To change your gender with in the Social Security System and the DMV:
Parents Who Are Doing it RIGHT! Human Rights that is!
Their transgender daughter is being discriminated but the whole school, but her parents are fighting back. Read about parents who believe a child has more insight and knowledge in to their own being then they do. These are parents who are truly demonstrating unconditional love, whether or not their children ‘follow in their footsteps.’ They are recognizing the individuality and right to self expression of their young child and are choosing to stand up for her rather then mold her to societies constraints and desires. That is love in action; read here
Social Security Removes Surgical Requirement for Gender Marker Change
Finally gender equality and privacy in social security! Read the long overdue story HERE & another insightful article HERE Thanks Obama:)
This step toward equality for transgender individuals is long overdue. Previously, transgender people required proof of surgical reassignment surgery in order to change their official gender withing the social security system. This was a gross violation of their human rights to privacy. Gender has more to do with their internal sense of knowledge and self then the body parts that are hanging, or not hanging off of them. This caused undue discrimination against people who for many varying reasons chose to not have any special surgery, either through cost constraints, or other personal reasons. Citizens who desire to change their gender and choose to go as far to change their documents, do not take the decision lightly. It is an extremely difficult endeavor to state to the world that the body you were born in to is does not match the internal state of gender identity in their mind. It is a struggle daily to wake up in a body that does not connect to the physical image one’s mind eye would like to feel. This process is not like changing someones name, which people can do and have done often with little reason. It is an intrinsic part of a person that requires sensitivity and some life altering, irreversible (for the most part) decisions, some that risk damaging their body to achieve their goals. So lifting the surgical requirement for gender change in the Social Security system will give those people who have not or do not wish to surgically alter their body at this point in time, but are 100% certain of their gender identity the right to have their documents match up with their self. So often societies feel that because people are on the margins of society, they have the rights to analyze and enter in to their private space more often in order to determine the level of acceptability they will assign to a specific action or way of being. This milestone says no to one violation, affording transgender people the privacy and discretion they deserve and all other citizens take for granted. To have the right to change ones gender in the Social Security system is a right that will save lives by aiding the reduction of discrimination caused by involuntarily exposing someones gender history.
This is another important step toward gender equality; to allow more people the possibility to become self actualized, which is the great goal of life.
Current Professional Male Athlete comes OUT! -98
While many athletes have come out as gay, and become gay icons, they previously have done this as part of a solo sport, like tennis, a less nationally popular team, or after retirement from the major team sports. Finally, a player in a nationally admired team has come out, NBA player Jason Collins came out as gay. Prior to his official coming out, he changed his number to 98, the year of Mathew Shepard’s bashing, as an ear tug to the gay community. His final push toward full self acceptance and expression was the Boston Bombing, which he stated reminded him of the fleeting nature of life and the importance of living honestly. This is truly a great step in professional male sports, a sector that is notoriously womanizing, male chauvinist, discriminatory, and outright hateful. I have great gratitude to him for being the “kid in the classroom raising his hand” because no one else had the courage to do it. He was not the first to publicly state his orientation, but he was an important first for the community and for human rights. He will be very important to that young gay person who thinks that sports, masculine expression, and success are always coupled with heterosexuality. We are always in need of another great example for inspiring the youth and suppressed adults to accept themselves and share their light with the world. The more we come out, the more voices there are in the media, the more common and less ‘other’ we seem to those still resistant to letting us move a step in from the margin, which leads to more acceptance and more equality.
Thank you Jason Collins, being your true self takes courage, no matter what your ‘coming out’ is.
READ THE ARTICLE HERE: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22341153
Tears of Gaza
The film Tears of Gaza is a beautiful, true life film about one specific period, in 2008-9, in the never ending devastation of Gaza and Palestine. Through the use of multiple perspectives you are able to view the daily life and reality of the prisoners of the refugee camp known as Gaza. This film really helped me begin to understand the steadfastness that the people of Palestine feel against Israel. They are steadfast because they are subjected to daily, illogical, unprovoked, attacks and abuses. Children are arrested or shot in the head by Israeli soldiers for throwing rocks. Chemical weapons are used to debilitate entire houses full of people, not just for the day, but for their entire lives. This is done to them by a group of people who moved on to someone else’s land and are not attempting to find a middle ground. I know it was not only the Israeli’s who carried out the settlement, it was a great complicated web of decisions by larger powers, but the Israeli government is continuing its was crimes against Palestine even with those powers now encouraging them to stop. This film helps bring the reality that media and the cultural powers ignore.
