The People's Record

Marriage is great, but many LGBTQ PoC need job safety
April 11, 2013

As the Supreme Court weighed arguments on same-sex marriage, Chief Justice John Roberts wondered aloud from the bench whether action on the issue by the court was necessary, because “politicians are falling all over themselves” to bring the legal rights of gay and lesbian Americans in line with those of everyone else. If only this were true. In up to 34 states it’s still legal for employers to deny jobs to citizens simply because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

The lack of legal protections in two-thirds of the states for members of the LGBT community means that more people live in poverty and have a harder time making it simply because their rights aren’t on an equal footing with other Americans. This is even more the case for LGBT women and people of color, where employment discrimination fuels an even broader economic crisis.

But these hardships can be rolled away, and we need not wait for members of Congress to finish “falling all over themselves” to make it happen. As a report released earlier this week by a coalition of non-discrimination organizations lays out, President Obama can take unilateral action right now to help more LGBT Americans secure jobs, improve living standards and live out their dreams.

As Tico Almeida, president of Freedom to Work, said to me recently, “Hopefully 2013 will be the year that President Obama fulfills his written 2008 campaign promise and signs an employment non-discrimination executive order.” A Freedom to Work online petition already has over a 185,000 signatures pressing the president to do just that.

The case for doing so is persuasive and the numbers are staggering. Contrary to the aspirational images wealthy white men in popular media, such as the gay-millionaire couple on NBC’s hit-comedy “The New Normal” or the upwardly mobile denizens of “Will & Grace,” LGBT Americans are more likely to be poor and less educated than their peers, and come from communities that have been historically, economically marginalized. More than half of LGBT people in the U.S. are women, and black Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos make up a greater proportion of those identifying as LGBT than do whites.

According to a Gallup Survey last year, LGBT Americans are 30 percent more likely to have low-income jobs than the general population. Correspondingly, LGBT Americans are less likely to have high paying jobs than workers as a whole, and have a greater sense of dissatisfaction with their living standards as a result.

Furthermore, lower levels of education, fed by the open hostility that many LGBT youth grapple with in school, creates yet another economic obstacle for the community. LGBT Americans have lower levels of education than the overall population.

The bottom line is that employment non discrimination measures are required. Too many people neither can get nor keep good jobs without them.

According to a report by the Center for American Progress, as many as two out of five gay and lesbian workers “have experienced some form of discrimination on the job” with up to one out of five of these having been “fired for their sexual orientation.”

For transgender workers, these astounding numbers become astronomical. Nine out of 10 transgender employees have encountered “some form of harassment or mistreatment” at work with almost half of those who encountered difficulty on the job reporting extreme hardship, such as losing employment “due to gender-identity discrimination.”

Extreme bigotry has dire economic consequences. In certain cities, as Queers for Economic Justice points out, the unemployment rate of the transgender community can be up to seven times higher than that of the muncipality as a whole.

Though the cruel truth is that all of this is perfectly legal, the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t think it should be. Public support for non-discrimination is 20 points higher than that for gay marriage, but you wouldn’t know it from the way things are moving in Washington.

A bill to end employment discrimination in all 50 states has been introduced in almost every Congress for the past two decades, but has never passed. Last year the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) received a hearing in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee but not a vote—not in the committee, the Senate itself nor the full Congress.

Full article

Missouri man arrested at hospital for refusing to leave gay partner
April 11, 2013

A gay man was arrested at a hospital in Missouri this week when he refused to leave the bedside of his partner, and now a restraining order is preventing him from any type of visitation.

Roger Gorley told WDAF that even though he has power of attorney to handle his partner’s affairs, a family member asked him to leave when he visited Research Medical Center in Kansas City on Tuesday.

Gorley said he refused to leave his partner Allen’s bedside, and that’s when security put him in handcuffs and escorted him from the building.

“I was not recognized as being the husband, I wasn’t recognized as being the partner,” Gorley explained.

He said the nurse refused to confirm that the couple shared power of attorney and made medical decision for each other. “She didn’t even bother to look it up, to check in to it,” the Lee’s Summit resident recalled.

