersectionality is a way of centering those who've been historically at the margins of the LGBTQ+ community, whose interests were little served by the arrival of marriage equality. "Sexism and racism are not just additive, but multiplicative," said Jillian Weiss, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. Weiss said that in order to liberate all members of the LGBTQ+ community, it is necessary to elevate those with the least privilege. "Intersectionality is absolutely crucial to our movement — it's not just one thing at a time that we need to fight." ADVERTISEMENT An activist, poet, and grad student at the University of California, Berkeley, Alan Pelaez knows this firsthand. "The way I navigate the world as an undocumented immigrant is different, as a black queer body is different, [but] I experience these identities simultaneously," said Pelaez, who has urged the LGBTQ+ movement to adopt an intersectional approach to advocacy. "Intersectionality is asking what kinds of privleges some LGBTQ community members have and who gets denied them." But as dustups caused by groups like No Justice, No Pride show — as well as other developments, like the addition of a brown stripe to Philadelphia's LGBTQ pride flag; and scuffles over the inclusion of Israeli flags at demonstrations — that not everyone is happy with the LGBTQ+ movement's focus on intersectionality, which has foregrounded discussions of privilege, police brutality, sexism, racism, and anti-trans violence. Some gay white cisgender men are starting to tune out. "You have gay white men who are no longer involved in activism or community work because they just get shouted down by minority activists who want to racialize everything," said Jamie Kirchick, a right-leaning journalist and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. In a piece in Tablet magazine last year titled "How Intersectionality Makes You Stupid," Kirchick took aim at the National LGBTQ+ Task Force, which canceled and then uncanceled a Shabbat reception at its annual Creating Change conference in response to critics of Israel. "White gay man has become an epithet," he added. While the academic definition of intersectionality may be narrow, its meaning has broadened as its usage has spread across various social justice movements. Not only is it used as shorthand to talk about work between coalitions, it has also come to embody the idea that, as with the experience of identity, the sources of oppression — sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism — are interconnected. For the more radical, the ultimate oppressor is capitalism. "I think what [the focus on intersectionality] does is bring everyone to rally around our victimhood, and that, fundamentally, is negative," said Jimmy LaSalvia, now a political independent who co-founded gay Republican group the Log Cabin Republicans. "A bigger, more unifying message will resonate with more and more of Americans as we grow tired of the us-versus-them confrontation-style politics of the last couple of decades." Kirchick said intersectionality has made the work of some LGBTQ+ organizations incoherent, citing groups like Gays Against Guns, which sprung up after the Pulse massacre in Orlando last year. ADVERTISEMENT "You can support gun control, but I don't see what that has to do with being gay," Kirchick said. "And the notion that gay-rights groups should be weighing in at all on [the] abortion issue is preposterous." Erasing Gay White Cisgender Men? But even some progressive gay white men say they feel alienated from a movement they see becoming more radical, particularly online, where the tenor of conversation is often uncivil. Writing in The Nation in 2014, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted a similar dynamic emerging online between older feminists and younger ones who consider themselves intersectionalists. One left-leaning political activist and writer, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisal, said he often gets shouted down on social media by intersectionalists decrying his "white privilege" and minimizing both his struggles and contributions to the movement. This includes downplaying the role of gay men in the 1969 Stonewall riots that kicked off the modern-day LGBTQ-rights era. "People literally say that gay white men have done nothing for the movement for the last 50 years," he said. "They're not trying to make the movement intersectional; they're trying to erase other participants who came before them." "A lot of people are staying on the sidelines just because of the intensity of the expected attacks," said Walter K. Olson, a fellow at libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. "For a lot of people — even people who support [intersectionality] but may have a sticking point — they just feel they had better stay out of the conversation." But Olson, who is gay and married, added that the internal conflict the LGBTQ+ movement is currently experiencing — and the drop-off in participation from those at the top — was to be expected after marriage equality. "Movements change after they win," Olson said. "After victory, you will naturally lose a lot of your momentum." Olson provided himself as an example. A gay white married man, he said he "showed up for marriage and looked at issues that followed and stepped back out." While he supports trans rights, he said he feels the battle is no longer his. Another "Movement of Movements" Older activists also believe that critiques of the LGBTQ+ movement's inclusivity overlook past progress. Richard Rosendall, a columnist for the Washington Blade and a decades-long activist, said the LGBTQ+ movement in Washington, D.C., has always been allied with the racial-justice groups, given the city's racial diversity. During the marriage fight, he worked with black faith leaders who supported gay marriage. The NAACP endorsed marriage equality at the time, which suggests that LGBTQ+ groups have often worked with other rights organizations to achieve its goals. "To pretend there has been no progress on [race within the LGBTQ+ community] disincentivizes allyship," Rosendall said. While Rosendall generally supports intersectional approaches to activism, he penned a column criticizing No Justice, No Pride for interrupting D.C. Pride. He said protesting police presence at Pride overlooks decades of work spent improving relations between the D.C. LGBTQ+ community and the police force; the department even has an LGBTQ+ liaison and is considered a model for inclusion. "There's a risk of behaving in a totalitarian mindset," he said. Stein, the SF State historian, noted that the current debate within the LGBTQ+ movement over issues of inclusion — and what "justice for all" means — is reminiscent of what academics call the "movement of movements" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. United by the Vietnam War, it was an "incredible era of dialogue" between social-justice groups of starkly different stripes. The Gay Liberation Front marched with the Black Panthers and participated in antiwar demonstrations. "Homophiles," as they called themselves back then, took on issues like police reform at a time when law enforcement routinely entrapped gay men in stings. The movement was not only far more decentralized than today, when several large LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations with lots of money generally set the agenda; it was stacked with critics of capitalism, including communists like Harry Hay, who co-founded early homophile organization the Mattachine Society. In 1989, the first gay-pride march through Washington, D.C., featured a conference that tried to encourage coalitions between different racial groups; it was endorsed by the National Organization for Women and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. ADVERTISEMENT To call the "movement of movements" intersectional would be an anachronism, but the banding together of different causes produced similarly contentious debates about who had power, whose issues should take precedence, and which coalitions made sense. Now, with President Donald Trump in the White House, intersectionalists are posing similar questions. "This Is Not a Polite Thing" To those experiencing oppression on several fronts — those at the intersections — the sensibilities of gay white cisgender men seem beside the point. "I come from a place of anger — particularly on social media, where people who are oppressed talk about their embodied knowledge — but my anger is rooted in the fact that my human limits have been met," said activist Pelaez, adding that the arrival of marriage equality did little to help his legal status. "Anger is generative and a source of empowerment. Only when we are angry can we do something to address what makes us angry." Lourdes Hunter, a black trans woman and the executive director of the TransWomen of Color Collective, put it more starkly. "When black trans women are murdered in the street, it doesn't happen in a polite manner," said Hunter, an academic who has worked as an organizer for 25 years. Indeed, trans women of color are more frequently the victims of violence than any other group under the LGBTQ umbrella. "This is not a polite thing," Hunter said. "When someone has their foot on your neck, you don't tap them and say, 'Excuse me.'" With Trump in office, the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ community feel that the need to speak out against threats forcefully is more critical than the need to engage in "respectability politics." "There are people who are undocumented, with disabilities, impacted by state-sanctioned violence in ways cisgender white queer people are not," Hunter said. "With intersectionality, we're talking about centering those voices that have been erased by cisgender white queers." "Sometimes the framework for the liberation of one group clashes with another," Pelaez added, citing the rhetoric around immigration as an example. Public sympathy centers around Dreamers — undocumented Americans brought to the U.S. as children — and those who have committed no crimes. Linking citizenship with lack of criminality undermines the racial-justice movement's critique of the way certain groups are presumed criminal and overpoliced. "We use narratives about immigrants that implicate blacks," he said. "I'm not going to be liberated because I am both black and an immigrant." The calls for politeness strike Darnell Moore, a writer and organizer with Black Lives Matter who identifies as queer and black, as "disingenuous." He noted that AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s — in which gay men and their allies chained themselves to government buildings and performed die-ins on the streets of major cities — was hardly polite. "So the only people who are allowed to be disruptive are white cisgender men?" said Moore, who called on LGBTQ organizations to endorse Black Lives Matter on HuffPost. Our Allies, Our Selves Not all gay white cisgender men see the LGBTQ+ movement's intersectional turn in a negative light. Gay Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Sims said his experience as a gay white cisgender man — and the discrimination he has faced on account of his sexual orientation — has made him more sympathetic to the plight of members of the community who are more disenfranchised than he is. "I don't think I've ever seen it as victimhood," said Sims, who supported the addition of a brown stripe to Philadelphia's pride flag. "We talk about the Obama years as a heyday for the gay movement. That's not true for hundreds of thousands of LGBT people. It didn't change the circumstances of trans women of color." ADVERTISEMENT Sims said it seemed obvious to him that sexism, racism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia come from the same place, and said that the far-right politics of the Trump administration have made intersectionality all the more important. "If sharing a common enemy brings us together, the best thing that comes from this Dumpster fire of a presidency is that we are all learning that we can and should work together," he said. "It doesn't water down the [experience of gay white cisgender men] to hear about others' struggles. It informs you to make better decisions." Imara Jones, an activist and journalist who identifies as black and nonbinary, said the current political moment is a turning point that calls for radicalism. "I don't believe the current structure of political power in the U.S. is going to last," Jones said. "The question is whether there is going to be enough momentum to replace it with something that's new." That depends on the degree to which those with more power in the LGBTQ+ family share it with those who have less, Jones said. To do this, gay white cisgender men have to not only let their guard down and listen but also acknowledge the relative power they wield and use it to elevate those lower down who have been historically marginalized. "The key to justice is acknowledgment," said Jones, who is currently at work on an intersectional news show for Free Speech TV. "White cisgender gay men have to acknowledge that they have a disproportionate amount of power in the movement that has accrued to them for historical reasons that are wrong." Pelaez concedes that "intersectional work is all about having really difficult conversations." It is, after all, psychologically taxing for a gay white cisgender man who got bullied in high school for his sexual orientation and can still be fired for it in 28 states to hear about the privilege he has as a white man. But it's necessary, Pelaez said. "Why does it hurt you to hear about someone else's experience that could help create a more just world?" Pelaez asked. For all the division intersectional conversations have sown, Jones said its ultimate end is equality for all. "The American ideal and project as it has been formed and inherited is intersectional," Jones said. "That's what we have to be in order for that ideal to be realized." It remains to be seen how intersectionality within the LGBTQ+ community will play out, whether it will be seen, decades from now, as sparking the kind of vital progress Stonewall or AIDS activism did. Or will it come to be understood as a force that fragmented queer politics and alienated gay white cisgender men, long-considered that movement's most powerful group? In large part, the answer depends on whether those with more power will step aside and let those with less speak and be heard, and whether they feel they are sharing power rather than losing it.

The New Stonewall Film is Just as Whitewashed As We Feared

From the moment of its debut, the trailer for director Roland Emmerich's film Stonewall inspired ire and disbelief. The film appeared to center on a fictional Midwestern blonde jock named Danny, putting the young gay man at the heart of the modern LGBTQ rights movement's flashpoint. This irked many LGBT people as it seemed to erase the crucial roles real-life trans women of color played in the actual Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. Important women such as Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major, who were part of the pushback against police who were raiding the Stonewall bar in the Greenwich Village, were nowhere to be found on the film's IMDB page. The trailer sparked a boycott movement, the petition for which has drawn over 24,000 signatures and activists even repainted Stonewall statues in New York to call out whitewashing of history. In the midst of this uproar, more moderate voices could be heard urging protestors not to "judge a film by its trailer," but rather to wait and see it in its entirety before expounding on its crimes and merits. Well, having seen "Stonewall," I can report that all of our concerns about the trailer play out in the film. Some portions of Danny's story are moving—particularly those set in Indiana, where his family disowns him for being gay. But Emmerich's attempt to make Danny a larger symbol of something, and the ham-fisted way in which he inserts Danny's drama into what's now seen as a world historical event, feels reductive and insulting. In interviews, Emmerich has described his intention for Danny to serve as a "window for the audience" into the LGBTQ culture of late '60s New York. In the film, Danny travels to Greenwich Village and quickly meets assigned-male-at-birth sex workers his own age. Many of these characters are people of color, and, while gender is never brought up in the script, several appear to be either trans or gender variant. Danny's whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormative affect, which are constantly remarked upon by others, allow him a social mobility denied to his new acquaintances. He meets a member of the more conservative gay rights organization the Mattachine Society—the openly transphobic Trevor, who is played with a Christopher Walken-esque oiliness by Jonathan Rhys-Myers—whom he soon moves in with. He also has a scholarship to Columbia awaiting him, offering social capital his new sex worker friends could only dream of. Emmerich's focusing on a character draped in such privilege comes at the expense of minimal screen time for real-life historical figures like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson (the latter of whom appears as a peripheral character in the film). This makes for painful viewing. Despite the roles played by trans women of color at Stonewall, the riots are still commonly referred to as "the birth of the Gay Rights movement" in the media. An accurate depiction of the event—one that trusted the inherent drama within it, and staged it with integrity and accuracy, like Ava Duvernay did with Selma—could have helped correct this erasure. Instead, Stonewall simply reifies it. As I mentioned earlier, the smaller personal story within Stonewall was, at times, quite powerful. In depicting his protagonist's youth, Emmerich subtly poisons all the cliched images of '60s heartland Americana. Danny's generic handsomeness and kindness, which actor Jeremy Irvine plays with vulnerability and winning guile, are no help in the face of rabid, unyielding prejudice. His secret exposed, Danny's parents, his community, and his lover all close ranks on him in terrifying haste. Once in New York, however, the film loses its subtlety. Emmerich and screenwriter Jon Robin Bait, locate no similar humanity in Danny's new acquaintances. His new friends Ray, Orphan Annie, Cong, and the others might as well be youth out of Dickens. Within moments of meeting him, we see Cong, an African American sex worker, break a giant storefront window to steal a hat, before he and his gang—with Danny in tow—scamper off, like characters from a cartoon. While Stonewall is frank in its depiction of LGBTQ youth homelessness, it's far less than deft in its storytelling. Emotional moments, particularly those involving Danny's mentor/protector Ray (played by the excellent Jonny Beauchamp), balloon into melodrama. Meanwhile, confrontations and action all resolve into cliché. It feels like Emmerich couldn't help but make his Stonewall a mashup of My Own Private Idaho and Independence Day. Especially disappointing in Stonewall are the stark contrasts between the worlds of Trevor and his white, middle class activist friends, and that of the sex worker youths. Ray, Cong, and the others are painted as nihilistic defeatists with a disdain for, or apathy toward, politics. In reality, Sylvia Rivera was both a sex worker and a lifelong political organizer. In addition to co-founding STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), she worked with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican youth group. Such an omission further feeds the divisions drawn around class, gender, and race that make the film so problematic. The movie's worst moments come toward the end with a bizarre sex trafficking incident, in which Danny is kidnapped and delivered to a swanky hotel room, occupied by what appears to be an incognito (though never identified) J. Edgar Hoover. The Powerful Man he encounters is a lascivious cross dresser, who nearly sexually assaults Danny, before he is rescued by Ray. Danny's trauma radicalizes him, inspiring him to throw the "first brick" that ignites the riot. This telling of the event is ludicrous. The true case for the riots is made in a thousand small ways throughout the film: police brutality toward LGBTQ people, social marginalization, lack of financial opportunity, transphobia, etcetera. Why a film devoted to the idea of LGBTQ equality would use a sensational eleventh hour plot twist involving exploitative gay sex (with problematic transphobic overtones), in order to catalyze a liberating action, particularly a historical liberating action, is baffling. Stonewall ends on an "it gets better" note involving Danny and his mother and sister. Does it get better, though, for Danny's former friends, like Ray and Cong, who aren't attending Columbia? The history of the early LGBTQ rights movement would suggest it didn't. In fact, trans women of color were marginalized from the early political organizations that sprang from the Stonewall Rebellion, who abandoned the pursuit of gender identity protections in favor of a narrow cis gay agenda. In 2015, with so much political activity around anti-racism and trans rights, a film about Stonewall could have been the perfect opportunity to tell an intersectional story of this important event, putting queer and trans people of color front-and-center where they belong. Instead we get the story of Danny from Indiana, a story we've heard far too many times before.