Being gay in Egypt
There is a tremendous amount of risk being openly gay in most countries, but exponentially more in some. One of the most romatacized countries from the eyes of US Americans, Jamaica, is one of the most deadly places for queer people. This so called paradise is a place of execution if alternate sexualities are revealed. The middle east, is another region that is extremely dangerous to be openly queer. People are stripped of their dignity, social standing, excommunicated from their family and religion, and often killed. There is blame upon the queer person that they chose their orientation and a mentality, that it is a life event that created this, so it may be able to be undone. In an article I found on OUTIMPACT.COM, a young Muslim man from Egypt writes about being gay. He states that the gay culture moves just beneath the surface of mainstream culture, just as many marginalized groups feel they do. The suffering of the oppressed and shamed is always present in a culture, the racism, homeless, jobless, and sexual minorities.
He used to belong to the group Muslim Brotherhood, who has a tumultuous and mixed infamous reputation, being a grouped that began with righteous ideals and has strayed too far in to the dark of politics, What is Muslim Brotherhood, CNN; Muslim Brotherhood English website
The young man speaks about how he has been coached by his THERAPIST to not tell his family. Something that is unusual in this country, at least usually in the US we have a goal to eventually come out to our families. He has been told to keep it under wraps, “because there is a chance it may change,” and he doesn’t want to be ostracized from his family. He believes that he is gay because of the lack of a paternal figure in his life. On the same hand, he does not want to move to a place with greater freedom for homosexuals. He stands on the grounds that he should not be forced to leave the country he loves because he is gay.
I find this interview sad and haunting. His life is similar, yet so far away from the more privileged US gay rights movement. I know that being queer is still a danger in our society, resulting in beatings, and death, but we have more freedom. We have a GAy RIghts Movement. We are seen as humans and in general we believe we are born this way, and not thanks to Lady Gaga. We have parades and pride events. We build families and have lasting relationships, not just a shadow culture filled with insecurity and internal hate and prejudice. This young man believes it is his life experienced that shaped his sexuality, and that he may one day change. His culture has put the burden of his identity upon him. He is committing an ultimate sin against his culture and religion and it is his fault. He does not have a cultural movement around him to say, “no, you deserve rights, too! You are perfect just as you are!”
Read the interview and see the world from his eyes for just a moment…
Coach loves to hate
I will let this man speak for himself. He is well spoken, calm and eloquent. His elloquence brings more fear to my heart, that a well educated, and well spoken man can spew such golden covered hatred, its not surprising, i’m just used to hearing the rhetoric from politicians, not the everyday Joe. I wonder if he has forgotten that the bible he quotes for citing homosexuality as a sin has also been used to discriminate and enslave entire races of people, including his. It is always astonishing when human’s take the voice of God. He conveniently forgets the well known passage to love thy neighbor, and do unto other’s, as well as not using your own freedom to to harm; selective quotes and memory can be a sharp persuader.
In psychology, specifically Jungian psychology, we might ask him to examine what it is in his shadow Self that is causing such intense hatred. Humans see the things in others we dislike the most vehemently in ourselves. A lot of self reflection is necessary for a many who states peace but preaches hate.
http://www.hrc.org/blog/entry/cornhuskers-coach-stands-by-his-discriminatory-views
Broken Promises in Puerto Rico
Public degradation of LGBT community continues in Puerto Rico.
This is specifically relevant to this blog because of the reference in Queer Latinidad by Juana Rodriguez to the disproportionate number of Puerto Rican immigrants and natives that were infected with HIV in the epidemic. Some of the reasons of the reasons for this can be attributed to the discrimination and blame the LGBT Puerto Ricans experience in their own culture.
http://www.glaad.org/blog/vow-twice-broken-puerto-rican-show-promotes-anti-lgbt-messages-again
The article above shows the public degradation of LGBT community that continues in Puerto Rico even after a very public promise to change these ways, which an be read here:
Invisible Children
“INVISIBLE CHILDREN USES FILM, CREATIVITY AND SOCIAL ACTION TO END THE USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS IN JOSEPH KONY’S REBEL WAR AND RESTORE LRA-AFFECTED COMMUNITIES IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA TO PEACE AND PROSPERITY.”