In a 2010 memorandum, President Barack Obama ordered hospitals that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding to allow visitation rights for gay and lesbian partners.

Research Medical Center pretends that it does not discriminate based on sexual orientation: “We believe involving the family is an important part of the patient care process,” the hospital said in a statement. “And, the patient`s needs are always our first priority. When anyone becomes disruptive to providing the necessary patient care, we involve our security team to help calm the situation and to protect our patients and staff. If the situation continues to escalate, we have no choice but to request police assistance.”

Gorley cannot currently visit his partner at all due to a restraining order issued after his arrest on Tuesday.

Source

This upset me so much that I’m tearing up at work.

LGBT equality must go beyond marriage
March 27, 2013

It is undoubtedly unconstitutional to exclude any couple from the institution of marriage in the 21st century. Any justification for doing so relies on the Bible, an illegitimate basis for interpreting the Constitution, or on some false conception of what marriage and procreation actually are in America today (and possibly a false conception on what marriage and procreation ever were, in the history of humanity). We’re asking ourselves the wrong questions, though, if we think that asserting the unconstitutionality of a same sex marriage ban is the same thing as fighting for a more just, equal, and free world.

Whether you agree with Catharine MacKinnon that a ban on same sex marriage is really just sex discrimination (Rick can’t marry John because Rick is a man; Rick could marry John if Rick was a woman), or that sexual orientation should be a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause in its own right, meaning that the government must have a narrowly tailored compelling interest in distinguishing based on sexual orientation, or that even without being a suspect class, distinguishing couples on the basis of sexual orientation fails even a rational basis test because there is no reasonable justification for the distinction (as Massachusetts’ high court found in Goodridge), DOMA’s unconstitutionality seems obvious. The same Constitution, however, purportedly ended slavery in the 1860s and segregation in the 1950s. But walk through any prison or down any urban block in America and you won’t be convinced those holdings led to racial equality.

The right to marry has been called the civil rights issue of our era, but we should be disturbed by this, and ashamed that in an era of economic inequality rivaling only the booming ‘20s right before the crash, an era when the resources of entire continents are extracted for the enjoyment of a tiny handful of the super rich elsewhere, that the civil rights battle of our time is to gain entry for gay men and lesbians into an institution originally meant to protect wealth, social structure, and male dominance.

As Michael Warner argues in his book The Trouble With Normal, the gay rights movement has lost the transformative vision held by the Stonewall Inn patrons of the late 1960s—drag queens, queers, male prostitutes, and homeless youth who wanted not to assimilate to the oppressive and homophobic mainstream culture but to be left alone by the NYPD—or the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) activists of the 1980s, who wanted not compromise, rhetoric, or meaningless reform, but a revolution in the way the government, the healthcare industry, and society in general understood and addressed the AIDS pandemic and its victims.

Queer communities, despised by mainstream culture with their radical tolerance, their embrace of stigma and their rejection of repressive societal norms, have much to teach society. The cultural and sexual revolution embodied by the Stonewall riots, in which gay pride meant refusing to assimilate, refusing to have the right kind of sex with the right kind of people at the right time and in the right place, refusing to marry and have children and move to the suburbs and quiet down, and especially refusing to go to Washington in a suit and ask for permission to do so, has been corporatized and sanitized.

Now, the “movement” is nothing more than a distraction from the extreme inequality and injustice experienced by the gay and transgender homeless youth, who make up 40 percent of all homeless youth, 58 percent of whom are sexually assaulted (as opposed to 33 percent of their straight counterparts), and 62 percent of whom commit suicide (as opposed to 29 percent of their heterosexual peers). It is also a distraction from the inequality and injustice felt by trans people and AIDS patients, who still struggle to find employment, healthcare, housing, physical safety, and acceptance.

To me, the struggle for gay marriage feels like a cop-out, an admission that this is the best we can or should want. Of course the Supreme Court should strike down DOMA as unconstitutional. But we should not fail to recognize that it is merely a struggle for formal equality for white, wealthy, well-behaved gays and lesbians and not a transformative movement for a better world. When the Supreme Court issues its decision announcing the Constitutional right to marry for all, as I believe it will, we should not celebrate too hard for too long. We should get back, as quickly as possible, to fighting for a fairer, queerer, more tolerant and less well-behaved world.