Violence Against Transgender Women In Latin America Thwarts HIV Efforts

HIV prevalence among transgender women in Latin American countries is significantly higher (35 percent) when compared to the HIV incidence among the rest of the female population (less than 1 percent), reports the Huffington Post UK. Transgender women in Latin America also face far more difficulties when it comes to accessing HIV prevention and care, as well as to medical services, due to transphobia, an unchecked form of discrimination, which makes these women targets for discrimination, violence and sexual abuse. In a report entitled The Night Is Another Country: Impunity and violence against transgender women human rights defenders in Latin America, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and partners have investigated transphobia in Latin American countries, revealing a disproportionate number of violent acts against transgender women which have gone undisciplined. "Between 2005 and 2012 in Colombia, 60 transgender women were murdered without a single person having been brought to justice. In the same period 35 transgender people were killed in Guatemala with only one person undergoing legal proceedings," wrote Dr. Alvaro Bermejo, Executive Director, International HIV/AIDS Alliance in the Huffington Post UK's blog. Other key findings of the report included: Approximately 80 percent of transgender activists interviewed reported violence or threats of violence from state officials including "extrajudicial executions, torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and arbitrary detentions that extend beyond the heading of hate crime." 79 percent of transgender murders in the world took place in Latin America for a total of 664 cases In Guatemala and Honduras, 60 percent of interviewed transgendered activists were subjected to arbitrary detention at some point in their lives 90 percent of violence against transgendered women was related to sex work Transgender women, sex work and HIV The high percentage of transgender women in sex work is directly related to the high incidence of HIV among the population, explained researchers. According to Bermejo, transgender women are often thrown out of their homes at a young age and excluded from an education. In order to make money, many feel they have no choice but to turn to the sex trade. "About six months ago, I got in a car with a man who I know is a policeman," stated a transgender activist from Guatemala City, Guatemala, in a study report from the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. "He hired me to provide my sexual services, but afterwards he didn't want to pay and he wouldn't let me get out of the car. He shouted at me, 'Today you really are going to die, hueco!' I told him to kill me, because I knew that sooner or later I'd end up dead, because for me, life is a bonus." Working in the sex trade puts many transgender women at risk for sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV, however, most Latin American countries do not recognized transgender people as a population, and therefore there are no laws protecting them or catering to their health care needs. The majority of transgender women, states Bermejo, have no access to basic health care, and many clinics do not support their special needs. Not only are services limited, but due to the threat of violence against them, most transgender women look to keep their identities concealed, therefore rarely seeking medical attention. "Because of the social exclusion that transgender women face and the context of violence and discrimination that surrounds them, it is virtually impossible to provide an effective HIV response focused on this at risk group," Bermejo stated in the blog. Report recommendations To help bring much-needed HIV care to transgender women, the Alliance report notes the following issues need to be addressed: Arrests and trials must be made for those responsible for hate crimes against transgendered women Legal recognition of gender identity Targeting the transgendered community with health care efforts Ensure health care clinics and prisons allow transgendered women to use female-only facilities where the likelihood of abuse is minimal Acknowledging and protecting transgendered women from the risk of rape and abuse from both the public and from state employees

Acceptance Grows, Slowly But Steadily, For Gay Evangelicals NPR

In rural Kentucky, the call to be a preacher can come at an early age. Nick Wilson was born with it. "We were always in church," he says. "Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Bible school, revivals. That's what life was." His father, a grandfather and two great-grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers. So is his brother. His sister married a preacher, and Wilson intended to follow the line. After college, he attended the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., a training ground for Baptist preachers since 1859. But his ministry plans soon ended, because no congregation was interested in ordaining him. They all wanted a family man, and Wilson didn't measure up. "First off, I'm single. That's a problem," he says. "They really want you to be married. But then if you throw in gay, it's over with." Wilson says he knew from the time he was six or seven that he was "different." In time, he became open about his sexuality, even taking his boyfriend to church. But in the Southern Baptist world, homosexuality is morally unacceptable, so he was disqualified from the ministry. "The scriptural view is what's ultimate," says Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary and an intellectual leader in the evangelical world. "The Apostle Paul very explicitly in 1 Corinthians says that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." [There's more from Mohler and the culture war being fought among Evangelical Christians in Tom Gjelten's Morning Edition story.] At one time Mohler advocated "reparative therapy" for LGBT individuals to help them change their sexual orientation. He now thinks same-sex attraction may be involuntary. Still, he says, those who feel it should not act on it, no matter whether they are in a committed same-sex relationship. Southern Baptist doctrine emphatically rejects gay marriage. "If you can change the way a society or civilization defines itself at the most molecular level — at marriage and family — and if you can redefine sexual mores pervasively," Mohler argues, "you will have changed the society utterly." Not surprisingly, as an evangelical, Wilson has long struggled with being gay. "It didn't take long to realize that that was not approved of, because I heard my father preach about it," he says. "I have been to the point of suicide over trying to not be gay, because I felt early on called to the ministry. But then 'gay Christian,' in the world I grew up in, that didn't go together. You had to be one or the other, and God didn't take it away — the calling or the gay." Attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex marriage have become much more supportive in the United States over recent years. Evangelicals generally still consider homosexual behavior immoral, but by ever smaller margins. In 2007, just 23 percent of Southern Baptists said homosexuality should be accepted by society, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2014, that figure had risen to 30 percent. Attitudes toward same-sex marriage have shifted just as dramatically. In a 2001 Pew survey, just 13 percent of white evangelical Protestants (the most conservative religious group on social issues) said they favored same-sex marriage. By 2015, that number had almost doubled, to 24 percent, and it was becoming easier for LGBT individuals to find a church home. For Wilson, it was Ridgewood Baptist, a small church in a working-class neighborhood of southwest Louisville. The church is part of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group of churches that broke from the Southern Baptist Convention about 25 years ago over the question of whether women should be ordained. The church's more welcoming attitude toward LGBT individuals, however, is a relatively new phenomenon. Pastor Matt Johnson, 36, was himself raised and schooled in the Southern Baptist tradition. As he prepared for the ministry, he says his views were clear cut and typical of his time and place: "Homosexuality is wrong. And that's very clear in the Bible. So that's kind of the end of the discussion." While studying at the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University, however, Johnson met some gay Christians and found his views softening. "People who were there because they want to be ministers and whose faith was very challenging to me and who were just deeply committed Christians and deeply committed to their faith and who also were gay," Johnson says. A careful study of the Old and New Testament convinced him that the scriptural references to homosexuality were not as clear as he originally thought, but it was his encounter with gay ministry students that mattered more. "I see the Holy Spirit working in these people's lives," he says. "Who am I to say that they are not Christians or that they are somehow lost or wrong? I don't feel like my faith is nearly as strong as theirs. I'm challenged and humbled by them." LGBT rights were not a big issue at Ridgewood when Johnson arrived at the church, but it already had a reputation for openness. Wilson, uncomfortable elsewhere as a gay man, was already a member. In April, at the age of 51, Wilson was ordained at Ridgewood as a Baptist minister, with Johnson's enthusiastic support. Most Ridgewood members have taken the church's gay-friendly reputation in stride, despite its setting in a community where LGBT rights are not well established. Sarah Thurmond, 20, a leader of the Ridgewood church youth group, says some people she knows find it hard to believe there are gay congregants. "When I say we have a gay member in our church, they just don't understand how we allow that," she says. "So I was like, 'What do you mean, how do we allow that? They walk through the door!' " Young people in general are much more likely to support same-sex relationships, but it's not universal. The men who choose to attend the Southern Baptist Seminary do so knowing their church's position. Matt Mihelic, 28, is preparing to be a pastor. He says if a young man were to come to him at church and confide that he's gay, he'd advise him to embrace God's view of sexuality alone. "He should ... refrain from sexual activity until he's married to a woman," he says. Mohler, the seminary president, acknowledges that he and other conservative evangelicals are often asked whether they are obsessed with issues of sexuality, given all the other evils they could focus on. "This sexual revolution is undergirded by a vast change in the moral thinking and the moral intuitions of Americans," he says. "And the reason why we can't drop this is because we do believe it matters to salvation and eternity." As for Wilson, he will not repent for his sexual orientation, but he does recognize that sexual behavior can be immoral under some circumstances. "Depending on how sex is used, or how somebody is literally used in sex. That can be sinful," he says. "If you're not honoring that other person and just using them as an object for your gratification, I think that's sinful." As a born-again Christian, Wilson seeks forgiveness and acknowledges that he is a sinner — but not because of his sexual orientation, nor because of his hope that someday he, too, will marry.

Changing Sex, and Changing Teams

LOS ANGELES — Not so long ago, Toni Bias dreamed of playing in the W.N.B.A. But after starring on the girls' junior varsity basketball team as a high school freshman, Toni came out as transgender last summer, began going by the name Tony and started transitioning to male. At the time, California had no policy governing transgender high school athletes. Already finding himself the target of bullies, who often taunt him with "he-she," Tony feared he would have to endure even more abuse if he pushed to try out for the boys' team. So he made a wrenching decision: he quit basketball. "They don't understand I'm not trying to pretend to be someone else," Tony, now a 16-year-old sophomore at River City High School in West Sacramento, said. "I'm just trying to be who I was all along." Professional sports have grappled with this question for decades, since Renée Richards, who was born male, underwent sex-change surgery and sued the United States Tennis Association to be allowed to play in the women's draw at the 1977 U.S. Open: How, if at all, should transgender athletes be allowed to compete? Over the last decade, the International Olympic Committee and the National Collegiate Athletic Association have adopted regulations for athletes who were born male but now consider themselves females and want to play on women's teams. And now, high schools are beginning to take on the issue as well, as a small but growing number students who identify themselves as transgender have begun demanding access to the same school activities, like interscholastic sports, that other students enjoy. More than half a dozen states, from Washington to Massachusetts, have adopted rules to allow transgender students to compete on teams that correspond with their gender identities rather than the sex listed on their school records. Half a dozen more states are considering similar regulations. And a bill in the Legislature would make California the first to specifically guarantee by law that transgender students like Tony are allowed to play school sports. "Transgender students deserve equal access to everything in public education, including sports," said Tom Ammiano, the state assemblyman sponsoring the bill. "You can't discriminate just because you're uncomfortable with a young man transitioning to become a young woman." The push to include transgender students in school sports reflects the rapidly growing visibility of transgender people in all walks of society — like Fallon Fox, the mixed-martial artist who was born a man but fights women, and Chaz Bono, the child ofSonny BonoandCher, who has transitioned from female to male — as well as shifting ideas about how to define gender. But state regulators now face the difficult challenge maintaining competitive fairness: What if a 6-foot-6 student who is biologically male identified as female and wanted to play on the girls' basketball team? "That student would have a dramatically unfair advantage because of his anatomical sex," said Andrew Beckwith, executive vice president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, a conservative group that has also opposed gay marriage and abortion. "And then after the game, he can go to the girls' locker room and shower alongside all the girls." While transgender students would be allowed to use the locker rooms along with their teammates under the Massachusetts guideline — a thorny issue that has sparked its own debates — state education officials noted that transgender students have often used gender neutral bathrooms at school. The International Olympic Committee initially required transgender athletes who want to compete in the Olympics to undergo a full sex-change operation and hormone therapy. The National Collegiate Athletic Association requires male-to-female transgender athletes to complete a year of hormone therapy before they may compete on a women's team. Regulations for transgender high schoolers are far less stringent. No state requires students to undergo surgery or hormone therapy before they are allowed to compete. In some states, including California, where the state interscholastic federation adopted a new policy about transgender students in February, students (or their parents) need only submit a letter to the school asserting their gender identity and the case will be reviewed. Thus far, only a handful of transgender students have sought to play high school sports, according to officials from several states, all without major controversy, in part because most have been biological females who wanted to play on boys' teams — often a less controversial transition that ignites fewer fears about a student's gaining competitive advantages. But Mr. Beckwith said guidelines issued this year in his state, Massachusetts, were far too lenient, calling them "ripe for abuse." "The policy says to just completely ignore anatomical sex," he said. "If a student decides that is his identity, the school has to accept that at face value." Along with members of other conservative organizations, he said the only way to maintain a fair competitive environment would be to permit students to play only with other students of their biological sex. Transgender rights advocates and school administrators have said that fears that male students will pose as transgender so they can play on girls' teams are far overblown. Rhonda Blanford-Green, executive director of the Nebraska School Activities Association, said the policy in her state offered transgender students — who are frequently targets of bullying and have elevated rates of depression and suicide — a fair opportunity to participate in school activities. "Do you know the stigma and psychological trauma most of these kids probably go through just to come out?" Ms. Blanford-Green said. "No kid is going to put himself in that situation as a joke." Nor are interscholastic sports the only school activities that transgender students say they are often barred from. Eli Erlick, a high school senior in Willits, Calif., who was born male but declared a female gender identity at age 8, tried in middle school to take girls' gym classes. "The school said I was a boy, so I couldn't participate in them," Eli, now 17, said. "After that, I just avoided sports altogether." Although California law already prohibits discrimination against transgender people, policies vary from school to school, Mr. Ammiano said, and some students do not know which teams they are allowed to play on. His said his bill would ensure that transgender students all over the state were able to play school sports on teams where they felt safe and comfortable. With the new state interscholastic federation policy in place, the athletic director at River City High School said Tony would be allowed to try out for the boys' team next season. But he does not plan to, still fearing the social fallout with his classmates. He still shoots baskets in the gym sometimes, but only by himself. "I miss it so much," Tony said. "To be who I am, I've had to give up something that's really big in my life."

Here's What Transgender People With Disabilities Want You To Know

Robin, a white femme genderfluid intersex person, seated in their manual wheelchair in front of a brick wall. They have blue hair, glasses, several visible tattoos and piercings, and are wearing purple lipstick and a shirt that says THE FUTURE IS ACCESSIBLE (courtesy of Annie Segarra). This is what it feels like to be transgender in America: Some days it feels like we're creating possibilities and finally making the world safer for one another. Other days all we can feel are the devastating threats to our community as reactionaries try to shame and legislate us out of public life. Earlier this year, the Trump administration withdrew Obama-era guidelines protecting transgender students, and just last month, Trump tweeted that transgender people cannot "serve in any capacity" in the military (though the Department of Defense still hasn't received any guidance from the White House about implementing the ban). The same day Trump tweeted about banning trans troops, the Justice Department argued in a major federal case that the Civil Rights Act's Title VII does not protect gay workers. At the same time, legal avenues for the advancement of trans people's rights are opening up in new (and controversial) ways. On May 18, A US district court in Pennsylvania ruled that Kate Lynn Blatt, a trans woman, could sue her former employer for discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Her former employer, Cabela's Retail Outfitter, tried to argue that gender dysphoria was not covered under the act, but it was denied the motion to dismiss. The court ruling has reignited a long-running debate about how we understand gender diversity. Is gender dysphoria protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act (and therefore a psychiatric illness requiring care)? This debate has been a centerpiece of trans discourse for years, with arguments today reflecting those in 2013 when the newly released DSM-V categorized gender dysphoria as a psychiatric condition. The development was an improvement from the manual's previous edition's categorization of gender identity disorder — which described the act of identifying as a different gender as an illness in itself — but the 2013 decision still caused a split between trans organizations. Some spoke out against the continued pathologization of trans experience, and others focused on the way that this designation would make it easier for trans people to receive care. Now the future of health care for the country at large remains an open question. While Senate Republicans failed to pass their last-ditch Obamacare repeal plan late last month, they haven't yet completely given up the fight — and some health professionals assert that repealing the Affordable Care Act would devastate transgender Americans. In a society where transgender and gender-nonconforming people are far more likely than the general population to be unemployed, live in poverty, and live with disabilities, trans people's access to safe and affordable health care is crucial to our survival. I have been a transgender community organizer for over a decade. Despite all of the victories that have dotted recent history, I've found this current political moment to be one of the most stressful and frightening to be transgender in America. As a disabled transgender woman in America, that stress is compounded. On any given day, I don't know which part of my identity will be under attack. Transphobia and ableism are harsh realities of my day-to-day life, and of the lives of countless other Americans who share my experience. Trans people with disabilities are among those most affected by these recent legislative and legal battles surrounding trans rights and the future of health care — but their voices have been strikingly absent from the national conversation. So I've spent several weeks reaching out to them to hear what they think about the current state of health care, gender, disability, and identity. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. Dom, a nonbinary person with short black hair, wearing a black tank top. I don't consider transition-related care because of health insurance, living with financial insecurity, and the way my disabilities would impact physical transitioning. I instead cope with gender dysphoria through radical acceptance and working through internalized transphobia and gender constructs, and that's going okay, I guess. One thing that's an intersectional struggle for me is that strangers have so many questions about me on sight: What's my gender and sexuality? What's my race? Why do I look young and "healthy" but walk with a cane? It's too much to deal with sometimes, and I just stay home. I know I exist in all these in-between spaces as a mixed-race, disabled, nonbinary person, but it would be nice if people just treated me like a whole person and not a walking question mark. There is a ton of ableism in the trans and queer community, and that's why I now only interact with other queer folks with disabilities, mostly trans people of color. We still struggle with internalized ableism, but can often support one another through that by being vulnerable, honest, and compassionate. Between racism, anti-queerness, and ableism, I basically keep to myself and focus on QTPoC Mental Health, networking with other activists and small grassroots organizations that address these complicated intersections. One group I highly recommend is National Queer & Trans Therapists of Color Network. Niamh, a nonbinary trans girl, wearing sunglasses, a red choker, and a black tank top with white lace at the collar. It took me a long time to figure out my transness because I was so preoccupied with my hemophilia, the arthritis it caused in my ankles, and my mental health. I've never had a moment where I haven't been conscious of how my body feels at any given moment. This means my disabilities (the list keeps growing) have informed the way I think about my gender identity and vice versa. Before I started doing any sort of medical transition, I first had to ask my hemophilia doctors is if that was a thing I could do. I was afraid they'd say no and I'd be stuck with higher levels of dysphoria. My gender identity is not respected in a medical establishment that believes that certain medical conditions are intrinsically gendered a certain way. My gender identity and my disability leave me at the crossroads of several communities, but honestly never really part of any. As a nonbinary trans girl, I don't fit in with NBs (whose circles can be really AFAB centered) and I don't fit in with trans women, because I'm not a woman. When I'm in trans and/or queer spaces, I often feel aspects of my disabledness being reflected (parts of my mental health), but I don't see that in terms of other parts of my disability. I think I feel more comfortable in disabled spaces, where my gender identity and orientation are somehow easier to understand than my disability is to people who share my gender identities or orientation. Queer, disabled spaces are the best! Though I wish they would center on trans women and trans femmes more often. Alex wearing a black t-shirt and black glasses. They have short pink hair. I turned to freelance illustration as my profession because of my physical disability — employers who seemed like they might hire me for general retail/service jobs very quickly changed their tune when they met me in person for the interview and realized I was missing a hand. Online commissioners care much less, prioritizing the quality of my work and frequently never even learning about my disabilities. I am not very a frequent participator in the general disabled or trans community, mostly out of fear that it might define me over what I want people to know about me instead: my art. The ruling of this court case protecting a trans woman under the Americans With Disabilities Act is...complicated, to say the least. I am stuck between frustration that the ADA was the way this woman had to fight back, but appreciation that she managed to win something against an abusive employer. Gender dysphoria can be debilitating for sure, but I find that things that cause it to the point of distress generally fall under harassment rather than disability discrimination. Trans rights should absolutely be established as their own thing, separate from the ADA, and as soon as humanly possible. Anna, a woman with curly brown hair and rimless glasses, wearing a blue v-neck t-shirt. I've never been denied transition-related care because of a disability, nor has anyone used disability as a reason to deny my gender identity. With all that said, I've definitely downplayed and withheld information about my physical disability out of fear that it might impact my transition treatment or ongoing HRT maintenance. This especially concerned me since my disability involves muscle weakness and stiffness — and an estrogen/anti-androgen regimen is known to reduce muscle mass and strength in people where testosterone was dominant. I didn't want any questions or roadblocks to my treatment. I don't really talk about my chronic pain with my primary care doctor. I certainly haven't sought any more treatments for it. Even though she's a competent and caring doctor, I still worry because she has power over my ongoing care and HRT prescriptions. I worry about medication being taken away — even though it's crucial for my physical transition and emotional well-being. As for my physical disability, I'm not really sure what I need or want for further treatment. What I do know is that even after four years, it's still hard to fully trust my providers when they have the power to act as gatekeepers. Emory, 32, Nonbinary Transmasculine (Oregon) Emory, a nonbinary transmasculine person with short blonde hair, wearing a black t-shirt, black glasses, and several small earrings. It's unfortunate that it is hard for people, especially cis people, to differentiate between being trans (not a psychiatric condition) and gender dysphoria (which is). But just as we provide help for people dealing with other conditions (anxiety, depression, etc.), providing accommodations for gender dysphoria is not unreasonable and can dramatically improve mental health. In an ideal situation, people would just respect the gender identity of their employees and this wouldn't be a problem, but we aren't there yet. Kristen takes a photo of themselves in a mirror wearing a black blazer, aviator sunglasses, and a purple t-shirt that reads "Disability is a natural part of the human experience." When the ACA was passed, I was finally able to get insurance and care for the first time in over a decade. For the first time in my life, my potentially fatal systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis (SJIA) is actually under control and has been for nearly two years. My quality of life is improving drastically and I am able to start conducting research, traveling, and presenting at conferences, and finish my masters. The ACA quite literally saved my life. Dysphoria can be a very intense experience. It's on par with my PTSD attacks, honestly. I don't want to belittle how it can affect our lives. That said, covering gender dysphoria under the ADA for this reason seems odd. There should be a way to sue for discrimination without needing to associate gender-related issues with disabilities. That said, I can understand how there are not laws put in place for gender-related protections the way there should be. We need to fight for those to exist instead of using disability laws, I think. Oliver, a transmasculine person wearing a blue t-shirt, a blue hat over short brown hair, and a blue hearing aid, stands in front of a canyon and a river. Being hard of hearing has absolutely affected my transition-related care. When I was younger, I was sent to therapy. I remember sitting in this big chair, not understanding a single word of what the therapist was saying. I just sat there for the hour and left. After five sessions of this, the therapist gave up. In retrospect, if I had actually been able to communicate with mental health professionals, I could have gotten things sorted much more easily and gotten the support I needed. Even today, when doctor's offices forget to book ASL interpreters for my appointments, I misunderstand what doctors are saying. I'm involved in both the Deaf community and disability community. There's some overlap, but there's a large number of Deaf people who don't identify with having a disability or with the disability community because lack of a shared language. A huge problem for the Deaf community is lack of access. This includes lack of access to online material, formal education, and incidental learning (e.g., learning something by overhearing conversations) — really, anywhere that you can learn about trans topics. So it's unfortunate, but there's a lot of transphobia in the Deaf community just because so many people haven't been given adequate opportunity to be exposed to this kind of information. I've been involved with the LGBTQ community for 10 years and I can count on one hand the number of totally accessible events I've attended. Not considering disabled members of the trans community is an ableist action. Whether it be having to climb stairs to get somewhere or not having an ASL interpreter or a perfume-free environment, these small barriers really do add up and prevent us disabled people from being involved in our very own community. Though our trans siblings without a disability are our allies, they still don't have a disability and do (unintentionally) contribute to our oppression. Naseem, wearing a tweed blazer over a grey striped t-shirt and a headband in their short hair, smiling and looking down to the left of the frame. I'm a Chicago native who spent eight years as a scientist, even going so far as to starting a PhD program in Philadelphia last fall. My parents are Iranian immigrants, and I was raised in a Sufi center. I spend my days freelancing, but my true love is novel writing. Not having an insurance plan is not an option for me. I take a lot of pills that would cost upwards of $500 a month if I didn't have insurance. My husband is a student, so I don't know what his insurance might look like in the future. Frankly, I'm scared. I take meds that regulate my mood and my androgen levels, the latter of which is tied intimately to my gender and transness. I can't afford them without insurance, but I can't live without them either. Not everyone who is trans has gender dysphoria. For some people, they just realize their gender didn't align with what they were designated at birth, and they feel more comfortable as a different gender. It would be dishonest to say that gender dysphoria hasn't caused me distress, though, which is part of what classifies a mental illness. For many people, their dysphoria is disabling in this way, and it does cause significant disruption to their lives. Making transness a medical "condition" can help some people transition medically, which can alleviate the dysphoria. On the other hand, pathologizing transness adds to the stigma and the "they're just confused" rhetoric often spouted by right-wing people. There isn't a good answer for this, because transness is experienced differently by every one of us. Robin, 23, Nonbinary (Sydney) — Robinmeames. Robin, a white femme genderfluid intersex person, seated in their manual wheelchair in front of a brick wall. They have blue hair, glasses, several visible tattoos and piercings, and are wearing purple lipstick and a shirt that says THE FUTURE IS ACCESSIBLE (courtesy of Annie Segarra). Because I'm a wheelchair user, people see me as incapable of having a gender identity, so often they will correctly avoid using gendered language or pronouns to refer to me, but it's not because they're recognizing and respecting my identity as a nonbinary person — it's because they think my wheelchair automatically makes me genderless. It's not misgendering as such, but it's degendering, and it's a different kind of harmful and it's part of a larger system of ableism that considers me less of a person because I'm disabled and a wheelchair user. I had an endocrinology appointment for the purposes of diagnosing and treating a parathyroid adenoma, and I came out of it with a medical report that began with "Robin is a 22-year-old transgender who is in the process of managing this with [their] care providers" (only it didn't use my correct pronouns). There's a phenomenon called "trans broken arm syndrome" where basically no matter what you're there to see a doctor about — a broken arm or a parathyroid adenoma or whatever else — they'll end up focusing on your gender identity to the exclusion of everything else, often to the point of deciding that whatever other medical issues you might be having are a result of being trans. s.e. smith wearing a hospital gown and surgical cap while taking inhalation medicine. I don't view being trans as a disability, and don't think it should be covered by the ADA. However, that's in a perfect world, and we don't live in a perfect world. Given that we effectively have to medicalize and pathologize our gender in order to receive transition services, shouldn't we argue that the same pathologization entitles us to protections afforded to other people with accommodation needs? Isn't denial of transition services disabling in itself, by forcing people to experience mental and physical distress? In other words, if you're going to make us act like our gender is a medical problem, we're going to avail ourselves of the laws that protect other people with medical problems. It's a fine needle to thread. There are many parallels between transgender and disabled experience. Our bodies are medicalized and modeled as deviations from an idealized body — a platonic ideal "able" or "cisgender" existence — and the further we deviate from that ideal, the less acceptable we are in society. We rely on a system of gatekeepers and are often coerced into fulfilling unnecessary and biased expectations if we want to receive care. We are conditioned to strive for normalcy — a body with a disability is expected to strive toward able-bodied ideals just as a transgender person is expected to strive toward patriarchal expectations — and we are punished for deviating from a value system that demands compliance. Transgender people have become experts at making beautiful lives out of scraps. We suffer in a misogynistic, patriarchal, racist system and play a role to access lifesaving treatment. We build communities out of nothing. At the end of the day, if the ADA ruling means less discrimination for trans people, most of us will roll with it. We are a pragmatic, flexible community.