Invisible Children, Film & Political Movement
This film is an attempt to bring attention and action against Joseph Kony and his Lords Resistance Army committing horrendous human rights violations in the countries of Uganda, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The LRA is in the practice of recruiting children to be child soldiers, believed to be between 60,000-100,000 recruited. The armed conflict has been occurring for twenty years. There is a history of the conflict on the website explaining how a group of rebels standing up for their own became the oppressors. The history of the conflict
Thanks to this movie, international efforts have been made to raise money and awareness and call upon the United Nations to take action. Technology and people have been banded together to create a system of tracking the movement of the Lords Resistance Army that is broadcast over radio to local towns in central Africa. This is meant to help inform the residents as soon as possible of the movements of the LRA to attempt to dimish the damage they cause, possibly giving people time to prepare and hide. LRA Tracker
Corrective Rape!
This article from BBC Corrective Rape, South Africa posted June 29, 2011 tells yet another story of women being brutally raped, either at knife point, or while being stabbed. The article explains that this is believed to be done in order to “correct” their sexual orientation. They site traditional patriarchal beliefs as a root cause for the continued acceptance and lack of investigation in to these crimes. They say that males have a resentment toward the more masculine presenting lesbian women because, “they are stealing their girlfriends.” They mention a specific number of cases that are known to be orientation related, but also mention that 50,000 rapes occur every year in South Africa and orientation is not noted, making it unknown how many of these specific types of cases their are. It is evident that most of these cases go unsolved. There was an extremely violent prominent case that did go to trial and convicted two of four gang rapists. This case where a South African lesbian woman was stoned, stabbed 25 times in the face, and gang raped by four men, caught the media attention and began a task force against gay and lesbian rape: Task force against gay rape. What makes the whole thing even more sad, as if it could get worse is that South Africa is just one of a few countries that have legalized gay marriage!
This pattern of thought and stereotype is not new. There is the infamous patriarchally inspired phrase regarding women who were raped, “She was asking for it [fill in the blank],” *because she was wearing too short of a skirt, * she was flirting with me, *she had already turned me on too far, * her saying no really meant yes. A woman very dear to me was once asked by her 50’s bred father what she did to deserve the beating her husband gave her.
When you add the ego crushing idea that a woman might not actually WANT to sleep with a man, that she doesn’t need him in her bed, well that is just unacceptable. I don’t know how many times I have heard from our liberal California boys, “she just needs to find the right man,” “she hasn’t been done right,” as if the right male partner will turn off the lesbian switch in her brain. Its disgraceful, tragic! With the addition of an unstable government, patriarchally extreme violence, guerrilla mentality, and unenforced equality laws, you get this practice of acting out all the shitty phraseology of insecure Californian boys to create an unchecked massacre of women.
I have experienced the entitled attitudes of men over lesbians. Lesbian erotica has been so extremely commercialized, many men participate in the ideology that two women together are simply waiting for a male to enter and fill the gap, so to speak. My girlfriend and I, just the other weekend, were told by a man that we were so sexy together, and that he was European, so he could say that. He then proceeded to watch us from about two feet away for at least an hour. (This was a tiny bar, not much space to escape and we were committed to staying for a friend). This is not ok. This is a violation! I understand the creation of fantasy, but to feel that he had the right and tell us that we had now become his fantasy, that we were there for his pleasure is degrading and devaluing. We were not two people in love to him, we had become a porn. I recognize that this might be the case for any couple canoodling in a bar, but most people have the respect to not inform them of this or to stare because it is there right as the higher up in the social hierarchy, white, male, european.
There is are many international organizations that bring awareness and power to women who have experienced violence, rape, or any other type of degradation at the hands of the patriarchal culture. Take Back The Night is one of these that is international and is meant to be a symbol of hope that women everywhere may enter the night without fear, with hope, and with support. I hope this for the women of South Africa, I hope that South Africa begins taking care of is margined marginalized women and men, and upholding the laws they committed to in their constitution.
Margins Of The Margins 