- The Lone Pamphleteer

Interest in ethnic studies jumps after Arizona ban, underground Chicano libraries begin to pop up
March 24, 2013

Arizona lawmakers passed a law to dismantle a Mexican American studies program in Tucson schools, but the legislation has had an unintended effect: The controversy is renewing interest in the state and nationwide in ethnic studies and Chicano and Latino literature.

Some Tucson students have found new ways to study the subject while receiving college credit to boot. Others who had no interest on the topic say they are now drawn to the material.

“Underground” libraries with Chicano literature are popping up across the Southwest and are set to open soon in unexpected places such as Milwaukee and Louisville.

“I guess the irony is … that we have banded together and created a new civil rights movement, a renaissance in Latino literature. Now there are people in Louisville, Ky., who will be enjoying Chicano literature,” said Tony Diaz.

Diaz heads Librotraficante, a group that raises money to buy books and open libraries to keep Mexican American studies alive. The state ban was the impetus for Librotraficante — whose name is Spanish for “book smuggler.”

A federal judge this month upheld the law banning the program, which critics said sowed discontent and promoted resentment against non-Latinos. Supporters said the program focused on long-neglected aspects of American history and inspired Latino students to excel in school. The supporters said they would appeal the ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Facing financial penalties if they continued the program in defiance of the new state law, trustees of the Tucson Unified School District killed the program last year.

Before the ban, interest in ethnic studies was minimal across the nation, says Sean Arce, who used to head the program.

“After the ban it really has grown exponentially,” he said.

Arce, who was dismissed when the program was discontinued a year ago, says he’s now in demand as a speaker, receiving invitations from various colleges — including Harvard and UCLA — to talk about the importance of ethnic studies. He said a few urban school districts have contacted him about consulting and collaborating on building a curriculum similar to the one outlawed in Tucson.

“We are happy and fortunate to collaborate with these folks because it really is a national issue,” Arce said. “It’s because Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic.”

Raquel Velasquez, a student at Prescott College in Prescott, Ariz., is among the students who say the controversy over the program has drawn them to ethnic studies.

“It was only until it was banned that I really took this seriously and recognized the need,” said Velasquez, a 19-year-old originally from Tucson. She is one of 14 students at Prescott College taking a pedagogy class to help train them to become ethnic studies teachers.

Curtis Acosta, who used to teach mostly Mexican American studies at Tucson High Magnet School and now is relegated to teaching a mainstream English curriculum, says he now looks forward to Sundays. That’s when he teaches a Chicano literature class at John Valenzuela Youth Center in South Tucson.

The idea for a course outside the confines of the school district came to him right before the Mexican American studies program was done away with in his school.

“I couldn’t sit back and watch that happen,” Acosta said. “So right away, the wheels were in motion. I had to do something.”

Now 10 students are enrolled in the Chicano literature class, and Prescott College offers college credit for those enrolled. Acosta and his colleagues also raised enough money to offset all of the students’ tuition costs.

Bianca Sierra said Acosta’s class may be one of the few silver linings to the ban. The 18-year-old is a senior at University High School in Tucson, where Mexican American studies was never offered. Although she had taken a slew of Advanced Placement courses, she’d never had the opportunity to attend a class on Chicano literature.

She says she likes her Sunday class better than her classes at school because she can relate to its subject matter on a personal level. For example, books she reads in her Chicano literature class have characters with names similar to those of her mother and grandmother or mention foods similar to those prepared in her home.

“You can put yourself in their shoes and relate to it more,” she said.

She also enjoys the relaxed atmosphere and format of her Sunday literature class. Instead of simply listening to the teacher lecture, the students gather in a circle and, along with Acosta, discuss and debate the subject matter.

“I like it because it makes me feel more invested in it, because they are asking you, ‘What is your opinion?’ I was never asked what my opinion was on an issue [in class]. You’re just not asked that in regular school,” she said.

Source
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Watch El Librotraficante talk about bringing truckloads of banned Latino history & literature books back into Arizona on Democracy Now here. 