LGBT People of Color: Addressing the Media's 'Diversity Issue'

We all know the feeling. Each of us, at one point or another, has leafed through a daily metro newspaper, surveyed the most popular blogs, or flipped through the television channels only to be let down by the lack of diverse images in the media. Whether your beef is with CBS, "the most watched network," and its continued lack of regular characters who are LGBT (according to GLAAD's 2011 Where We Are on TV report, of 134 regular characters, only one was LGBT), or with the media in both North Carolina and Maryland and their refusal to acknowledge that African-American community leaders have stepped to the front of conversations that affect the lives of LGBT Americans, the truth remains that we all want and deserve a media landscape that accurately reflects the diversity of our communities and tells the full story. According to the most recent Census, there are more than 100 million Americans who identify as black (or African American), Latino (or of Hispanic heritage), or Asian, accounting for some 30 percent of the U.S. population. These groups likely make up a similar percentage of the LGBT community. But a quick scan of the media would tell a very different story. Particularly invisible within mainstream media are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people of color. From national television to regional (and even LGBT) newspapers, media images of LGBT people are monolithically white and usually male. Within ethnic media outlets, the representations of families, professionals. and religious leaders are virtually all straight. A lack of visibility promotes a world where, it would appear, LGBT people of color do not exist. And unfortunately, within this void, stereotypes and misconceptions continue to grow. When national, community, and ethnic media turn a blind eye to the everyday challenges affecting the lives of LGBT people of color, people don't see that 32 percent of children raised by black or Latino gay male couples and 23 percent of children in Asian or Pacific Islander gay households live in poverty. Among children raised by heterosexual, white couples, that number is 7 percent. Americans know that same-sex relationships aren't legally recognized in most states. But do they know that most of our society's family assistance programs use a narrow definition of "family" that presumes that a child is being raised by legally recognized parents? Do they know that food and nutrition support, housing subsidies, health insurance, child-care assistance, educational loans, and other forms of aid may not be available to LGBT and other diverse families? Do they know how this disproportionately affects children and families of color? In order to combat the silence and ignorance surrounding LGBT people of color, it is necessary to reach into communities across the country that might not even know that LGBT people are among their family, friends, and neighbors. In order for LGBT people of color to have the same rights and protections as their straight counterparts, it is necessary to change the media landscape. GLAAD, along with many partner organizations, advocates, and community members, is doing that. But we all can to do more. Whether it be working with iconic outlets like Ebony.com and trans advocate Monica Roberts to spotlight the contributions of transgender men and women to American history and black heritage; taking action against Puerto Rico's highly rated gossip show SuperXclusivo for breaking its promises and featuring blatantly anti-LGBT messages; or calling on the media to shine light on the injustice facing CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman currently on trial for trying to protect herself and her friends, GLAAD has made elevating voices of color in the media a priority. Today we proudly announce our 2nd Annual National People of Color Media Training Institute, as a part of our National People of Color Media Initiative. The Media Training Institute was created specifically for people of color who are LGBT or LGBT allies and develops passionate and visible leaders who can speak across all media platforms about the issues that affect the lives of LGBT people and their families. In its first year, GLAAD worked with 30 such advocates through the National People of Color Media Institute. As a result, their stories and views reached millions through national media outlets including National Public Radio (NPR), Black Enterprise, and Ebony, as well as community and ethnic media outlets such as El Diario, The Afro, and the New York Amsterdam News. The year's institute will consist of a two-day training program in New York (Aug. 24 to 26) and Los Angeles (Sept. 7 to 9), where GLAAD staff, leading journalists, professional pundits, and key media trainers will develop participants' abilities and equip them with best practices for on-camera, radio, and print interviews. Though media coverage of LGBT issues has drastically improved overall in the past few decades, the media's focus on how these issues specifically affect LGBT people of color is still almost as nonexistent as it was 20 or 30 years ago. Only by developing and empowering more voices that can speak about these issues will this ever change.

Judith Butler Summary A central concept of the theory is that your gender is constructed through your own repetitive performance of gender. This is related to the idea that discourse creates subject positions for your self to occupy—linguistic structures construct the self. The structure or discourse of gender for Butler, however, is bodily and nonverbal. Butler's theory does not accept stable and coherent gender identity. Gender is "a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . .[so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief" (Gender Trouble). To say that gender is performative is to argue that gender is "real only to the extent that it is performed" (Gender Trouble). 2. There is no self preceding or outside a gendered self. Butler writes, " . . . if gender is constructed, it is not necessarily constructed by an 'I' or a 'we' who stands before that construction in any spatial or temporal sense of 'before.' Indeed, it is unclear that there can be an 'I' or a "we" who had not been submitted, subjected to gender, where gendering is, among other things, the differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being . . . the 'I' neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within the matrix of gender relations themselves" (Bodies that Matter). 3. Performativity of gender is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of the dominant conventions of gender. Butler argues that "the act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act that's been going on before one arrived on the scene" (Gender Trouble). "Gender is an impersonation . . . becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that nobody actually inhabits" (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum). 4. Biological sex is also a social construction—gender subsumes sex. "According to this view, then, the social construction of the natural presupposes the cancellation of the natural by the social. Insofar as it relies on this construal, the sex/gender distinction founders . . . if gender is the social significance that sex assumes within a given culture . . . then what, if anything, is left of 'sex' once it has assumed its social character as gender? . . . If gender consists of the social meanings that sex assumes, then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties, but rather is replaced by the social meanings it takes on; sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs and displaces "sex" (Bodies that Matter). Butler also writes "I think for a woman to identify as a woman is a culturally enforced effect. I don't think that it's a given that on the basis of a given anatomy, an identification will follow. I think that 'coherent identification' has to be cultivated, policed, and enforced; and that the violation of that has to be punished, usually through shame" (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum). 5. What is at stake in gender roles is the ideology of heterosexuality. "To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that 'imitation' is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarism, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome....that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is constantly haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself" (Bodies that Matter). 6. Performativity of Gender (drag) can be subversive. "Drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality's claim on naturalness and originality" (Bodies that Matter). 7. But subversion through performance isn't automatic or easy. Indeed, Butler complains that people have misread her book Gender Trouble. "The bad reading goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a piece of clothing and change my gender, stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something like the comodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism. . . . [treating] gender deliberately, as if it's an object out there, when my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that 'performativity' is not radical choice and its not voluntarism . . . Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in" (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum). Butler also writes that "it seems to me that there is no easy way to know whether something is subversive. Subversiveness is not something that can be gauged or calculated . . . I do think that for a copy to be subversive of heterosexual hegemony it has to both mime and displace its conventions" (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).

What's wrong with the way intersex has traditionally been treated? In the 1950s, a team of medical specialists at Johns Hopkins University developed what has come to be called the "optimum gender of rearing" system for treating children with intersex. The notion was that the main thing you had to do in cases of intersex was to get the gender assignment settled early, so kids would grow up to be good (believable and straight) girls and boys. Under the theoretic leadership of psychologist John Money, the Hopkins team believed that gender was all about nurture—that you could make any child into a "real" girl or boy if you made their bodies look right early (before about 18 months of age), and made them and their parents believe the gender assignment. Though the Hopkins team wrote early on that children should be told the truth about their intersex histories in age-appropriate ways, in practice many medical care providers lied to patients or actively withheld medical history information from them.1 Medical textbooks frequently gave doctors advice about how to lie to patients with intersex.2 As the Hopkins model spread throughout the developed world, surgeons performed cosmetic genital surgeries on intersex children without their consent, believing this was necessary and efficacious. Endocrinologists, meanwhile, manipulated patients' hormones to try to get the bodies of patients to do what they thought was necessary not just for physical health, but for psycho-social health (i.e., getting the body to look sexually "normal"). So what was wrong with this model? To start with, lying to patients is not only unethical, it is bad medicine. Patients who were lied to figured that much out, and often stopped getting medical care they needed to stay healthy. (For example, some stopped taking hormone replacement therapy—critical after gonadectomy—and wound up with life-threatening osteoporosis at an early age.) They also suffered psychological harm from these practices, because they got the message that they were so freakish even their doctors could not speak the truth of their bodies to them. (A lot of doctors still have not told their present and former patients the name of their conditions. Some still withhold medical records from patients and from parents/guardians of minor children.) Second, the system was and is literally sexist: that is, it treats children thought to be girls differently than children thought to be boys. In this approach (still going on at Hopkins so far as we can tell), doctors' primary concern for children thought to be girls is preservation of fertility (not sexual sensation), and for children thought to be boys, size and function of the phallus. Third, the "standards" used for genital anatomy have been arbitrary and illogical. For example, under the "optimum gender of rearing" model, boys born with penises doctors considered small were made into girls—even though other doctors believed (and showed3) they could be raised as boys without castration, genital surgery, and hormone replacement. Girls with clitorises their doctors think are "too big" still find themselves in operating theatres with surgeons cutting away at their healthy genital tissue.4 Paradoxically, though all medical experts agree the identification of intersex anatomy at birth is primarily a psycho-social (not medical) concern, it is still treated almost exclusively with surgery. Parental distress is treated with the child being sent off to surgery. This is not an appropriate form of care for parents or children.5 There is no evidence that children who grow up with intersex genitals are worse off psychologically than those who are altered. In fact, there is evidence that children who grow up with intersex genitals do well psychologically. In other words, these surgeries happen before the age of assent or consent without real cause. "Ambiguous" genitalia are not diseased, nor do they cause disease; they just look funny to some people. There is substantial evidence that people who have been treated under the "optimum gender of rearing" model have suffered harm, psychological and physical. This does not mean doctors intended to harm their patients; far from it. But good intentions are inadequate reasons to maintain a practice that has shown to be unethical and unscientific. Finally, parents consenting to intersex surgeries do not appear to be fully informed about the available evidence, about alternatives available to them, about the risks associated with surgeries, or about the theoretical problems underlying the "optimum gender of rearing" approach. For example, they are typically not told the evidence that gender identity may emerge to an important degree from prenatal hormonal actions on the brain—and thus, that you can't "make" a child a maintain a particular gender identity in the long term by doing surgery on him or her in infancy.

In fact, the American Psychiatric Association has this on their website: "Is It Possible To Change One's Sexual Orientation ("Reparative Therapy")?There is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of "reparative therapy" as a treatment to change one's sexual orientation, nor is it included in the APA's Task Force Report, Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders. More importantly, altering sexual orientation is not an appropriate goal of psychiatric treatment. Some may seek conversion to heterosexuality because of the difficulties that they encounter as a member of a stigmatized group. Clinical experience indicates that those who have integrated their sexual orientation into a positive sense of self-function at a healthier psychological level than those who have not. ......(rest of quote cont'd on next slide)

"Gay affirmative psychotherapy" may be helpful in the coming out process, fostering a positive psychological development and overcoming the effects of stigmatization. A position statement adopted by the Board in December 1998 said: "The American Psychiatric Association opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as "reparative" or "conversion" therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder, or based upon a prior assumption that the patient should change his/ her homosexual orientation.""