Arizona’s law banning Mexican-American studies curriculum is constitutional, judge rules
March 11, 2013

A court upheld most provisions of an Arizona state law used to prohibit a controversial Mexican-American Studies curriculum in Tucson on Friday.

The ruling dealt a blow to supporters of the suspended classes, who had hoped the courts would overturn a 2010 law championed by Arizona conservatives determined to shut down the unconventional courses.

“I was really surprised at the decision,” Jose Gonzalez, a former teacher of Tucson’s suspended Mexican-American Studies classes, told The Huffington Post. “But as a student and teacher of history, I know in civil rights cases like this there’s always setbacks.”

The experimental Tucson curriculum was offered to students in different forms in some of the local elementary, middle and high schools. It emphasized critical thinking and focused on Mexican-American literature and perspectives. Supporters lauded the program, pointing to increased graduation rates, high student achievement and a state-commissioned independent audit that recommended expanding the classes.

But conservative opponents accused the teachers of encouraging students to adopt left-wing ideas and resent white people, a charge the teachers deny. Aiming squarely at Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies program, the Arizona legislature passed HB 2281 — a law banning courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, foster racial resentment, are designed for students of a particular ethnic group or that advocate ethnic solidarity.

Federal Judge Wallace Tashima said the plaintiffs failed to show the law was too vague, broad or discriminatory, or that it violated students’ first amendment rights.

The news wasn’t all bad for supporters of the suspended classes. Tashima ruled that the section of the law prohibiting courses tailored to serve students of a particular ethnicity was unconstitutional.

Originally filed in October of 2010 on behalf of the program’s former teachers, who lost standing because they are public employees, the case is currently brought by former Mexican-American Studies student Nicholas Dominguez and his mother Margarita Dominguez. They will likely appeal the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals within the next 30 days, their lawyer Richard Martinez told The Huffington Post.

“This case is not over,” Martinez said. “It’s not only important to Arizona, but to the country as a whole that this statute be addressed.”

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne began a campaign to eliminate the Mexican-American Studies program from Tucson Unified School District in 2006, when he was serving as the state’s Superintendent of Public Education.

Angered that Mexican-American civil rights leader Dolores Huerta had said that “Republicans hate Latinos” in a speech to Tucson students, Horne sent Deputy Superintendent Margaret Dugan, a Latina Republican, to give an alternate view. But the intellectual exercise turned confrontational when students, who said they were not allowed to ask Dugan questions, sealed their mouths with tape and walked out of the assembly room.

“As superintendent of schools, I have visited over 1,000 schools and I’ve never seen students be disrespectful to a teacher in that way,” Horne said in an interview last year.

The final product of his efforts was House Bill 2281, which then-State Sen. John Huppenthal (R) helped pilot through the Arizona legislature. Huppenthal, who succeeded Horne as state superintendent of schools, then found Tucson out of compliance with the new law and ordered the district to shut Mexican-American Studies down or lose 10 percent of its annual funding — some $14 million over the fiscal year. In January of 2012, the school board complied, voting 4 to 1 to discontinue the classes.

The decision drew national attention as administrators plucked Latino literature that once belonged to the curriculum from classrooms, explicitly banning seven titles from instruction.

Tashima wrote in Friday’s ruling that Horne’s anti-Mexican-American Studies zeal bordered on discrimination.

“This single-minded focus on terminating the MAS (Mexican-American Studies) program, along with Horne’s decision not to issue findings against other ethnic studies programs, is at least suggestive of discriminatory intent,” Tashima wrote.

But the federal judge stopped short of invalidating the law on those grounds.

“Although some aspects of the record may be viewed to spark suspicion that the Latino population has been improperly targeted, on the whole, the evidence indicates that Defendants targeted the MAS program, not Latino students, teachers or community members who participated in the program,” the judge wrote in the ruling.

Not everyone agrees.

Writer and activist Tony Diaz — who along with independent journalist Liana Lopez and multimedia artist Bryan Parras launched a “librotraficante” caravan to “smuggle” books banned from Tucson classrooms into Arizona — said the court had “failed our youth, our culture and freedom of speech” by upholding the Arizona ethnic studies law.

“But we remain inspired by the youth of Tucson, the teachers, the families, the activists who will appeal this unjust ruling and continue the struggle to the Supreme Court,” Diaz said.

Source
Photo: Save Ethnic Studies by Julio Salgado

Georgia man with intellectual disability scheduled to be put to death on Tuesday
February 18, 2013

A Georgia prison inmate found by doctors to have a mild intellectual disability is scheduled to receive lethal injection on Tuesday, despite constitutional protections that exist to prohibit the execution of the mentally disabled.

More than 20 years after being convicted of murdering a fellow inmate while already behind bars, Warren Hill, 52, is slated to be killed on Tuesday. Now with only hours left to live, attorneys for Mr. Hill and human rights activists are demanding a last-minute intervention.

Back in 1991, the judge overseeing the murder case against Mr. Hill said the defendant was “mentally retarded” by a“preponderance of the evidence,” contradicting testimonies from physicians who examined the inmate. Decades later, though, those doctors who examined Hill say they acted in too much of a hurry to reach that conclusion and today agree that the inmate is unfit for execution.

“The whole process, including my evaluation of Mr. Hill, was rushed … my previous conclusions about Mr Hill’s mental health status were unreliable because of my lack of experience at the time,” one of the doctors, neuropsychiatrist Thomas Sachy, now claims.

All three physicians that gave their original evaluation 12 years ago say today that their decision was rushed and ill-conceived, reports The Guardian. Additionally, the jurors involved in his murder trial and the family of the man he was convicted of killing while in prison has stated that they would not like to see Hill put to death.

“Several jurors who sat on Warren’s original jury have since stated under oath that they would have sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole had that been an option at the time of his 1991 trial, particularly after learning of the evidence of his intellectual disability and history of childhood abuse,” Amnesty International reported last year.

Brian Kammer, a Georgia lawyer who has worked close to the case, tells the Guardian that with the latest testimonies in the case, “There is now no daylight between any of the experts who have evaluated Mr Hill – in an innocence context this would now be a clear case for exoneration.”

Mr. Hill was expected to be killed last July, but a last minute hold was granted to reassess the method of execution only an hour-and-a-half before he was scheduled to die. Now just a few months later, the state of Georgia is once again readying to make the kill.

One day before he is scheduled to die, Judge Thomas Wilson said on Monday that he would not consider a request for habeas relief, essentially leaving just the US Supreme Court as the only available option to save him from execution. Attorneys for Mr. Hill had asked Judge Wilson to see testimonies from the doctors who initially examined the inmate, but according to the Associated Press, he has refused it on the basis that the request for reconsideration is procedurally barred and that the new evidence doesn’t establish a miscarriage of justice.

Attorneys for Mr. Hill have submitted a petition with the US Supreme Court, asking for intervention due to the 2002 federal ruling that found executing a person considered “mentally disabled” was in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution: the provision that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. In lieu of federal law, however, individual states can determine their own definition of “mental disability.”

Eric Jacobsen, a columnist for Huffington Post, says that the state-wide requirement for what is and isn’t mental disability in Georgia is “a powerful legal concept that does not translate into the way individuals are assessed to determine if they have an intellectual disability. So, while Georgia never contested Mr. Hill’s intellectual disability or I.Q. of 70, he was not able to meet the burden of proof.”

In 2002, the Eleventh US Circuit Court of Appeals said they couldn’t touch the case because national law ”mandates that this federal court leave the Georgia Supreme Court decision alone — even if we believe it incorrect or unwise.”

Source

Note: To address people with disabilities with dignity & respect, I’ve changed all the “retarded” references to people first language - referring to the person and then their disability.

Calling someone a retard or saying something is retarded is ableist, derogatory, offensive & exclusive language. 

Many people use “mentally retarded” because it’s believed to be the official terminology for someone with a disability, but as of 2010, the phrase was removed from federal health, education & labor policies in what is known as Rosa’s Law. 

So… stop saying “retarded.” Ableism is discrimination. Thanks.

Uganda to officially pass ‘Kill the Gays’ bill
November 12, 2012

Uganda will officially pass the ‘Kill The Gays’ bill at the end of this year despite international criticism.