Op-ed: What the Ruby Rose Obsession Misses About Gender-Fluid Lives

"How's Micah?" my father-in-law texts my spouse. He lives in a small suburb in Georgia, sings at church every Sunday, and occasionally wears Hawaiian-print shirts. Every time a trans person makes a splash in mainstream media — Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars, Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time — he checks in, his small way of letting us know he's totally cool with everything. He is also one of 17 million Americans who saw Caitlyn Jenner come out as transgender on national television. I haven't even come out to 17 people, at least not with the whole story. Folks in my life fall into three camps: those who still see me as the girl I never was, those who believe I'm a trans man, and those who think I'm nothing more than a sweet-mannered five-foot short guy. All three groups are equally convinced that what they see is so blatantly, obviously, the only possible truth. But even the most well-meaning ones — the ones who do know I'm transgender or have to some degree intuited that some sort of gender transformation has taken place — don't quite grasp the entire depth of my identity. My gender is too complicated for a single sentence. Confessing "I'm nonbinary" elicits the usual quandary: "What's the binary?" Just like some people don't feel they are girls and others don't feel they are boys, I feel I'm neither. Yet that one sentence already assumes an understanding — and acceptance of — the canonical transgender experience. It's a big leap to understand nonbinary identities, considering that the latter conversation has barely begun. Simply put, the gender binary is the idea that there are only two distinct sexes and/or genders: male and female. This is false. In fact, gender (as well as sex) is a spectrum. Yet talking about transitioning as "transcending gender" — thus queering gender — is not equivalent to portraying the genderqueer spectrum. Most trans people still identify within conventional notions of man or woman; after all, a trans man is a man, a trans woman is a woman. What about the trans not-men, trans not-women? To the media, nonbinary people are nonexistent. We're in a time when transgender stories are exploding in mainstream avenues, a time where finally more and more journalists are getting it right. Thanks to interviews like the one in which Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrerra quashed Katie Couric's interrogation about their genitals, or Janet Mock's flipping the "innocently curious yet invasive" script on Alicia Menendez, narratives are respectfully moving away from intrusive questions. And John Oliver's recent segment unequivocally set the record straight on what allies should ask versus what is none of their business. But while the Last Week Tonight anchor accurately stated that being trans means not identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth, he omitted that some transgender people go on to identify as something other than male or female. Failure to acknowledge nonbinary identities — even in the most inclusive trans coverage — is unfortunately the norm. Thanks to celebrities like Ruby Rose or Miley Cyrus proclaiming to be beyond gender (although, beyond these recycled sound bites, I don't really know how these celebrities truly identify), there's been a recent uptick in mainstream articles talking about identities that stray from the male/female binary. These conversations are critically advancing the dialogue of the relationship between gender and sex, helping our society redefine what gender really is. But while I should be grateful for the coverage, what I mostly see is that it remains deeply flawed, perpetuating harmful stereotypes that prevent the public from understanding nonbinary genders, much less take them seriously. A recent personal example illustrates this phenomenon well: A mainstream magazine asked me to comment on Ruby Rose's declaration for an article titled "3 People Define Their 'Gender Fluidity,'" yet none of the interviewees featured seem to identify as gender-fluid. Commonly, these articles mistake the difference between gender fluidity as a concept — where society gains freedom from imposed gender roles and stereotypes — versus gender-fluid as an identity, where a person has a internal sense of self that is nonstatic, oscillating between masculine and feminine among various combinations. Continued conflation in the media over words and concepts relating to any gender identity that is not strictly male or female is only getting worse. Genderqueer and nonbinary are relatively equivalent umbrella terms. Other labels can be used to distinguish diverse genders within these; for instance, folks who feel neither male nor female or feel an absence of gender often say they are agender or neutrois; people whose identity encompasses both male and female may use labels like androgyne or bi-gender, along with many more combinations. The adoption of a specific term is personalized, and definitions may vary widely across individuals. Moreover, terms like "gender-fluid" are being used as a catchall for people who sidestep gender lines. Since people with alternative gender presentations are lumped into a genderqueer category, articles are often quick to differentiate them from those who are "really" transgender. Whether someone identifies within the trans umbrella or not is up to the individual; however, it is false to assume that genderqueer and transgender are mutually exclusive. Queer expressions of gender are further confused with sexuality. To be clear: Gender is who you are, sexuality is who you like. Having a gender-nonconforming expression does not necessarily mean you are gay or bisexual; similarly, a nonbinary person may be attracted to men, women, any, or neither. Ultimately, what this inconsistent jumble of terms does is make it harder for audiences to wrap their minds around the basic idea that gender identity — an internal sense of self — can exist outside of the male and female dichotomy. Thankfully, we are moving past the trans trope of "stuck in the wrong body." Ironically, genderqueer coverage almost never focuses on the body; instead, we are dealt lengthy descriptions of small frames draped in baggy cargo pants, beards with skirts and high heels, a preference for football rather than ballet, ambiguously gendered names, odd-sounding pronouns, and the occasional mention of binding. Gender runs much deeper than clothes, hair, makeup, colors; although these are means to express it, they do not make up one's gender. Yet the media continues to treat gender nonconformity as something superficial: men who wear dresses, androgynous women with short hair, or people who have evolved past gender norms to simply find it "irrelevant." Even the good articles gloss over nonbinary people who medically and legally transition, who undergo discrimination in health care, who exist on a spectrum of age, class, race, body type, and any other demographic, who are the butt of harassment from all fronts. "Genderqueer" is still a niche word, politically charged with a multitude of meanings. Even trans communities dismiss us; the pervasive stereotype of confused adolescents flippantly toying with gender norms serves as the abstract representative of my identity, of me. But I'm not playing around: I live my gender, have done so for the past five years, and intend to do so for the next 50. Although someone's gender may not have an official word or color or box to tick, nevertheless it exists on a plane of reality equal to that of trans men and women. The seriousness of nonbinary genders extends beyond myself. In conferences, online, at local gatherings, I've met the gamut: teenagers to 50-year olds, newbies and veterans, genderqueer or nonbinary, agender or bi-gender or gender-fluid. There are a million combinations of us, but no one yet to tell our story to our friends and families, to the average American at the breakfast table, in dorm rooms and bedrooms, in grocery aisles and waiting rooms, reading all about it in Vanity Fair. Mainstream portrayals of transgender icons weave a fabric of shared knowledge, common ground our community can stand upon to begin unraveling our truth. But when our loved ones don't even understand the basics, the personal needs and nuances of nonbinary transgender people remain in the backburner. Right now there is still no magazine our friends can buy, no book our doctors can borrow, no TV show our family can watch, no famous celebrity I can simply point to and say, "That's me, get it?"

67. CAN CHRISTIANS BE FRIENDS TO THE LGBT

people can struggle to have relationship with LGBTQ members when they're religion tells them otherwise.

LGBT Athletes Speak Up By Coming Out | SPEAK UP WITH JIMMY NGUYEN

1/2 of americans call football theyre favorite sport. the battle is never over. coming out is the most powerful piece. come out and tell their stories, ripple affect. go to sport teams and explain atheletes and talk about language makes them less productive and less lproducte and happy in their own lives. training people to watch what they say come out as gay to straight friends and then come out as sports fan to his gay friends.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual people experience sexual violence at similar or higher rates than heterosexuals (CDC, 2010) • About one in ten LGBTQ survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) has experienced sexual assault from those specific partners (NCAVP)

44% of lesbians and 61 % of bisexual women experience rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 35 % of heterosexual women • 26 % of gay men and 37 % of bisexual men experience rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 29 % of heterosexual men • 46 % of bisexual women have been raped, compared to 17 % of heterosexual women and 13 % of lesbians. Bisexual women experience rape earlier in life compared to heterosexual women • 22 % of bisexual women have been raped by an intimate partner, compared to 9 % of heterosexual women • 40 % of gay men and 47 % of bisexual men have experienced sexual violence other than rape, compared to 21 % of heterosexual men

The Daily Show - Brave New Girl

As a woman, Caitlyn, comparitability as a man asked about her job and now they slutshame her and compare her to other women, say she looks good for her age

This article is more than 5 years old Global LGBT community still gripped by homophobic state-sponsored violence

As the US joins 19 other countries in recognizing marriage as a legal right, billions of LGBT people across the world are still fighting for basic human rights The US supreme court's ruling that same-sex marriage is a legal right across the country marks a milestone in the march for equality. But the ever-expanding rainbow map of America, bolstered by the Friday verdict, is in stark contrast to the state of LGBT rights in the rest of the world, where as many as 80 countries are still hostile toward gay people. Despite recent progress in the US, Latin America and even Ireland - one of the most conservative societies in Europe - the global campaign for the rights of sexual minorities has experienced a series of setbacks in other regions including Africa and the Middle East. Fewer than 1 billion of the world's population live in countries where same-sex marriage or civil unions are recognised, compared to almost 2.8 billion living in countries which criminalise gay people and impose severe punishments on homosexuality, such as imprisonment, lashings and even death sentences.

Transgender people face discrimination, violence amid Latin American quarantines From Panama to Peru, transgender people say gender-based quarantine restrictions have exposed them to discrimination and violence. NBC NEWS

BOGOTA - Alis Nicolette Rodriguez is bracing themself, nervously looking over their shopping list and preparing in case someone tries to bar their way at the grocery store. It has happened before. To keep crowds thin during the coronavirus quarantine, Colombian capital Bogota — like some other places in Latin America — has specified that men and women must go out on separate days. That has turned a routine food shopping trip into an outing fraught with tension for social work student Rodriguez, who is transgender and nonbinary. From Panama to Peru, transgender people say gender-based quarantine restrictions have exposed them to discrimination and violence from people questioning their right to be out. In Bogota, women can only go out on days with even-numbered dates and men on odd, while transgender people are allowed to choose. However, rights group Red Comunitaria Trans said it had received 18 discrimination complaints since the measure began. One of those complaints was from a transgender woman in southern Bogota stabbed by a man who said she was out on the wrong day, a case also reported in local media. The woman is recovering from her injuries. "The last time I went out things happened that were really tense," said Rodriguez, 20, who uses neutral pronouns and began hormone treatments four months ago. "My features are still very masculine so people still say 'I see the body of a man' and they deny who you are." Rodriguez said the previous Sunday an employee stopped them at a grocery entrance and a police officer asked to see their identification, although the mayor's office has told police not demand ID to prove gender during the quarantine. A spokeswoman for Bogota's government department for women confirmed the police do not have the right to question anyone's gender identity. In response to questions about the accusations of discrimination, Bogota's Metropolitan Police sent Reuters a publicity video of officers and members of the transgender community speaking to store employees, explaining that transgender people can choose their shopping day. Rodriguez was eventually allowed into the store, but at the check-out one cashier asked another why "this man" had been able to shop, they said. Being nonbinary complicates the choice about which day to go out, said Rodriguez, who has chosen the women's days. "If you don't go out with make-up on, with a skirt... If you don't comply with those stereotypes and gender roles then you can't identify yourself or be in a public space," said Rodriguez, who was wearing pink eye shadow and a sparkly silver jacket. Juli Salamanca, communications director for Red Comunitaria Trans, said the coronavirus pandemic had left transgender people particularly exposed. "They're trying to protect themselves from the violence of the police, the violence of the supermarkets, the violence of society in general," Salamanca told Reuters, referring to the physical and emotional toll of discrimination and prejudice. She said some transgender people may be afraid to report discrimination because of previous police abuse. Colombia's second-largest city, Medellin, has restricted outings based on ID numbers rather than gender, a valid alternative to enforce social distancing, Salamanca said. Colombia is not the only Latin American country where restrictions have stoked fear among transgender people. The Panamanian Association of Trans People has received more than 40 discrimination complaints since restrictions began in April, director Venus Tejada said, including problems getting into supermarkets or buying medicine. Transgender people who are immunocompromised are particularly worried, according to Tejada, and some with HIV fear additional discrimination because of their illness. "If they need anything we've advised them to ask a neighbor or someone else to get it," Tejada said. In Peru, the government canceled restrictions based on gender after just over a week, as retailers struggled to control crowds on women's days and LGBT groups complained of discrimination. Back in Bogota, Rodriguez is piling a shopping cart with items. They avert their eyes when two police officers walk into the store. The officers escort out an older man who is violating the rules and then stare briefly at Rodriguez before leaving. Today, at least, they shopped in peace.

Five transgender athletes that dominated the sporting world

CAITLYN JENNER (FORMERLY BRUCE) Undoubtedly the most famous transgender athlete of the modern era, Caitlyn Jenner was once dubbed "the greatest athlete in the world", a title often given to Olympic decathlon champions. Formerly a competitive footballer at Graceland College in Iowa, Jenner switched to athletics and quickly excelled in the sport. Finishing 10th in the 1972 Olympics, Jenner went on to dominate the decathlon at the 1976 Games in Montreal, coming away with the gold medal. Outside of her athletic career, Jenner played minor acting roles in the short film Can't Stop the Music and TV cop show CHIPS. More recently, Jenner came to prominence in the reality TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians. RENEE RICHARDS (FORMERLY RICHARD RASKIND) Born to a conservative Jewish family in Queens, USA, Richards spent a large portion of her life as a man. After 40 years living as Richard Raskind, when her marriage fell apart in 1975 Richards underwent gender reassignment surgery and from then on identified as a woman. A keen tennis player from a young age, Richards rekindled her love for tennis after the surgery and began competing in amateur tennis tournaments. Quickly rising through the competitive ranks, Richards caught the public eye when she was formerly barred from playing professionally as a woman by the United States Tennis Association. In a court case that would act as a landmark decision in favour of transgender rights, the New York Supreme Court ruled in favour of Richard's right to compete at as a woman. She went on to compete in the doubles final of the 1977 US Open and was ranked 19th in the world by 1979, her best ranking before retiring from professional tennis in 1981. MIANNE BAGGER A current professional on the Australian Ladies Professional Golf Tour, Bagger became the second transgender woman ever to be accepted into a professional sporting competition, beaten only by tennis star Renee Richards. Bagger is famous for lobbying major governing bodies in professional sport in an attempt to have them re-evaluate their regulations regarding gender diversity. As a result of Bagger's work with the Women's Professional Golf Association, the Ladies European Tour voted in 2004 to allow Bagger to compete on the tour. Having competed as recently on the ALPG as January this year, Bagger is currently the most prominent transgender athlete in professional sport. FALLON FOX (FOMERLY BURTON BOYD) The first openly transgender athlete in the history of MMA, Fox was born a male in Toledo, Ohio and served in the United States Navy before being honourably discharged in 2000. After years of struggling with her conflicting identity, Fox travelled to Thailand in 2006 where she underwent a complete physical transformation from male to female. Fox began training in jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts in 2008 and soon after began competing in the Championship Fighting Alliance. Holding a current MMA record of five wins and one loss, Fox caused widespread controversy in the MMA world in 2013 when she expressed interested in fighting the UFC's female bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey. Rousey told the New York Post in a 2013 interview that she would fight Fox if asked by the UFC, but did not see it as a fair matchup. "She can try hormones, chop her pecker off, but it's still the same bone structure a man has. It's an advantage. I don't think it's fair. ... What if she became UFC champion and we had a transgender women's champion? It's a very socially difficult situation." JAIYAH SAELUA (FORMERLY JONNY SAELUA) American Samoa footballer Jaiyah Saeula is the first ever transgender athlete to compete in a men's FIFA World Cup qualifying match. At the age of 22, Saeula made her debut for American Samoa and competed the following year in the 2011 South Pacific Games. After the tournament, FIFA president Sepp Blatter reportedly sent Saelua a congratulatory letter to mark her achievement as a transgender athlete. At 26 years old, Saelua still plays for American Samoa, coined the world's worst football team by BBC UK.

Last week we learned about the important role that mental health organizations and professionals had in LGBT history They shifted the prevailing idea that "homosexuality" was a sin and should be punished to the notion that "homosexuals" were actually ill and needed the appropriate care to "get better" One common way professionals attempted to "change" people was to use conversion/reparative therapy

Conversion therapy is still performed, despite the fact that most major mental health and medical organizations condemn its use (click here for the HRC document for specifics) Conversion therapy rests on the notion that sexual orientation and gender identity is a "choice," and therefore one can be "converted" into one or the other This is particularly harmful when this is directed at minors, which it typically is

• NGOs in the United States estimate LGBTQ homeless youth comprise 20 to 40 % of the homeless youth population; these youth are at particularly high risk of being forced into prostitution (U.S. Dept. Of State) • Lack of reporting of LGBTQ youth trafficking and prostitution make needs assessment, services, initiatives difficult • Today, children are more open to coming out, as early as nine or ten years old. This also means those young kids are opening themselves up to the risk of being rejected by their families, being forced to live on the street, making sex work sometimes the only option to survive • Discrimination in hiring for the trans community in particular is linked to sex work

Curative rape in South Africa • Sexual violence targeting lesbians for purposes of "curing" them of their sexual identity • Directed specifically at Black lesbians • Multiple perpetrators- systematic abuse • Intersection of sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, racism, classism • Judges and police do not investigate most cases • Most people do not want to recognize that violence against women is a hate crime • Gender not added as a protected category until the US Violence Against Women Act in 1994

Circumcision Damage Leads to More Tragedy

David Reimer, boy forced to life his life as a girl because he was sexually reassigned as a female after his penis was accidentally destroyed during circumcision. Died by suicide. Winnipeg mid 60's. Both circumcised, but John Money who thought that boys could be raised as girls, that nurture was stronger than nature. Went to baltimore. and took sex hormones so david can be a girl. When he was 2 years old, david tried to rip off a dress he was forced to put on. David, felt he was different. He was bullied and teased without mercy. Called him "it" in school. The mother of david later asked Money again what had happened to most of the people inthe experiment like the one David was in, and Money responded that most had died by suicide. When he was 14 he was going to go through a sex change and learned the truth that he had been born a boy.

The Black Lives Matter movement has joined forces with the Trans Lives Matter movement "The linking of TLM and BLM comes at a pivotal time of rising fatal violence against transgender people in the United States. Of the 20 estimated murders of transgender Americans across the country this year, 17 of the victims were transgender women of color" - The Advocate, September 2015 Divides even within LGBTQ community: white cisgender gay males accused not always being sensitive to issues important to trans people

Equality Network What is intersectionality? We can think about intersectionality in many different ways. Many people have spoken and written on the subject. Another angry woman writes that being a person with an intersectional identity is like standing in the middle of the road being hit by cars from many sides. Roshan das Nair speaks about his birthday party as being in the middle of many different circles of friends and family who seldom overlap. In many ways we ALL feel like both of these descriptions at different times. We all have different aspects of our identities. We all have different sides of ourselves. But we are not all protected by UK law in the same way. A gay man has to deal with homophobia. A black man has to deal with racism. But a black gay man will have to deal with homophobia and racism (often at the same time). It is often the case that he will face racism inside the LGBT community and homophobia in the black community. Similarly, a disabled lesbian Muslim will have to deal with ableism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and sexism. She might find physical barriers to accessing LGBT venues, but even when she can get into the building she might still face racism and Islamophobia from the white LGBT community. Having an intersectional identity often generates a feeling that someone does not completely belong in one group or another, and can lead to isolation, depression and other mental health issues. Including Intersectional Identities The exclusion and erasure of intersectional people from our communities is reflected in service provision. Often LGBT-focused organisations have little knowledge of, for example, race issues. This can lead to racism attitudes and practices carried by staff and other service users remaining unchecked, thus creating an unsafe space for a minority ethnic LGBT person who wants to access the services. Our intersectional work is aimed at helping organisations become more inclusive of all their service users and respect every part of their identity. We work with a variety of organisations with diverse expertise, exchange awareness-raising sessions, and speak to intersectional service users. This extensive partnership work reveals that there are many ways to be inclusive without spending any extra money and that learning to be inclusive of people with complex identities benefits every service user.

Caster Semenya And The IOC's Olympics Gender Bender

The person carrying the flag for South Africa at Friday's opening ceremonies might be one of the most-famous athletes on the planet. But her notoriety has little to do with her talent on the track; nor does it stem from her hardscrabble personal story. Instead, this girl—who went from a village where few have running water to reigning world champion—is best known for the fact that three years ago, the whole world was openly speculating about what, exactly, was going on under her running shorts. Though she has since been cleared for competition, the subject of Caster Semenya's gender is still pretty much all anyone talks about when they talk about the powerhouse runner. In 2009, after shaving eight seconds off of her personal best during the run-up to the World Athletic Championships in Berlin, the rumors that had long swirled around the now 21-year old athlete reached a fever pitch. In the weeks that followed, Semenya made headlines around the world—under some of the most unenviable circumstances imaginable. As one of her competitors put it bluntly: "For me, she's not a woman. She is a man." On the day before the Berlin event, the International Association of Athletics Federations—the umbrella organization that runs all international athletic competitions outside of the Olympics—announced that Semenya was undergoing gender-verification testing, a weeks-long process that had started in South Africa and would continue in Berlin. Semenya, it was later reported, had been told she was being tested for doping. But in spite of the humiliating public reveal, her victory the following day was as definite as it was defiant. Her nearest competition crossed the finish line a full bus-length behind her. She won gold, beat her own personal best, and became the world champion in the 800 meters. It should have been the best day of her life. Instead, after the race, she retreated from cameras and microphones, avoided all interviews, and, ultimately, disappeared—for eleven months. Banned from competition by the IAAF, Semenya underwent a slew of further tests before being cleared for competition as a woman. She also sparked the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee to confront, yet again, an issue they'd repeatedly attempted to wash their hands of. Semenya, of course, is far from the first competitor to face this kind of scrutiny. Female athletes, especially the talented ones, have been accused of not really being female for almost as long as they've been allowed to compete. Early in her career, Serena Williams—who just won her fifth Wimbledon and who will be trying for her third Olympic gold in London—was called a "shemale" and a transsexual. So was tennis great Martina Navratilova, who played in the 2004 Athens games. And Brittney Griner, who this year led Baylor University's women's basketball team to an undefeated season and an NCAA championship and earlier this month was named, along with LeBron James, athlete of the year at the ESPN ESPY Awards has been so dogged by rumors that she's actually a man that her coach once publicly pleaded for the speculation to cease. Such accusations go back at least half a century. The IOC adopted its first set of gender tests in the 1960s, with "nude parades" that were exactly what they sound like: female competitors made to walk naked before a panel of judges. But as the IOC later realized, what's on the outside doesn't always match what's on the inside, so the committee moved on to chromosome testing. Once it was shown that women can have a single X chromosome (just as men can have two of them) that was abandoned as well. Then came SRY gene detection (the gene that triggers male sex determination), but after the Atlanta games, in which 8 women tested positive for it, and all were cleared for competition, this method, too, was deemed insufficient. A decade ago, the committee decided to chuck the testing altogether. But in the wake of Semenya's case, and the international scrutiny it prompted, the IOC announced that it would try, once again, to devise a way to decisively determine what makes a woman a woman. The committee's medical commission assembled a group of two-dozen experts. They gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, to debate the various aspects of sex characteristics and the merits of various methods of testing. Late this past June, the committee announced the result of those meetings: that the determining factor making men men and women women—and the source of what was deemed an unfair competitive edge—lies in naturally-occurring levels of testosterone. The testing, which will be administered on a case-by-case basis rather than across the board, as earlier incarnations were, will result in the ban of any female athlete deemed to have an unfair advantage because of high testosterone levels. Unlike the IAAF, it doesn't elaborate on interventions or treatments. But for female athletes who want to compete, the option is not off the table. This could mean anything from surgical interventions (removing internal, essentially dormant testes) to pharmaceutical ones (hormone replacement therapies). Semenya, her coach, and sports officials have been cryptic about the results of her tests and the treatments she might be undergoing—but details of the exams have leaked out nonetheless. According to a story published in Australia's Daily Telegraph, Semenya's body has both male and female characteristics—she's externally female, and internally male, essentially— and produces far more testosterone than the average woman. The track and field manager at the University of Pretoria's High Performance Centre, where Semenya trains, recently confirmed that she has submitted to an unspecified treatment in order to compete in the London games. Meanwhile, speculation about a softer Semanya is already circulating—The Atlantic Wire recently published two side-by-side pictures of Semanya with crude red arrows pointing at her jawline (slightly less masculine than before?) and waist (does it seem nipped in?). The visual comparisons are hardly conclusive—neither are her race times. This shouldn't come as a surprise, according to critics of testosterone testing, who say that there's been precious little research done on how the hormone actually affects female athletes. "These policies are based more on folklore than precise science," says socio-medical scientist Rebecca Jordan-Young, the author of Brain Storm: the Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences and an author of a paper that criticized testosterone testing recently published by the American Journal of Bioethics. (The paper was released prior to the IOC's official announcement and was based—as was our interview—on the policies already adopted by the IAAF, and those the researchers expected the IOC to adopt as well.) Along with a co-author, Katrina Karkazis of Stanford's Center for Biomedical Ethics, she cites the fact that women who are unable to process androgens—including testosterone—tend to excel in sports, not fail at them. Yes, testosterone can be used as a performance enhancer on an individual basis, but if the hormone were truly helpful across the board, they say, women with that condition "would be under-represented, not over-represented." But what most troubles the researchers is the fact that female athletes found to have excessive levels of testosterone might have to submit to medical intervention to lower those levels if they want to compete—even when medical intervention might otherwise be unnecessary. "These women might not experience anything wrong with their bodies," says Jordan-Young, noting that athletes of this caliber are among the healthiest people on the planet. "The treatments can raise issues all on their own. These are not benign drugs." According to studies, patients treated via hormone replacement therapy are more likely to develop breast cancer, ovarian cancer, strokes, and heart attacks. Adds Karkazis, "They've said this is for the health of the athletes. There's a phony benevolence there." To be clear, what the IOC committee is looking for is levels of naturally-occurring testosterone that the body produces on its own, without help from injected hormones. It's simple to test for synthetic versions of testosterone, and not even the IOC claims this is analogous to testing for doping. Having abnormally high levels of natural testosterone, critics say, is more akin to having an oversized heart, like Lance Armstrong, or double-jointed ankles, like Michael Phelps. It's genetic, biological, and it may or may not confer an advantage. "The question is, do you let a woman who by all other measures is a woman but who has testosterone compete and say, 'Well, this is a variation of womanhood that has made her a champion in a certain field and has given her a world record,' or are you going to say, 'This is outside true 'Woman''?" says Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor of Biology and Gender Identity at Brown University. "For me, there's no right way to do that." Even supporters of the new policy acknowledge that it is falls far short of perfect. "It is a social-imposed categorization which sports authorities have always struggled to comply with," says Dr. Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics at UCLA who advised the IOC in Lausanne. The reason so many methods have been adopted and then abandoned is because there is no single indicator that can be used to definitively distinguishes between the sexes—not chromosomes, nor hormones, nor secondary characteristics, nor external appearance. "The reality is it's absolutely never going to be perfect." What the IOC has struggled with all these years exposes something that many of us might find difficult to process: between M and F exists a tremendous swath of gray. Exact numbers are hard to pin down, but by some estimates, at least one in every 2,000 babies is born intersex, and still more are diagnosed as teenagers or adults. As Fausto-Sterling says, "The reason sports federations can't get this right is because there is no right." In recent years, public attitudes towards gender roles and identity have begun to loosen considerably. A Denver father of six recently made international headlines after he somewhat cheerfully told a local paper that doctors had discovered ovaries in the place of testes during a routine treatment for kidney stones. Transgendered people now compete on "Dancing with the Stars," and in the Miss America pageant. Four countries have third-gender options on their passport forms. And this spring, Sweden introduced a gender-neutral pronoun. When it comes to the transgendered, the IOC saw the writing on the wall almost a decade ago. In 2004, it issued a set of guidelines called the Stockholm Consensus, which stipulates that trans athletes may compete as long as surgeries and hormone treatments have been completed and the individual's new sex is legally recognized. But in the upper echelons of professional sports, the idea that there might be something other than male or female, something neither here nor there, isn't so easy to accommodate. "In what other institutional setting in society could ever you have a sex test and not only legitimize it but present it as if it was a necessary policy?" asks Ian Richie, a professor of Health Sciences at Canada's Brock University. "To test somebody's sex, to have them prove that they are what they are in terms of their sex, is in many countries completely unethical, contrary to human rights, in some cases unconstitutional. But in the context of sport it's seen as an inevitable thing we have to do. Sport the only place that could happen, because sport is based on the idea that men are men and women are women and that's it." Semenya may be carrying her country's flag in London, but there's no denying that her journey to the world's stage was at times an agonizing one. In a 2011 British television documentary called Too Fast to be a Woman, Semenya spoke of sinking into a deep depression after being subjected to the tests, and even considered quitting athletics altogether. The Indian middle-distance runner Santhi Soundarajan's silver medal in the 800 meters, won at the Doha Asian Games in 2006, was revoked after she failed a gender test of her own. She was banned from sports participation by the Athletics Federation of India, and this week the Times of India reported that she is now working in a brick kiln, earning roughly $3 per day. It all highlights a cruel injustice: the policy—and the testing, treatment, and humiliation that can come with it—only applies to female athletes. Men who excel at, say, ice dancing or synchronized swimming, where success has more to do with grace and rhythm than brute strength or speed, simply aren't questioned in the same way women are. In 2010, after two French-Canadian sports commentators snickered over the flamboyant skating champion Johnny Weir and suggested that he should compete with the women, they were immediately and vociferously condemned for what was widely perceived as homophobic, despicable language. (This was, keep in mind, precisely the moment that Semenya was living in virtual exile after the subject of her gender had made international news.) Similarly, there is no upper—or lower, for that matter—limit to the amount of testosterone their bodies naturally produce. This past winter, Bruce Kidd, a Canadian professor of physical education and health, who competed as a runner in the 1964 Olympics, called on the IOC to abandon not just gender testing, but segregation too. Karkazis and Jordan-Young have called for a similar change, noting that size and strength could, in the future, provide a better basis for groupings than sex alone. Already, male and female athletes compete against one another in all equestrian and sailing events, and in some of the luge, badminton, and tennis ones. But as Vilain and others admit, eliminating gender segregation altogether could, in practical terms, lead to something that looks nothing like equality. It's been mere weeks since the fortieth anniversary of Title IX, which ensured that girls had the same access to athletics that their male classmates did. Isn't there something counter-intuitive about the notion of dismantling women-specific sports in the name of gender equity? Wouldn't such a move just eliminate women from the competition altogether? Maybe not. A recent ESPN feature on the future of women in sports called, "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet," argued that "women are not necessarily just getting bigger, they're also getting better." Brittney Griner, the basketball superstar who's six feet, seven inches tall, will be dethroned in no time, the piece said. Sports is, essentially, a numbers game, and in the United States 4.5 million high school boys are on athletic teams, versus just 3.2 million girls. As those numbers level out— as they have consistently since girls were first allowed to play—we can expect to see more athletes with size and talent comparable to hers. "Women are already as good, or better, than men." If true, the need for gender testing may be moot soon enough. But that's probably little consolation for today's athletes. "The way you were born is the way you were born," Semenya says in the British documentary. "Nothing can change it. I've got a deep voice. I know. I might look tough but what are you going to do? Do you think you can change it? No. If someone was born the way she was born, are you going to blame him or are you going to blame God? Whose fault is that? Nobody's."

Eunuchs | National Geographic

In India, nearly half a million people live as eunuchs, not man or woman, but considered an entirely separate gender. Mona, is called a hidras. Indians call hidras to be a separate gender. Mona was born male but she felt different. Only had 1 option, enuchs and had all her male sexual organs completely removed. No body hair, and developed breasts and for 40 years she worked only being able to sing and dance at celebrations. in india in more than 1/2 million eunuchs live on the fringes of society mona has a eunuch family. has 2 disciples who support her. trio scouts to find work. is waiting for the day that india sees her as more than just a eunuch. but a complete person.

Everyone treated me like a saint"—In Iran, there's only one way to survive as a transgender person QUARTZ

In Iran, homosexuality is a crime, punishable with death for men and lashings for women. But Iran is also the only Muslim country in the Persian Gulf region that gives trans citizens the right to have their gender identity recognized by the law. In fact, the Islamic Republic of Iran not only allows sex reassignment, but also subsidizes it. Before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran there was no official government policy on transgender people. After the revolution, under the new religious government, transsexuals were placed in the same category as homosexuals, condemned by Islamic leaders and considered illegal. Things changed largely due to the efforts of Maryam Khatoon Molkara. Molkara was fired from her job, forcibly injected with male hormones and put in a psychiatric institution during the 1979 revolution. But thanks to her high-level contacts among Iran's influential clerics, she was able to get released. Afterwards, she worked with several religious leaders to advocate for trans rights and eventually managed to wrangle a meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini, the "supreme leader" of Iran at the time. Molkara and her group were able to eventually convince Khamenei to pass a fatwa in 1986 declaring gender-confirmation surgery and hormone-replacement therapy religiously acceptable medical procedures. "The Iranian government...sees trans individuals as people with psychosexual problems, and so provide them with a medical solution" Essentially, Molkara, the Iranian religious leaders she worked with, and the Iranian government had reframed the question of trans people. Trans people were no longer discussed as or thought of as deviants, but as having a medical illness (gender identity disorder) with a cure (sex reassignment surgery). "The Iranian government doesn't recognize being trans as a category per se, rather they see trans individuals as people with psychosexual problems, and so provide them with a medical solution," says Kevin Schumacher, a Middle East and North Africa expert with OutRight Action International, a global LGBTIQ-rights organization. The policy is based on Islamic notions that gender is binary and that social responsibilities should be split between men and women. "If you're born a man and your body is a female then in order to protect you and the wellbeing of society," says Schumacher says, "the government is responsible for fixing the issue." An uncomfortable truth For Sarah, life in Iran was divided into two very distinct parts: before and after she had gender confirmation surgery. As a young child growing up in the late 1980s in Tehran, Sarah (who, because she is not openly trans, did not want to publish her full name) was uncomfortable wearing the clothes and playing the games traditionally associated with being a boy, and felt she did not belong at the all-boy's school to which her parents sent her. "You are alone against all the social norms that dictate what you should do, what you should wear, how you should live," she says. She was a good student, but in high school, when puberty hit and gender roles grew starker, Sarah began to have difficulty coping with schoolwork and dropped out. "I had to deal with sexual harassment from my classmates and from other people in society on a daily basis, from everyone that thought that [I] was a girlish boy, a sissy boy," she says. "My life as a teenager was total hell." Despite the official policy about trans individuals, trans issues are not openly discussed in Iran. And because the government heavily censors material available on the internet (a 2013 analysis found that nearly half of the 500 most popular sites on the internet are blacklisted in Iran) Sarah couldn't research what it means to be transgender or connect with others in the community. Meanwhile, she felt guilty about her inability to fit in. "Everybody expected me to behave like a man and be like a man and I hated to be like that," she says. "I wondered why I couldn't be like other people. Why I couldn't meet the social expectations." At 16, she decided to make a change. "If I'm not a woman, if I'm not a man, I thought at least I should be a productive person and live a...happy life," she says. So she enrolled in university in Tehran, and began to study languages and translation skills. Even though she continued to live as a man, she grew more confident in her gender identity thanks to the more tolerant atmosphere at the university, and from her academic successes—though she was still years away from realizing she was trans. The official view Officially, an Iranian can be diagnosed as having gender identity disorder only after a complex series of medical tests and legal procedures including obtaining a court order, multiple visits to a psychiatrist, and physical and psychological examinations at the state's Legal Medicine Organization. Even if you somehow figure out how to navigate this process—and Sarah did not—it can take over a year, according to a report compiled by OutRight Action International, a global LGBTIQ-rights organization. When people do approach doctors in Iran about being transgender, the experience is not always pleasant or helpful. Amir, a 26-year-old trans man from Shiraz, Iran, told OutRight that when he approached a medical professional about his condition, the doctor tried to intimidate him: It all started when I was eight or nine years old. My parents took me to see a doctor because I kept saying I was a boy. The doctors never talked to me. They just told horrible and terrifying stories to shut me up. They said things like "you will die if you undergo [sex reassignment surgery]," or "many girls who wanted to become boys died during the surgery" All of them treated me like I was delusional.... They would tell me: "It's not possible, you were born like this." But I knew I had to do this operation and change my sex. I was convinced there was a way and I was just looking for some kind of confirmation, from someone, who would tell me "yes, it's possible!" Instead, one of the doctors gave me pills, and another other one injections.... [Another] told me to "get out and close the door behind [me]," as if I was a dirty and untouchable person. If an Iranian is officially diagnosed with gender identity disorder, the government issues the authorization for them to legally start the sex reassignment process, and at the end of that process the court issues a new identity card, with a new gender listed. In other words, while Iran does not mandate that all trans individuals have the surgery, it is not possible to change your gender marker on official documents without undergoing the surgery. Over the last decade, with high-profile clerics and academic centers advocating for trans rights, social awareness on the issue has grown, says Schumacher. In 2007, Molkara established the Iranian Society to Support Individuals with Gender Identity Disorder, the first legally registered trans advocacy group. In 2008, the BBC reported that Iran was second only to Thailand in the number of sex-change operations performed, and the country's surgery industry still attracts patients from all over the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Between 2006 and 2014, nearly 1,400 people applied for permission for the process according to government figures published in Iranian media. There are even Iranian movies about accepting trans identities: 012's Facing Mirrors was something of a social turning point, giving local journalists a chance to address the issue publicly. The film's release was even covered by state-run television and radio channels. "I was so scared of the ramifications of what I was going to do, because I thought I [would] lose everyone and everything that I had fought for." Nevertheless, stigmas remain, reinforced by the notion perpetuated by the government that being trans is a medical problem. Outright's report found that trans individuals are often subjected to bullying, domestic violence, and social discrimination. In some cases, family members disown trans relatives. Openly trans people often can't get jobs, and when employers find out an employee is trans they are often fired. Trans individuals can't rent houses or apartments easily and find it hard to get married because families don't welcome the idea of having a trans son- or daughter-in-law. All of which is why when Sarah finally realized that she was trans, when she was in her early 20s and already graduated from college, she did not feel comfortable coming out in public. "Only my family members and few of my close friends knew about it," she says. "I had to hide everything." Making the decision to go through with gender-confirmation surgery was fraught with uncertainty. "On one hand I really wanted to do that and be free and liberated from all the problems of my past," says Sarah. "On the other hand I was so scared of the ramifications of what I was going to do, because I thought I [would] lose everyone and everything that I had fought for. My university degree, my job, everything. I saw myself having to stand against the entire world." Practically, she did not have the means to go through with the surgery and live independently. According to OutRight's report, the cost of the gender-confirmation surgery in Iran is $13,000 and hormone-replacement therapy costs $20-$40 a month—and the average Iranian's monthly income is about $400. The government does offer some limited financial support for gender-confirmation surgery, hormone-replacement therapy, and psychosocial counseling. But funds are limited and government officials decide on a case-by-case basis which individuals qualify. In 2012, the government announced that health insurance companies must cover the full cost of sex-change operations, according to a BBC report. But OutRight has found that insurance companies still often decline to cover some forms of transition-related care, on the basis that they are cosmetic and not medical. "The government pays a lot of lip service but the actual services that they provide are extremely limited," says Schumacher. "You talk to many people and they tell you that they have been waiting for many years, hoping to receive some government assistance for these medical bills, but they are still waiting." The challenges of being trans in Iran For those who don't get the surgery, life in Iran is exceedingly difficult. Sharia-based laws mandate segregation of men and women in schools and public transport, and Iranian law requires men and women to wear "gender-appropriate" clothing in public spaces. Women are expected by law to wear a hijab, which means they must dress modestly and cover their head, arms, and legs. Traditionally, this is interpreted as a long jacket, called a manteau, accompanied by a headscarf. Failure to conform to this is a crime and could result in arrest or assault at the hands of vigilantes. "If their appearance is not completely male or female, they are even stopped in the streets by the moral police in Iran," says Saghi Ghahreman, president of the Iranian Queer Organization based in Canada. These are the undercover agents deployed by the police to patrol public spaces looking for men and women dressed or behaving in a manner deemed un-Islamic, The Guardian reported in 2016. The moral police crack down on loose-fitting headscarves, tight overcoats, shortened trousers for women and necklaces and shorts for men.The laws are often extended to cover new fashions. For instance in 2010 Iran banned ponytails, mullets, and long, gelled hair for men; in 2015 the country cracked down on "homosexual" and "devil worshiping" hairstyles along with tattoos, sunbed treatments, and plucked eyebrows for men. Hasti, a 30-year-old Iranian trans woman from Khansar, told OutRight that she was frequently harassed by Iranian police for her feminine appearance and makeup. "The [police] would lift up my dress, look at my ID card and ask me if I was a man or a woman," she said. "In the end they would force me to sign a pledge letter [to promise that I would no longer dress as a woman] and then release me." Because women are expected to get married at a young age and produce children, trans people who have not gone through the surgery are sometimes forced into marriage. Worse, a trans person who is not legally recognized can be accused of homosexuality and face the death penalty. In fact, in some cases gay people in Iran decide to undergo the surgery because the alternative is death. "The sex change operation is most of the time forced on trans people by the culture and by the government," says Ghahreman. Making the transition Sarah spent six years preparing mentally and financially to go through with the surgery. She describes that period as one of the darkest phases of her life. "I was so depressed and anxious about everything," she says. "At that time almost all the transgender people I saw in Iranian society were involved in prostitution, were isolated, were ostracized by the society and their family. I didn't see any successful transgender people. I was afraid if I did it myself, my life would turn into a kind of new misery." "The sex change operation is most of the time forced on trans people by the culture and by the government" But she stuck with the plan: she worked in a managerial job, living and dressing like a man, while saving for the surgery. When she had enough money, she decided to travel to Thailand for the surgery; despite the high number of gender confirmation surgeries performed in Iran, the quality of the work is poor. "The operations are done by surgeons that are not professionally trained," says Ghahreman. "Almost all of the trans people who have operations in Iran are suffering from many side effects that disable their body. Every trans person I have met in the past 10 years, they have a lot of pain because of the surgery and they cannot have normal or pleasurable intercourse." When she was 28, Sarah had sex reassignment surgery. "I turned into a whole new version of myself which I loved so much," she says, likening the process to dying and being reborn. I felt more liberated than what I was in the past. Because in the past I was imprisoned within the framework of my body and my former identity. After the surgery, I got liberated from all those things. For me, anything was better, anything. At least after the surgery I got to enjoy some basic rights that I didn't enjoy before the surgery." Afterwards, she was surprised to find that "almost everyone was very welcoming and very supportive." Sarah had worried government officials would harass her during the legal process after the surgery, but "everyone treated me like a saint," she says. "They adore me so much and they admire me so much for doing such a courageous thing—they respect me on a whole different level. I didn't even expect that—to be respected by people for being a transgender. But it all happened after the surgery." And, all of a sudden, she could wear the clothes she wanted, change her name, and live the lifestyle of her choice. "I felt I was a monkey at the zoo" Not everyone has such a positive experience with Iranian officials. Assal, a trans woman who travelled back from Iran after undergoing the surgery in Thailand told OutRight she was harassed by Iranian border police agents who passed around her medical documents to each other and laughed at her. "I felt I was a monkey at the zoo," she told OutRight. And despite the support, Sarah never came out officially. Instead, she began to live as a woman in Iran. "The people who know me from the past, they know that I am a transgender, but the people who know me after the surgery, they have no idea of who I was," she says. "They just think that I am a straight woman." Sarah stayed in Iran for six years after surgery. Now 36, she lives in Canada and works as a freelance journalist and translator. But she returns to the country of her birth frequently, and helped found an organization for trans rights there with Maryam Khatoon Molkara. "The culture needs to change," says Sarah. "The society needs to change its mindset towards people who not like the mainstream. It doesn't matter if they are gay, bisexual, or trans."