Speaker Rebecca Kadaga said the anti-gay bill will become law by December since most Ugandans ‘are demanding it’.

Referring to the law as a ‘Christmas gift’ to the population,  she spoke of ‘the serious threat’ posed by homosexuals.

The law will broaden the criminalization of same-sex relationships by dividing homosexuality into two categories; aggravated homosexuality and the offense of homosexuality.

‘Aggravated homosexuality’ is defined as gay acts committed by parents or authority figures, HIV-positive people, pedophiles and repeat offenders. If convicted, they will face the death penalty.

The ‘offense of homosexuality’ includes same-sex sexual acts or being in a gay relationship, and will be prosecuted by life imprisonment.

Originally put to government in 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill had been temporarily shelved because of international criticism.

Several European countries have threatened to cut aid to Uganda if it passes, with the UK government warning Uganda it would face severe reductions in financial help.

Uganda lawmaker Atim Ogwal Cecilia Barbara has even suggested there should be a continent-wide ban on homosexuality, saying all African gay people should be jailed for life.

Gay rights activist David Kato was murdered in Uganda in January 2011 shortly after a local newspaper published images of him and other gay people under a headline urging readers to ‘hang them.’

Despite this, Uganda’s LGBT community held a weekend of gay pride events this summer.

According to a 2010 survey by The Pew Research Center, homosexuality is morally unacceptable to 89% of Ugandans.

Source

Trans prisoners fight abuse & unfair treatment behind bars
November 12, 2012

“Imagine being told, ‘You have no right to be who you are,’ ” says Faith Phillips, remarking on her first days in prison. The transition was even harder for Phillips than it is for most prisoners: Phillips, a transgender (trans) woman, was held in a men’s prison.

According to recent studies, 16-33 percent of trans people have spent time behind bars, compared with less than 4 percent of the general U.S. population. Another statistic provides a clue as to why: 26 percent of transgender people report being fired because of their gender identity. Forced into the underground economy, some enter prison for “survival crimes” such as sex work. Once inside, people who don’t conform to the gender regulations—both written and unwritten—face a form of punishment far harsher than their original sentences.

Growing up in California’s San Bernardino County, Phillips was abused by her transphobic father and was one of the few people of color in her community. When she landed in central California’s Avenal State Prison at 21, she witnessed the same ill treatment of trans people she’d experienced as a child. So, in March 2008, when a queer prisoner was threatened with a transfer to a ward where he knew he’d be unsafe, she staged a protest, refusing to leave the prison yard when the correctional officers (COs) announced that it was time.

“Might as well take me to the hole, because I’m not moving,” she remembers telling the COs. “Then the whole queer community said, ‘We’re going to the hole, too.’ ” Night fell. The temperature dropped. Prisoners who were inside managed to push blankets out to the protestors underneath a doorway. Eventually, the transfer of the at-risk prisoner was cancelled.

Phillips and her fellow prison-yard occupiers also came up with a list of demands that included HIV and sex education, the return of appropriately gendered clothes that had been taken from them, an end to harassment by staff, and a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex support group. The prison’s warden agreed to their demands (apart from the clothing) after a sympathetic captain pled their case.

In retribution for her activism, Phillips says, she was put through a series of prison transfers, drugged and sent to solitary confinement. She claims prison administrators threatened, “If you ever think about doing this again, we’ll bury you.” But Phillips soon became an information collector for the San Francisco-based Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project(TGIJP), one of a handful of trans prisoner support organizations that documents abuses inside prisons.

While marriage and military enlistment have monopolized the mainstream gay rights agenda, a trans/queer prisoner justice movement has been quietly gaining momentum. But the movement’s critique of the prison system often brings it into conflict with LGBT rights groups that advocate for hate-crime legislation or other strategies that rely on police to secure justice for queer people. Currently, only 12 states include gender identity or expression in their hate crime laws. When New York State was considering legislation that would have extended hate crimes statutes to transgender people, groups representing queer people of color, such as theAudre Lorde Project, opposed the bill on the grounds that it gave “a deeply flawed, transphobic, and racist criminal legal system” the discretion to impose longer sentences.”