Privilege, Power, and Pride: Intersectionality within the LGBT Community

In, but Out: In this series, we will discuss the idea of being part of a particular community (African Americans, Female, Disability, Latinos, Christians, LGBT, and any other self-identifying group), but still feel like an outsider. There is an assumption that one should be accepted within their own self identity population, however even within these communities there is a certain level of judgment and discrimination that takes place. The minority experience is anything but easy. It's something I would never wish upon my worst enemy. While being able to claim various interesting facets as a part of my own identity, the struggles of each tend to wear down even the strongest of us. Being a racial and sexual minority born in the South, I'd like to think I know a thing or two about the minority experience. In general, minorities of all types experience varying forms of discrimination, persecution, and negativity. This is certainly the case for sexual minorities. In many pockets of the world, expressing a desire that deviates from heteronormativity can result in emotional or physical abuse. When sexual minorities share their true selves with others, they are often met with opposition from people who feel uncomfortable with others who do not fit into their world view. These types of experiences are exclusive to people who identify as anything but the norm. History has proven these claims time and again, and, especially within the LGBT community itself, contention develops when people within the LGBT community are forced to reckon with how other layers of diversity may affect one's own experiences within a community. This is due to a lack of understanding regarding the burden of intersectionality in identity. Intersectionality. It's a word that made its debut in the late '80s, has swept its way through sociology courses on college campuses, and has become a buzzword for anyone dealing with identity politics during the past 10 years. I, myself, was first introduced to the word and concept in my Intro to Queer Studies course at LSU (GEAUX TIGERS!). It's a word that encompassed the very air I breathed. It described the dynamic of identity that I had always tried to make sense. It perfectly summed up the conflicting aspects of one's being. It's the gateway drug to those dealing with discrimination: it helps us make sense of how race, class, socioeconomic standing, gender, religion, ethnicity, and much more, can overlap and affect how others perceive you. For many people, intersectionality is a hard concept to grasp. Combine this perception with privilege and you have a recipe for misinterpretation and disaster. Some believe that by claiming a minority status, their experience within a minority identity is representative of all people's experiences as that minority. Take any sort of minority group - each one experiences some form of stigma. One could postulate that the more minority groups one identifies with, the more discrimination and stigma that person may experience. One could assume that a black, queer woman would, in essence, have a more difficult life experience than a heterosexual white male just by virtue of her experiences as a woman, compounded with her experience as a black person, and topping it off with her queer identity. Her life will be just a little harsher, her earning potential just short of the people around her, her ability to say with certainty that she gets everything she deserves not as strong as a white male's ability. She would have to work that much harder to be taken seriously in today's heteronormative, white, male-dominated world. Assuming that you haven't clicked this article off your browser yet, this is where things start to get interesting: even within minority groups, there exists a hierarchy of privilege. The same constructs that affect majority groups permeate into minority group structures and wreak havoc on individuals who cannot pass or assume a less stigmatized identity. In terms of LGBT history, while the very beginnings were sparked by riots led by leading trans activists, the people who were working within the system to fight for LGBT rights were predominantly gay, white males. This isn't to say that racial and sexual minorities within the community did nothing - they were leaders in various aspects of the equal rights and visibility causes. Society in general, especially during the first couple of decades in the fight for LGBT rights, tended to favor affluent, white males who could pass. Because of this, these people were able to use their privilege to push and shape the LGBT Rights agenda. As a result, many milestones reached during this time were central to this subsection's own focus. I say this neither commending nor condemning it - there are many positives that came out of this, but there were many causes ignored. Due to this privilege, much of the conversation regarding the LGBT Rights movement is still controlled by this prominent group. As a result, even the celebrations of Pride and gayness cater predominantly to this group. That's not to say lesbians or even people of color don't have their own spaces - these more nuanced spaces exist in major cities like New York City and San Francisco. But, on average, the major events and those with the greatest reach and engagement tend to be spaces created for gay, affluent, and white males. When I first opened myself up to the LGBT community, I had found a group that was accepting of me joining their ranks. They were happy to have another person essentially "join the cause," if you will. Mind you, that acceptance did not necessarily translate to me gaining a whole new circle of friends - the kindness afforded to me by others in the Southern LGBT circles did not stretch that far. Instead, I had become acquaintances with a bunch of people I could head-nod or acknowledge in a crowd, but not a group who would invite me out to dance and have a night on the town with them. Within the context of any minority community, various privileges and hindrances command one's experience, subjugating those who are unlucky to be in the minority. I, Kittu Pannu, define myself as an Indian-Malaysian, Southern, Sikh, gay male, among other things. Within the LGBT community, there are certain characteristics that give me a higher "social currency" and "value" in the eyes of fellow community members. These include my height and stature, my gay identity, my gender, and even (thankfully) my good looks. Being male and gay in the LGBT community allows me to identify with majority groups within the community. Being perceived as attractive provides me with an ability to command attention from others who may not necessarily give me the time of the day otherwise. And, of course, being a male in the community allows me access to the majority of programs and activities that are advertised to our community. Now, while these characteristics allow me to scale the heights of social interactions in LGBT spaces, there are certain characteristics that may be perceived as weaknesses or hindrances within the community. Some of these include one's general physique, body hair, skin color, mannerisms, desire to "enhance" one's experience using recreational drugs, and much more. This year, I attended D.C. Pride, NYC Pride, and ended the festivities with an extended weekend in Provincetown. While I had a blast during my travels, I was acutely aware of how my various forms of privilege and other characteristics influenced how others perceived and interacted with me. The events my friends and I attended were some of the more heavily-marketed ones, promoting a more white, gay male-centric experience, with advertisements featuring buff males in various poses, wearing very little clothing. Sometimes, we would see an advertisement that featured a Latinx or Black individual, but they were far and few between. To this day, I have yet to see an Indian or Middle Eastern featured on any sort of marketing collateral for any major events. But, I digress. The first major hurdle was shelling out the amount of money associated with these events. Tickets, when bought well in advance, were around at least 30 dollars per party, with admission the day of reaching upwards of 175 dollars at times. This requirement automatically discourages those who are less financially successful from attending. Then, when I looked around at the general makeup of the crowd, I saw gaggles of muscular, in-shape men. There would always be a couple of people who did not fit the mold, as well as one or two racial minorities sporadically throughout the various groupings. More than often, I would find groups of white males together, stalking around for their next prey. My own group was more diverse, featuring a token white male, a Latino, and two Indian males. Like clockwork, at least with the all-white groups, one guy, Party-goer, would initiate contact with my white friend while his friends ignore the rest of us. I, being the gregarious person I am, would approach Party-goer's friends and begin as much of a conversation one can have on a dance floor, but these people would normally be interested only in that one friend who, to them, represented attractiveness. Often, the other guys in the group would become rude, or find the closest white male dancing around us to converse with. They would glare at me for daring to approach them, as if I defied social cues by dancing in their space. And that's the thing. These parties, while inclusive in description, are everything but in practice. These types of spaces tend to place on a pedestal the motifs of societal attractiveness that have been engrained in all of us from a young age. This culture perpetuates the muscular body standards, the light skin, the masculinity complexes, the overall need to fit into a specific look or box. I believe this may be a byproduct of bringing together large groups of people, or maybe it has to do with the undercurrent of societal norms that many of us in the LGBT community still buy into. It's hard to disregard the institutional racism, sexism, and other -isms that plague us in everyday life, but it helps to acknowledge and actively take steps to remedy the situation. At the end of the day, I am truly happy that I didn't waste time talking to people who did not want to have a legitimate conversation, but it also does not help to continually see people treat you as less than because of factors outside of one's control. We, as a community, champion diversity. But when it comes to celebrations, we perpetuate a specific type of gayness - one that meets the demands of societal norms and fits into our preconceived notions of attractiveness. As a result, those who don't conform to these ideals get lost in the shuffle, or worse - they are told they don't matter. As a community of minorities, it is up to us to change how we interact with people who may not adhere to our understanding of what is attractive. It is up to us to recognize that what we consider attractive has been engrained in us from a young age based on our environment and exposure to media and other materials. The more we acknowledge the beauty in others, especially those who are different than us, the more united we can be as a community. Currently, our US administration has it out for minorities of all types. Whether they're attacking LGBT people through trans bans or Muslims through travel bans, minorities are clearly in the crosshairs of the executive branch. As I reflect on these issues, I think about what can be done. Obviously breaking down the structural and institutional aspects of racism, sexism, (toxic) masculinity, and other detrimental issues are a major step in the right direction. But, in terms of what those who deal with these pressures on a daily basis can do to alleviate these stresses, I would suggest not placing oneself in situations that would contribute to negative self-perceptions and coming to terms with one's own self. Loving yourself. Accepting yourself for who you are, flaws and all. Because, as famous drag queen entertainer and LGBT community mother RuPaul says: If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else? With knowledge comes responsibility. And yes, the world may be harder on us minorities, but we have the ability to change it by meeting these obstacles head-on. By working that much harder to be the person we are proud of. When we say "screw it" to the preconceived notions and societal norms that are placed upon us, we gain so much power. And confidence. Because, trust me, that power and confidence is so much more attractive than conforming to what certain groups deem acceptable.

This "optimum gender of rearing system" was developed at Johns Hopkins University with Dr. John Money. One of your video clips this week focuses on Dr. Money and one of his first patients using this rearing system, David Reimer This story was evidence that the way physicians treat intersex patients needs to change because it is harmful psychologically, and in some cases, fatalISNA recommends avoiding any kind of gender reassignment SURGERY until the child is old enough to decide if surgery is appropriate for them

Intersexuality is one of many examples pointing to the idea that thinking about sex and gender as binary (two categories only of male and female) is limiting and also inaccurate Judith Butler is a famous feminist who spoke a lot about the fact that gender is socially constructed (society and people make up its meaning) and that gender is actually just a "performance." Read the brief synopsis on Butler's view here.

MEDIAINTHEUNITEDSTATESMedia sends important messages about gender and sexualityMainstream TV shows/movies and their character depictions can form stereotypes about what it means to be a part of the LGBTQ communityA major message is also sent through the general absence of LGBTQ individuals in mainstream media

LGBTMEDIAPRESENCE¢At the launch of the 2011-2012 television season, GLAAD estimates that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) scripted characters represent 2.9% of all scripted series regular characters on the five broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox, and NBC. This is a decrease from last year, with 19 series regular characters identified as LGBT.¢The number of scripted LGBT series regulars found on mainstream cable networks has also fallen slightly to 28 in the upcoming season.GLAAD counted 26 additional recurring characters on cable.¢CBS: Out of 134 regular characters, only one was LGBT GLAAD's 2011 Where We Are on TV report

The Intersectionality Of The LGBTQ And The Immigrant Communities

LGBTQ can be anyone. any attack on any community is an attack on all of us. immigrant rights are linked with the fight for the LGBTQ community. So many LGBTQ people in america cam here because they were fleeing oppression persecution or violence, so many in immigration detention centers are LGBTQ themselves and for those who are in detention centers there is an increased risk of violence. 1 in 500 in detention facitlies are transgender and 1 in 5 who are victims are sexual assault in detention centers are transgender. LGBTQ immigrants are at a hgher risk of violence and stigma in those places. only when we stand together will we be able to defeat the force of hate, and move equality and justive forward for all of us

LGBT 1 Domestic Violence Fact Sheet

Law enforcement, government agencies, and the general population acknowledge that domestic violence is a serious public health problem. The most commonly understood type of abuse involves partners of the opposite gender engaging in behavior that is both physically and mentally harmful, with the victim typically being the female. Less universally recognized is the occurrence of domestic violence among partners of the same sex. Research indicates that domestic violence among same-sex couples occurs at similar rates as domestic violence among straight couples. Unfortunately, domestic violence victims in same-sex relationships are not receiving the help they need. This is due to the lack of legal recognition of same-sex relationships, law enforcement's failure to identity and properly handle domestic violence cases involving people of the same sex, and the shortage of resources available to victims of same-sex partner domestic abuse. Lawmakers and social service providers should reconfigure the traditional model of domestic violence prevention and treatment to include individuals involved in same-sex relationships. The majority of gay and lesbian families are happy, healthy, and well-functioning, similar to that of healthy heterosexual families. Domestic violence in same-sex families does occur, however. Studies have found that domestic violence occurs among same-sex couples at comparable rates to straight couples: • One out of four to one out of three same-sex relationships has experienced domestic violence. • By comparison, one in every four heterosexual women experiences domestic violence in her lifetime. Both straight and gay victims of domestic violence experience a similar pattern of abuse, albeit with some notable distinctions. Straight and same-sex domestic violence share many common characteristics: • The pattern of abuse includes a vicious cycle of physical, emotional, and psychological mistreatment, leaving the victim with feelings of isolation, fear, and guilt. • Abusers often have severe mental illnesses and were themselves abused as children. • Psychological abuse is the most common form of abuse and physical batterers often blackmail their partners into silence. • Physical and sexual abuses often co-occur. • No race, ethnicity, or socio-economic status is exempt. But domestic violence in same-sex relationships is distinctive in many ways from domestic violence in heterosexual relationships: • Gay or lesbian batterers will threaten "outing" their victims to work colleagues, family, and friends. This threat is amplified by the sense of extreme isolation among gay and lesbian victims since some are still closeted from friends and family, have fewer civil rights protections, and lack access to the legal system. • Lesbian and gay victims are more reluctant to report abuse to legal authorities. Survivors may not contact law enforcement agencies because doing so would force them to reveal their sexual orientation or gender identity. • Gay and lesbian victims are also reluctant to seek help out of fear of showing a lack of solidarity among the gay and lesbian community. Similarly, many gay men and women hide their abuse out of a heightened fear that society will perceive same-sex relationships as inherently dysfunctional. • Gay and lesbian victims are more likely to fight back than are heterosexual women. This can lead law enforcement to conclude that the fighting was mutual, overlooking the larger context of domestic violence and the history of power and control in the relationship. • Abusers can threaten to take away the children from the victim. In some states, adoption laws do not allow same-sex parents to adopt each other's children. This can leave the victim with no legal rights should the couple separate. The abuser can easily use the children as leverage to prevent the victim from leaving or seeking help. Even when the victim is the legally recognized parent an abuser may threaten to out the victim to social workers hostile to gays and lesbians, which may result in a loss of custody. In the worst cases the children can even end up in the custody of the abuser The generally accepted model of a male aggressor and female survivor cannot be easily applied when dealing with victims in same-sex relationships. Same-sex couples therefore face certain impediments to having their domestic violence issues recognized and addressed that straight couples do not: • Authorities often lack the knowledge of how to handle domestic violence cases involving people of the same gender. An officer may mistake two males living together for roommates, for example. And officers may fail to report an incident of domestic violence since the two parties involved may be unwilling to divulge their relationship status. In some cases the victim will be detained instead of the aggressor because the latter was physically smaller. • Same-sex partners lack the resources needed to help them get out of abusive relationships. While domestic violence shelters appear to be increasingly responsive to the needs of lesbian victims, gay male victims are rarely admitted. Services for gay men are practically nonexistent. • Survivors of same-sex domestic violence lack the same legal recognition and protection as straight survivors. Currently, a patchwork of state laws exist that offer some protections to gay and lesbian victims of domestic violence. Some laws cover gay and lesbian victims explicitly in their anti-domestic violence laws, while others cover gay and lesbian victims though gender-neutral language. A federal law is needed, however, to provide uniform and comprehensive protections for all same-sex couples. A number of policy solutions would address the challenges that both victims and survivors of same-sex domestic violence face. They include: • New legal interpretation of existing domestic violence laws at all levels of government that incorporates same-sex couples within the definitions of domestic violence and related parties. • Providing local, state, and federal funding to educate law enforcement and social service providers about LGBT people, establish same-sex domestic violence prevention programs, and support organizations that specifically address same-sex domestic violence. • Mandated cultural competency training for organizations receiving federal dollars to implement domestic violence prevention or treatment programs. Domestic violence among same-sex couples is a serious public health concern. Victims of same-sex domestic violence face added challenges when attempting to receive help, as outlined above. More gay and lesbian victims of abuse are reporting their experiences as the general public has become increasingly more accepting of same-sex relationships. Still, barriers to equal treatment for same-sex couples remain. Survivors of same-sex domestic violence can receive the recognition and help they need with further research, better training for law enforcement officials, and more funding for relevant programs.