Wesley Ware, director of the New Orleans-based project BreakOUT!, which organizes queer youth around prison issues, says that his group is focused on changing the conversation from hate-crime legislation to how “the police are terrorizing black transgender women on the street, every single day.” This July, BreakOUT! helped to secure a landmark legal decree from the Department of Justice mandating trans-sensitive practices at the notoriously discriminatory New Orleans Police Department. If a federal judge approves the decree, the NOPD could not legally stop people based on sexual orientation or gender, would have to conduct same-gender searches according to the subject’s gender identity and would have to refer to trans people by their preferred names and gender pronouns.

Queer-rights groups also successfully lobbied for California’s Gender Non-Discrimination Act (AB 887), which went into effect in January and includes provisions that may translate into more livable conditions for trans prisoners. Among other things, the act’s clause regarding “public accommodations” has meant that more trans people are now held at more transfriendly prisons. But problems remain. Two trans women went on a hunger strike in September to protest their unfair treatment in a San Diego prison.

Though legislative reforms like AB 887 may bring material improvements, TGIJP remains focused on uniting queer prisoners and allies to support each other and challenge the prisonindustrial complex as a whole. Now out of prison, Phillips is pursuing a law degree and continues to organize with TGIJP in Los Angeles. She and other authors have put out the guidebook Surviving Prison in California: Advice by and for Transgender Women. Along with pointers on how to get HIV treatment, the authors stress that community power is one of the best ways to stay safe. “If [the police] can divide us into different groups … then we are unable, as a united community, to fight the real enemy… the corrupt system that defiles and oppresses us as human beings.”

Source

For transgendered soldiers, Dont’ Ask Don’t Tell carries on
October 29, 2012

On an afternoon in January 1998, Monica Helms walked into a building in Phoenix, Arizona, where she lay her reapplication papers on the counter in front of her and waited for the reaction she knew was coming.

She had been a member of her hometown’s chapter of the United States Submarine Veterans since around 1980, but not under the name “Monica.” Back when she joined, she’d been a man, as all submariners had been at the time, and was unconditionally accepted into a select group within the military. But now, dressing full-time as a woman and six months into the process of becoming physically female, this routine reapplication quickly became more complicated.

The chapter president called up the national organization, which bounced the problem right back to him, saying it was a local issue. So the Phoenix group of about a dozen tried to push her into a generic veterans’ organization for women. She said no. They asked if they could list her as her former name, with “Monica” in parentheses. No. 

After months of this, she called the national chairman, who said that if Phoenix wouldn’t let her back in, she could rejoin as an at-large member; after all, the only two requirements for admission were an honorable discharge and prior work on a submarine. Monica registered and asked her hometown group to vote on whether they wanted to see her at meetings. They did.

U.S. Submarine Veterans is now a coed group, and Monica, 61, swells with pride when she says she was the first woman to join. She only wishes this kind of inclusion were the norm for transgender people who are currently serving in the armed forces.

***

Monica is the president of a tiny organization called Transgender Veterans of America. The group has made receiving medical care at veterans organizations a much more pleasant experience for many transgender vets, but the situation for their active-duty counterparts remains the same — if the military finds out, you’re gone.

The armed forces were applauded for promoting equality when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed in 2010. But transgender military members were still excluded, and now that the gay community has achieved equality in the armed forces, they feel that their previous momentum has slowed.

There are around 140,000 transgender veterans in the U.S., says Dr. Gary Gates of the Williams Institute, a research organization dedicated to law and public policy in sexual orientation and gender identity. He estimates that there are roughly 700,000 transgender people in the country, and a recent National Transgender Discrimination Survey showed that 20 percent of them have been a part of the military at some point. (In contrast, only 10 percent of the general population has served.)

There are two general reasons why the military won’t allow transgender people to serve, says Norman Spack of Boston Children’s Hospital, where he cofounded the gender management service clinic, the first to treat pubescent transgender people in the Western hemisphere. First, members of the military don’t want to be in a professional environment with anyone who is gender variant. Second, they don’t know how to classify a transgender person with respect to housing, rooming, or whatever else.Despite this, if the U.S. armed forces discover a transgender individual in their ranks, he or she is dishonorably discharged — in contrast with the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, and other nations where they can serve freely. Being transgender, according to the U.S. military, is a psychological disorder, and it renders an individual unfit for service.