Among transgender racial minorities: • 24 % of transgender American Indians, 18 % of transgender people who identified as multiracial, 17 % of transgender Asians, and 15 % of Black transgender respondents experienced sexual assault in K-12 education settings • This level of violence is at MUCH higher rates than students of other races. • Transgender women respondents experienced sexual assault more often than their transgender male peers.

Lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner Women: Lesbian:44% Bisexual:61% Heterosexual: 35% Men: Gay:26% Bisexual: 37% Heterosexual: 29%

MEDIALITERACY¢As you see LGBTQ characters depicted in the media, remember to ask yourself:How are LGBTQ characters represented in the media? What do they look like? How do they speak? What kind of activities do they engage in?*What specific images and words contribute to our understanding of what it means to be LGBTQ?*What impact do LGBTQ representations have on the opportunities and possibilities for LGBTQ-identified individuals in their personal and professional lives?*

MEDIALITERACY*¢What do the images and narratives being deployed say about queer people?Are the images and narratives you consume describing an entire subgroup of people or are they describing a single individual? Is the individual posited as an exceptional member of their subgroup and if they are, what is being implied about the group of which they are a part?¢If the representations in question utilize humor, are queer people in on the joke or are they the joke?This is an important distinction to grasp and can sometimes be quite tricky depending on the media product under scrutiny. Ridiculous and humorous representations serve a wide variety of purposes and humor can often broach topics that would otherwise be too sensitive or difficult to deal with. That said, there is a difference between a humor that "Others" people and one that isinclusive.

MISREPRESENTATION¢How might feeling absent/misrepresented from media make someone feel?Isolated/can't relate to the culturePressure to change aspects of themselvesOn the other hand, sometimes there can be buffering effects: ¢if media is harmful but you feel it does not encompass who you are, you might ignore it/dismiss it easier

MEDIAPRESENCEWe do see more LGBTQ individuals covering the news, in TV shows, movies, talk shows, music, sports, more than ever before, and more LGBTQ people of color specifically:¢Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Caitlyn Jenner, Ellen Degeneres, Frank Ocean, Don Lemon, Robin Roberts, Rachel Maddow, Michael Sam, Lee Daniels, Neil Patrick Harris, Tim Cook, Wanda Sykes, Adam Lambert, Carmen Carrera, Fallon Fox. Isis King, Jenna TalackovaBut it is important to consider media literacy when thinking about how any group of individuals is depicted in the media, especially sexual and gender minorities.... (next slide)

Global discrimination against LGBT persons: 2015 United Nations report

On February 23, 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that career diplomat Randy Berry would be the first-ever Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons. Berry's mission is to "advance efforts underway to move toward a world free from violence and discrimination against LGBT persons." While Berry plans to travel to countries such as Uganda, where homosexuality is a criminal offense, his primary focus is to target the large number of states with moderate views hoping to expedite the already rapid progress some regions are making. The announcement of the Special Envoy comes three years after the State Department's December 2011 launch of its Global Equality Fund, an initiative that partners with public and private entities to promote the human rights of LGBT people through three priority areas: Advance Justice; Support Advocates; and Increase Public Dialogue. These initiatives follow the 2011 release of the United Nations first-ever report on the human rights of LGBT people around the world, which details the often grim, and on-going, realities of violence and discrimination. At the request of the U.N. Human Rights Council, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights released an updated report in May 2015, "Discrimination and Violence against Individuals Based on their Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity," highlighting the setbacks and advancements impacting LGBT persons. Under international law, states are obligated to protect their citizens from violence and ensure their right to equality under the law. Yet there remain many "serious and widespread human rights violations perpetrated, too often with impunity, against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity." According to the report, governments in every region have taken some initiatives since 2011 to reduce violence and discrimination toward LGBT individuals and advocates. Fourteen states "have adopted or strengthened anti-discrimination and hate crime laws... Three States have abolished criminal sanctions for homosexuality; 12 have introduced marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples nationally; and 10 have introduced reforms that, to varying degrees, make it easier for transgender persons to obtain legal recognition of their gender identity." Many countries have launched sensitivity training and anti-bullying programs, and in pop culture, LGBT characters are more prevalent and visible. However, despite this progress, "hundreds of people have been killed and thousands more injured in brutal, violent attacks," the report notes, and countless more have been denied access to healthcare, housing, employment and other basic human rights based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. The report features updated information on a variety of other key issues: State-sponsored discrimination and violence: Currently, "at least 76 States retain laws that are used to criminalize and harass people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression, including laws criminalizing consensual, adult same-sex relationships... In the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and Yemen, and in parts of Nigeria and Somalia, the death penalty may be applied in cases of consensual homosexual conduct... In the past two years, laws have been enacted or proposed in several States that seek to restrict public discussion of sexual orientation under the guise of 'protecting minors' from information on so-called 'non-traditional sexual relations'." Crimes against LGBT persons: "Violence motivated by homophobia and transphobia is often particularly brutal, and in some instances characterized by levels of cruelty exceeding that of other hate crimes." In every region in the world, the U.N. continues to receive reports of physical and psychological abuse perpetrated against individuals perceived to be LGBT. In addition, LGBT people are targets for religious extremists, paramilitary groups, and extreme nationalists, and also risk being ostracized by their families and communities. Instances of violence: Due to poor data collection and a fear of reporting the crimes to authorities, many violent and discriminatory acts against LGBT people go undocumented. However, certain crimes and patterns have been confirmed, including:Between 2008 and 2014, there were 1,612 murders, across 62 countries, of transgender persons — equivalent to a killing every two days.The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported 594 hate-related killings of LGBT persons in the 25 members of the Organization of American States between January 2013 and March 2014.Brazil saw 310 murders in 2012 in which homophobia or transphobia was a motive.In 2013 the U.S. experienced 18 hate-violence homicides and 2,001 incidents of anti-LGBT violence. New laws and programs: Several states in every region have taken some steps to address the issues of violence and discrimination toward LGBT persons. For instance, "new or strengthened anti-hate crime laws have been enacted in several States, including Albania, Chile, Finland, Georgia, Greece, Honduras, Malta, Montenegro, Portugal and Serbia... Other notable initiatives include the establishment of specialized hate crime prosecution units in Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, and Spain... and [Belgium (Flanders) and Canada have implemented] surveys to improve hate-crime data collection." The report also includes policy recommendations: The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights recommends that all states enact hate crimes laws; conduct prompt thorough investigations of "hate-motivated violence"; collect and publish data on human rights violations; provide sensitivity training to law enforcement, school officials, etc.; ban "conversion therapy," grant refugee/asylum status to individuals fleeing persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity; and address anti-discrimination through public service campaigns. Related: The U.S. Department of Justice notes that, in 2013, "law enforcement agencies reported 1,402 hate crime offenses based on sexual-orientation bias. Of these offenses: 60.6 percent were classified as anti-gay (male) bias; 22.6 percent were prompted by an anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (mixed group) bias; and 13.2 percent were classified as anti-lesbian bias."

Murders of transgender people on the rise as public presence grows FSRN

On Wednesday, the Obama administration announced the appointment of the first out transgender White House staffer, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who will be in charge of outreach and recruitment for the presidential personnel office. Freedman-Gurspan has a long history of activism in the trans community. She formerly served as policy adviser at the National Center for Transgender Equality. The high-profile post adds to a rapidly growing public awareness about gender dysphoria and gender nonconformity, expanded by celebrity transitions and reality TV. But transgender activists say increased public attention has unintended consequences - while it has increased acceptance for some , it has also fueled a backlash and led to increasing violence against those who aren't rich and famous. And the recent spike in trans murders in they say, underscores the crisis facing mny transgender people. Larry Buhl reports from Los Angeles. "Our lives matter," chants trans activist Bamby Salcedo as she leads a rally in front of LAPD in response to the most recent murder of a transgender woman. "The lives and existence of trans people matter. And we are not going to take it any longer." This week it was Tamara Dominguez, who was repeatedly run over by a car in a church parking lot in Kansas City, Missouri. Authorities are looking into her death as a potential hate crime. At least nineteen transgender men, transgender women and gender nonconforming people have been killed in the U.S. so far this year, an increase over fourteen homicides in all of 2014. And those are just the documented homicides. Activists say the true number may be higher because police can mis-gender murder victims. And they say trans survivors of violent crimes are often unwilling to report it, because of their gender status. This month three black trans women — Elisha Walker, Ashton O'Hara, and Kandis Capri — all unrelated, were killed in a 24-hour period. Leaders in the trans movement say violence against them, instead of abating, is reaching a national crisis. "We live in a time when there's an increased visibility of transgender people like Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Caitlyn Jenner," says Jorge Amaro. The spokesperson with the National LGBTQ Task Force says having vocal transgender celebrities has been a mixed blessing. "At the same time anti transgender violence has skyrocketed." Activists point out that the lives of most trans people, especially trans black and Latina women, are quite different than those of political appointees and celebrities. Trans women of color are disproportionately victims of violent hate crimes, including murder, and advocates believe the increased visibility and openness of trans people has made them even more vulnerable. Mariana Marroquin, a client advocate at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, explains that trans people don't have much faith that law enforcement will protect them. "The Los Angeles LGBT Center had been doing a lot of work with the LAPD and sheriff's department regarding training," the trans Latina Marroquin says. "But it is still happening that when you go to the police to make a report you are victimized again. Because they ask questions about your gender, about your identity instead of what happened, so that keeps people from looking for protection." The risk of violence is not just about trans hate and intolerance. Marroquin says the problems that lead to their lives being cut short are systemic. "The problem is the lack of resources and lack of respect by authorities and organizations," she says. "We don't have resources. We don't have access to medical, we don't have access to legal, we don't have access to representation so that puts the transgender community in a very vulnerable place. Other members of the transgender community agree that the recent spike in trans murders is really a continuation of longstanding issues that cut their lives short in many ways. Jennicet Gutierrez is an organizer with Familia Trans Queer Liberation Movement. She was also the activist who drew criticism from some in the LGBT community for heckling President Obama during a speech, about not granting quick asylum for transgender immigrants. "The reality is for many of our transgender sisters, they don't have that support," explains Gutierrez. "They get kicked out of their homes, which puts them on the streets. Many don't have housing available, so they try to meet with people and sometimes the people they connect with put them in positions to be abused and the sad thing is in some cases for them to end up murdered." A recent report by the Center for American Progress shows that transgender people are four times more likely to live in poverty. That puts them in situations and neighborhoods that increase their risk of being victimized. Discrimination in housing, education, health care and employment can lead them to illegal activities like survival sex and drug dealing, which leads to violence against them, for which they're afraid to seek help. This vicious cycle is a grim reality for many in the community. That's why trans activists aren't demanding new laws, at least not now. In 2009, President Obama signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which included transgender protection, but it hasn't stopped crimes against them, and hasn't improved their access to the social safety net. They admit that while the increased visibility of transgender people is part of the problem, it is also inherently part of the solution. They hope that recent and important strides for public figures will translate to similar inclusion for all of them.

This Is What It's Like to Log Into Grindr as a Person of Color

On a typical day, 1.6 million users in more than 192 countries send more than 70 million messages and 5 million pictures to each other on Grindr, the location-aware gay dating app that is now six years old. While that level of worldwide connection is astounding, not all of Grindr's connections are created equal. Matthew* — a black, 29-year-old Los Angeles resident — said he remembers a striking moment of racism while browsing Grindr one night. An attractive white guy began to chat with him. He felt the man was out of his league. The conversation quickly became highly sexual. Desires and interests were put on the table. "He eventually said that he had a fantasy of having his white boi pussy raped by a big-dicked n****," Matthew told Mic in an email. He said he blocked the user and signed off, promptly. Preference or racism? While those who practice sexual racism may see what they do as separate from harboring racist attitudes, recent research disagrees. A study published in the October edition of Archives of Sexual Behavior argues sexual racism "is closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference." For Kevin Nadal, even subtle moments of racism indicate deeper attitudes regarding race. Nadal is the executive director of the Center for LGBTQ Studies at City University of New York's Graduate Center. Nadal has published several works on microaggressions, which are subtle forms of bias or discrimination that, while often well intentioned, can be taken in hurtful or offensive ways by those who experience them. "People who make it a point to state that they have racial preferences, they need to examine some of the biases they have that lead to what they call those preferences," Nadal told Mic. Nadal said people of color tend to be exoticized or viewed as less attractive due to long-held portrayals painting people of color as inferior and white people as ideal in terms of attractiveness. Even attention intended to be positive but based on assumed racial traits can be harmful, according to Nadal. "People who are viewed as the norm in terms of standards of beauty, they may not even recognize that their experiences are different from those who don't fit that standard," Nadal said. "People of color who do go on sites and get this attention, they get messages that people are attracted to [them] simply because of their racial features that they view as exotic or something that's different and new — that they can be treated more like objects." Many of the gay men of color who spoke to Mic described how they felt being exoticized or expected to adhere to certain limitations of what their race or ethnicity might entail. Louie, 38, a Latino Philadelphia native, told Mic that he often had to deal with assumptions about his bedroom practices because of his race and appearance. "White men consistently assume that I am a top because I am brown and have a beard," Louie said. "Then get mad and say 'Well do you have AIDS since you're a bottom?'" Louie said his interactions with white men on Grindr have since forced him to change how he operated on the platform. "I no longer use Grindr, but when I did, I didn't return any messages from white men. And if they messaged me, I blocked them," he said. "I get everyone is looking for a fantasy on Grindr, but forcing that fantasy on someone is something different." A random user threw a highly racially-charged epithet (pictured below) at Eliel — a 24-year-old, Latino Atlanta native — while he was browsing Grindr recently. "Because of my ethnicity he, and many other white gay men, deem me to be ugly," Eliel told Mic. He said he's stopped letting it get to him. "I believe my ethnicity is beautiful," he said. Even worse than outright racial bias is the reactions people of color receive when attempting to push back against it. "When people of color call white people out on racist bias," said Nadal, who co-authored a 2007 paper detailing the impact of white people's reactions to microaggressions, "or racist dynamics in dating, that can often lead to overt bias or prejudice in that people of color are told directly that their perspectives are wrong or they are being overly sensitive and that their reality is not the truth." Getting people to admit to their own biases can be difficult. "Most people want to view themselves as good people and are hesitant or are in denial that they have racial biases," Nadal said. "Whereas, there have been studies for the past 40 years on implicit bias, which connotes that everyone has some sort of implicit bias." Evading bias: Larry, a 33-year-old Filipino from New York, told Mic that he has experienced a lot of implicit bias on Grindr, to the point that changing his race from "Asian" to "Other" increased the amount of people who spoke to him. "I can't isolate all the variables, because I also did change my profile picture, but I just know that I got hit up a whole lot more than I had in the past and by guys who hadn't responded to me in the past," Larry told Mic. Larry said many of his friends have stories far worse than his. "Someone hit [my friend] up on Grindr and kept making these terrible references like 'Do you wanna suck on my egg roll?'" he said. Nadal doesn't see a problem with having a racial preference, but it's the way people choose to express it that matters. "There's a power play happening where they want people to know that one group is superior for them or other groups are not to even talk to them," he said. Alternative ways of expression are available, Nadal said. "There's another way, which is to be silent about who you are romantically or sexually attracted to, and you can tell somebody if asked." Nadal stressed that, in the end, the burden to examine these attitudes really does rely on those who perpetuate racist micoraggressions — to reexamine why they feel that way. "In terms of romantic attractions, if somebody is not attracted to a certain race in absolutes, then that's something to question in terms of 'Why do you think that is?'" he said. "What does that say about your feelings or attitudes towards that group?"

She was sexually assaulted within months of coming out. She isn't alone. USA Today

Sarah McBride wasn't sure if she could do it. She wasn't even sure she should. She watched that Sunday in October as her Twitter and Facebook feeds filled with stories from survivor after survivor - accounts that eventually would stir the conscience of a nation that had long refused to reckon with its culture of sexual violence. After a restless night contemplating whether she was strong enough to lift the weight of silence, she gathered her courage and tweeted those devastating words: "Me Too." Until that moment, McBride, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign and the first transgender American to address a major party convention, had only disclosed her sexual assault to a few people. She said she stayed silent for years because she feared she wouldn't be believed. Sarah McBride wasn't sure if she could do it. She wasn't even sure she should. She watched that Sunday in October as her Twitter and Facebook feeds filled with stories from survivor after survivor - accounts that eventually would stir the conscience of a nation that had long refused to reckon with its culture of sexual violence. After a restless night contemplating whether she was strong enough to lift the weight of silence, she gathered her courage and tweeted those devastating words: "Me Too." Until that moment, McBride, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign and the first transgender American to address a major party convention, had only disclosed her sexual assault to a few people. She said she stayed silent for years because she feared she wouldn't be believed. While the perception of the LGBTQ community is that of increasing visibility and acceptance, especially during Pride month, it is a population that continues to face discrimination that makes it more vulnerable to sexual violence. The rates are so much higher A 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality found nearly half of respondents were sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime and one in 10 was sexually assaulted in the past year. Overall, people who identify as LGBTQ are at greater risk of sexual violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: • 44 percent of lesbians and 61 percent of bisexual women experience rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner, compared with 35 percent of heterosexual women. • 37 percent of bisexual men experience rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner, compared with 29 percent of heterosexual men. • 40 percent of gay men and 47 percent of bisexual men have experienced sexual violence other than rape, compared to 21 percent of heterosexual men. Biggest Me Too headlines followed a formula While McBride found Me Too personally empowering, she said other members of the LGBTQ community felt their experiences weren't reflected in the conversation. Some gay voices helped launch the movement - Anthony Rapp led the charge against Kevin Spacey's alleged sexual misconduct - but Me Too headlines were largely dominated by the stories of white, wealthy, straight, cisgender women. There was a feeling when Me Too exploded, McBride said, that the people "most at risk of experiencing sexual assault and sexual violence" weren't as included as they should have been. The stories given most attention followed a formula: a prominent female survivor and a powerful male perpetrator. Many felt these stories were elevated at the expense of poor survivors, survivors of color, disabled survivors and nonbinary or queer survivors - people whose identities put them at greater risk for sexual violence. #METOO: Sexual violence impacts LGBTQ folks, too "Queer people ... around the world who are also chiming in - we have to pay attention to them, too," Me Too founder Tarana Burke, who started the campaign more than a decade ago to raise awareness about sexual violence among women of color, told USA TODAY in October. Why? Vulnerability Experts say reasons for the disproportionately higher rates of sexual violence are complex. What's clear is that discrimination makes LGBTQ people inherently more vulnerable, said Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. "Bias and discrimination end up equaling secrecy and alienation, and when you don't have support systems ... that often creates risk factors that people who inflict harm on others are seeking out," Houser said. A queer teen who is shunned by his family and community is a more likely target for a sexual predator. A transgender person struggling to find employment is more likely to be homeless, which increases the risk of sexual victimization. The CDC's risk factors for sexual violence also tie in to risks for the LGBTQ population: • Alcohol and drug use (sexual minorities have higher rates of substance misuse and substance use disorders than heterosexuals, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse) • Homelessness (in a survey of agencies helping homeless youth, 40 percent of the youth identified as LGBT, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA) • Poverty (rates of poverty are higher among lesbian, gay and bi people, and nearly a third of transgender people live in poverty, twice the national rate) • Lack of employment opportunities (in many states, anti-LGBT laws enable legal discrimination in hiring and in the workplace) Myths about LGBTQ people are also important to understanding the disproportionate rates of violence, Houser said. For example, 46 percent of bisexual women have been raped, compared to 17 percent of heterosexual women and 13 percent of lesbians, according the CDC. "Bisexuality is seen as a curiosity, and the way it is oftentimes presented, especially in pornographic connotations, is constantly willing, like you don't say no to anyone," Houser said. "I think you end up ... running the risk of men in particular making assumptions about not being turned down and feeling entitled. ... If we're going to fetishize sexual assault against bisexual people or trans people and turn it into entertainment, we're going to have a hard time taking it seriously." Sexual violence against LGBTQ people also can be a dimension of hate. "If you have a person who is expressing disdain or wanting to dehumanize another person for having a different ... identity other than being cisgendered or straight, sexual assault can be used as a punishment," Houser said. "Corrective rape," when a straight person rapes an LGBTQ person in an attempt to punish them or change their sexual orientation, is an example of hate-motivated sexual violence. "It's the most personal violation you can perpetuate against somebody without murdering them," Houser said. Getting help gets complicated Discrimination also means LGBTQ survivors are less likely to seek help from police, hospitals and rape crisis centers. Some worry about being "outed," and many worry about being discriminated against further. In 2016, 39 percent of LGBT survivors interacted with law enforcement following an incident of intimate partner violence, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Seven percent said the police were hostile and 12 percent said that the police were indifferent in their interactions. McBride, who says she was sexually assaulted during her junior year of college in Washington, D.C., six months after coming out as transgender, didn't report her assault to police and shared the incident with very few people. She said she remained silent not only because she worried people wouldn't believe her, but also because initially she wasn't sure what she believed herself. McBride said she had internalized transphobic messages about her self-worth, at one point thinking, "You're lucky he's even interested in you." She also worried speaking out could harm the LGBTQ community at large, by reinforcing myths that LGBTQ people are "overly sexual." To combat sexual assault, states must have comprehensive anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, McBride said. "We need to know that we are safe and protected from discrimination in accessing the kind of services, care and support that every survivor of sexual assault deserves," she said. Sexual violence is a too-common experience, especially for women. But not every element of it is universal. There is much that LGBTQ survivors of sexual assault share in common with straight, cis survivors. And there is much they do not. "(We need to be) taking seriously the entire spectrum of abusive and inappropriate behavior, which is one of the benefits of the Me Too movement," Houser said. "We ... can be inclusive for everybody. It's not just how do you define this act. It's really about what kind of behavior do we want to tolerate around us. It's bad behavior. No matter who the victim is. It hurts all of us." You may also be interested in: OPINION:Why we have LGBTQ Pride and not 'Straight Pride' CELEBS:All the inspiring ways they're celebrating Pride Month GLOSSARY:LGBTQ definitions every good ally should know

Will Michael Sam Save the NFL From Its Homophobia?

The NFL has been plagued by homophobic train wrecks. Just last week New Orleans Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma expressed his fear of taking a shower knowing a gay player might be within eye range. There's former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe now charging that he was fired because he supported gay marriage publicly, and saying he has witnesses to assistant coach Mike Priefer allegedly saying that "we should round up all the gays" and "nuke them." San Francisco 49er Chris Culliver last year threatened that gays better not even think about coming out in the NFL anytime soon (and got a slap on the wrist), and the New York State attorney general got involved after reports surfaced of a college player being asked during a scouting combine if he "liked girls," which would violate New York's law protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Now we have college football star Michael Sam, a former University of Missouri defensive lineman expected to be an NFL early draft round pick in May, coming out and getting a whirlwind of media attention. One reason he came out now, he says, was to get it out of the way, as it was widely known on his college team — where players who knew supported him or just didn't care — though not publicly discussed. And the issue was now coming up. "At a showcase game for college seniors last month," The New York Times reported, "several scouts asked Mr. Sam's agent, Joe Barkett, questions about whether Mr. Sam had a girlfriend or whether Mr. Barkett had seen him with women." Exactly what big, strong linebackers like Jonathan Vilma are afraid of has always been puzzling, but homophobia is of course a phobia — an irrational fear — in its purest sense, and that's how phobias work. Guys like Vilma are cowardly for not facing their own bigotry and fear. But they're actually not as cowardly as the anonymous sources in the NFL responding to Sam's coming out by telling Sports Illustrated that professional football's not ready for an openly gay player. Here's someone identified only as an NFL player's personal assistant: "I don't think football is ready for [an openly gay player] just yet. In the coming decade or two, it's going to be acceptable, but at this point in time it's still a man's-man game. To call somebody a [gay slur] is still so commonplace. It'd chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room." A "man's-man game"? "Chemically imbalance" the locker room? Really, that's pretty ugly. That Sports Illustrated even allows these people to say such crap without being quoted is rather pathetic. Imagine if a source had said any other minority group would "chemically imbalance" a locker room? Would Sports Illustrated give that person such cover? After all, Sam would not be the first gay player in the NFL by far, as we know there are many who are closeted, just as in every profession, and many who've come out after they left professional sports. These arguments against having openly gay players right now are the same offensive rationalizations used by those who said gays and lesbian couldn't serve openly in the military. And we see how that's worked out just fine. Publicly, the NFL is being supportive, putting out a statement saying, "We admire Michael Sam's honesty and courage," and adding that they "look forward to welcoming and supporting Michael Sam in 2014." But in the Sports Illustrated article numerous unnamed sources say Sam's going to be a "distraction" and not a problem any team is going to want to take on, questioning his coming out now and claiming it will hurt his chances. "It's one thing to have Chris Kluwe or Brendon Ayanbadejo, advocates for gay rights, on your team," one source said. "It's another to have a current confirmed player." Cyd Zeigler at LGBT sports site Outsports, which covered the back story of Sam's coming out, dismissed all this, tweeting, "Don't listen to the NFL jerks who think Sam will be too big of a distraction," adding the hashtag #oldguysinsuits. Michael Sam presents an incredible opportunity for the NFL to put all the ugliness behind it and move into the future. We'll see if Zeigler is right, and if Sam will save the NFL from its homophobia.

According to ISNA, intersex is "a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types—for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris, or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia. Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY."

There are major criticisms towards the medical field in how they have traditionally treated intersexed patients and their families Notably, an approach during the 1950s was developed which is called "the optimum gender of rearing system" that encouraged doctors to hastily pressure parents to choose which sex they wanted their child to be as early as possible and perform surgery *In many cases doctors would not even ask parents, and would decide on their own and operate surgically on the infant. These decisions were often fraught with sexism (e.g. if a baby was born with internal organs such as a uterus and ovaries, but external genitalia like a scrotum and penis, often doctors would decide to prioritize the fact that child-rearing was possible, and to "make" this baby a girl. Of course, in some instances, if the penis seemed to be rather large, the penis could become the priority)*

National Geographic explains the biology of homosexuality

Until recently, geneticists were confused by differences found in identical twins. especially how one could be gay and the other one straight. How can this be if they have identical DNA? This segment explains just how different twins can be even with identical DNA. The new branch of genetics which addresses the effects of particular proteins affecting gene expression is called epigenetics. Celso and Jeuss Cardenas, raised together. Remained physically similar as they grew up. Celso is gay, jesus is not. Are people born gay? they both shared the same environment during crucial development. In general population, the chance of someone being gay is less than 5% unless you have a gay twin, then the chances are much higher. if you are a fraternal twin, there's a 25% chance that you will also be gay. identical 50% chance you will also be gay. suggest that there must be a genetic compentn to sexuality. but cant all be up to genes than all ideintiall would be both gay or both straight. so whats the other factor? in 1st few weeks all fetuses develop along similar lines if nothing changed each one of us would be born female. Fetusus with male Y chromosome would produce testes at about week 6 and and 8th week produce testosterone and may affect early brain develpoment. Test maculinizes the body also masculinies the brain including hypothalamus, which partially controls who we find sexually attractive. Some believe that the more the hypothalamus is exposed to testosterone, the more it sets the stage for a sexual inclination toward women. Occasionaly a male fetus doesn't produce sufficient testosterone or its brain doesnt asbob enough to shape it along heterosexual lines. if this theory is right, then it may be that Celso absorbed enough testosterone to masculinize his body but not enough to fully differentiate his brain, and was left with a desire for men. epigenetics reveals that even if their DNA code is the same, the way it fucntions can differ. the human genome contains around 25k genes. each with each fucntion. geneticisits are not exploring a previously unknown aspect of the genome called the epigenome. a series of chemicals that act like switches that are capable of activating or deactivating indivdual genes. One gene works thorugh a process called DNA methylation, where enzymes inside a cell attach a miniscule molecular compound a methyl group to a gene. This compound can deactivate or activate the gene, but the gene remains. So the cell's DNA profile is unchanged. if sexual preference is associated with an unidentified gene it may be that the epigenetic supression of activation of this gene dictates sexual preference. this can show that nature and nuture are bound with epigenetics that biological link between the two.

Black working class gays left out of national gay rights agenda the grio

When Obama delivered his "gay agenda" speech to the well-fed, well-scrubbed mostly white crowd of gays and lesbians at the Human Rights Campaign's Annual Dinner on Saturday night, anyone outside of the LGBT community would have assumed by the applause that the entire "gay community" is in agreement that access to serve in the military, gay marriage, and hate crimes legislation are our primary issues. But in reality, HRC's political agenda is not what I want. It does not speak for me, nor for the lives of many other black, poor and working class LGBT people. Given the fact that we're in a long recession where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in almost every month of 2009, and national unemployment numbers are at nearly 10 percent, why are we not talking about the issues that most people are concerned about - health care and the economy - and their impact on the LGBT community? The truth is, for many people at that dinner who could afford the cheapest ticket at $250 a plate, jobs and wages are of little concern. It's not as though there is a lack of evidence that supports the idea that LGBT folks are impacted by poverty. A report on lesbian and gay poverty in the US by the Williams Institute this spring showed that lesbian and gay couples were as likely to be poor as straight couples, mostly due to the impact of race and gender. WATCH THE REPORT OF THE PROTEST AND THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH [MSNBCMSN video="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/33268416#33268416″ w="425″ h="339″] Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy The study showed that black gay and lesbian couples had higher poverty rates than their black straight counterparts, and three times higher than white gay couples. White gay male couples with jobs and no children had higher incomes than all compared groups - even heterosexual couples. We see that race and gender are more likely to determine one's economic status, something that the 1000+ benefits given to married couples will not solve. Even if it did, do we want to live in a society where only married couples can ensure not being poor? Living wages, affordable housing, and universal, single-payer health care access would go much further towards stabilizing poor and working class people than marriage, military service or hate-crimes protections would ever do. Some might point to HRC's lobbying hard for the passage of Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) as a major win to protect LGBT employees. The law would add sexual orientation and gender identity to national employment discrimination laws. On the surface this would seem like a good thing - after all, in most states, you can still be fired from a job with no legal recourse for your sexual orientation or gender identity. While discrimination is clearly wrong, we know that unemployment in the black community is usually twice the national average, even though race already exists as a "protected" category in employment discrimination laws. Currently unemployment among blacks is at a staggering 15 percent. Other studies have shown that people of color with "ethnic sounding" names are less likely to even get a call for an interview. If you're a black lesbian or transgender woman named Keyana Brown and you're looking for work but your name prevents you from getting an interview, ENDA won't help you. The chances of proving discrimination took place, finding a lawyer to take on your case, and winning a judgment in the courts are very thin. It seems it took a while for HRC to support another important employment legislation, The Employee Free Choice Act, which if enacted in its original form would make it much easier for workers to unionize and would provide job security, higher wages, and health care for workers in so-called "Right to Work" states where unions have been historically dissuaded. Many of these states are also the same ones with no protections for LGBT people from workplace discrimination. It was originally reported by QueerToday.com that HRC's Business Council (gay and lesbian reps from major corporations), tried to dissuade the organization from endorsing EFCA. HRC did ultimately endorse, but that endorsement can only be found only the websites of labor unions, not on HRC's website. In short, HRC doesn't have a progressive vision of justice for the LGBT community. And their work does not represent the needs of all LGBT people, certainly not those who are not wealthy and white. Black lesbian blogger Pam Spalding of Pam's House Blend, on a North Carolina NPR show this week noted the tensions that exist between HRC and other members of the LGBT community. She stated, "The fact that [President Obama] will speak before the nationally known, official, gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, sort of brings up the schism between those who are the well-to do insiders within the community and those of the grassroots who will be outside or even not able to go to the march itself. While it is important to talk to that group of people who are the movers and shakers on the Hill, there are also voices out there that don't have a [direct line] to the president." President Obama, who once named the black gay character Omar as his favorite on the HBO hit series, The Wire, needs to listen less to the HRC, and to find the Omar's of the world to find out what a true LGBT agenda might look like.

Our Families: LGBT / Two Spirit Native American Stories

in 2012 there were 57k american indian and alaskan natives living in the state of oregon, and for many ---- describes only a part of their indentity. Stephanie & Louie Tomaskin. Yakama and Lummi Stephanie met someone in Portland and at the time she was close to her dad and told him and he said that it was just a phase. Jackie Cloud, Chipewa. Came out to a spiritual mentor and said that she was double spritied (male spirit and female spirit). Phillip Hillaire: Lummi Came out to his parents. dissapointment from both parents. thought that she was a failure in upbringing. took his mother 8-10 years before she accepted it. realized that he's happy. mother was going through chemo, and on her last round they told her there was nothing left to do. ----Encountering depression, alchohol, drugs, and would lose everything in life. Close to being homeless, no income. after treatment, now there's a different perspective in life and friends help. being humble. and that it is a gift to be 2 spirit. Community is the environment and now it's home. What makes a family is people who love and take care of eachother.

Transgender Rights: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

private parts, and don't wanna speak about personal things. ask ridiculously personal questions. asking questions about sex organs ignorance. nearly 70k transgender individuals in the U.S 2011 survey found 41% of trans people attempted suicide. transgender household income to make less than 10k a year those who expressed a transgender identity or a gender non-conformity while in grades k-12 reprortes 78% rates of harrasment 35% physical assault and 12% sexual violence. any interaction with bureaucracy is horrible. also referred to as it discharged from being trnas and was awarded a medal. Jacob Eleazer. bathroom bills on arizona. sex on birth certificate to use the bathroom designated. 6 months in jail at least 13 bathroom bills have been instated gainesville florida bathroom bill forcing trans people into certain bathrooms is more disruptive, shown in activist michael hughes taking a pic of himself in the womens bathroom legislators have tried to enforce these bills into highschools Henry Brouseau, trans person, was bullied in school because since administration couldn't accept his identity, the kids wouldn't either a civil rights issue at the end of the day

¢Now think about how all of those identities "intersect," or impact each other ¢ ¢For example, some people of color who are also gay may experience prejudice from both communities. They may therefore not feel they completely "belong" or are accepted in any community

¢The LGBT movement in the United States has been criticized for focusing on white LGBT individuals and not being inclusive. For example: ¢ ¢Many activists believe the fight for marriage equality is a privileged one and ignores more pressing issues: Poverty, healthcare, lack of employment, affordable housing, LGBTQ homeless youth LGBTQ people of color higher risk for targets of violence Employee Non-Discrimination laws are important steps, but very difficult to implement. Many "protected" groups are still not hired UCLA Williams Institute study: ¢black gay and lesbian couples had higher poverty rates than their black heterosexual counterparts, and three times higher than white gay couples.

All of the different identities you possess determine your relative social and political power A white, heterosexual, young woman will have different life experiences and political and social power than a middle-aged gay black man Identities are valued in a hierarchical fashion all over the world. Light skin favored over dark skin. Male favored over female. High SES favored over low SES, etc.

¢Think about all of your identities and roles Sex Race Ethnicity Sexual orientation Gender identity Religion Age occupation Social class Nationality Mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, friend, etc