Which is to say that many military members are afraid of what they don’t understand.

“Many people don’t necessarily come from very large cities or other parts of the country where there will not just be more understanding, but more tolerance of this sort of thing,” Spack said.

The struggle for equal rights for the transgender community in the armed forces will inevitably be compared to the effort to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but there are key differences.

A main concern for transgender veterans is that they simply don’t have enough numbers to drive a policy change. It’s estimated that transgender people make up 0.6 percent of the 21.8 million US veterans. That’s barely one in 200.

While overcoming the math may turn out to be a major obstacle, the transgender community also has a huge advantage that the gay community did not — they don’t have to deal with Congress. The policy barring transgender individuals from the armed forces is just that; a policy, not a law.

But Michael Segal, a neurologist who is also heavily involved with the military through the Advocates for ROTC program, cautions that a 180 degree change might not be the way to go.

“Even a lot of transgender people will say that they don’t think someone who’s actively going through a transition at that time should be in the military,” Segal said. “I don’t think you’re going to get the same pressure for an all-or-nothing thing.”

Whether or not the fight is for a complete change of policy, though, the transgender community’s struggle for equal rights in the military may begin far away from the armed forces.

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Former Disney employee discriminated against for being Muslim; ‘modern-day Jim Crow’ bias

August 20, 2012

An ex-Disney employee filed a federal lawsuit Monday against her former employer, alleging she was discriminated against and harassed because of her Muslim beliefs.

Imane Boudlal, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who was born in Morocco, started working at the Storytellers Cafe at Disney’s Grand Californian hotel in Anaheim in April 2008.

Boudlal alleges she was subjected to ethnic insults such as “terrorist” and “camel” by co-workers and supervisors. Boudlal said she reported the harassment to supervisors, who acknowledged the problem but allegedly did not take any action.

Boudlal claims she got into a dispute with her supervisors in 2010 when she asked to wear a hijab, or headscarf traditionally worn by Muslim women, at work. After two months of considering the request, she was told she could not wear the head covering because it would violate Disney’s “look” policy, according to the lawsuit.

Boudlal says she offered to wear a hijab bearing colors matching her uniform or with a Disney logo, but her bosses instead suggested she work in a back area out of sight of restaurant patrons.

Boudlal says she was also given the opportunity to wear a large fedora-type hat on top of her hijab, and was fired when she refused those options.

Disney spokeswoman Suzi Brown said: “Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has a history of accommodating religious requests from cast members of all faiths.

We presented Ms. Boudlal with multiple options to accommodate her religious beliefs, as well as offered her several roles that would have allowed her to wear her own hijab. Unfortunately, she rejected all of our efforts and has since refused to come to work.”

In August 2010, Boudlal told City News Service that “I don’t keep rejecting (Disney’s proposals) for no reason. The problem is they don’t want an Islamic woman working at Disney.”

In a statement released after the lawsuit was filed, Boudlal said she was harassed before she started asking to wear a hijab.

“Disneyland calls itself the happiest place on earth, but I faced harassment as soon as I started working there,” she said. “It only got worse when I decided to wear a hijab. My journey towards wearing it couldn’t have been more American; it began at my naturalization ceremony. I realized that I had the freedom to be who I want and freely practice my religion. Neither Disney nor anyone else can take that from me.”

Boudlal also alleged Disney has a double standard with regard to its “look” policy, noting that some employees had tattoos and wore jewelry and hairstyles in violation of the work code. Christian employees were allowed to wear marks on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday, which would technically violate the policy, she said.

Boudlal is being represented by American Civil Liberties Union attorneys, who blasted Disney for the way the company handled the dispute.

“Had Imane been Princess Jasmine, a cartoon Muslim, Disney would not only have permitted her to wear a hijab, they would have exploited it,” said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU of Southern California.

“The film ‘Aladdin’ grossed over $200 million in revenues. But Disney’s tolerance of religious practices of Muslim women does not extend to real-life women,” he said. “Imane would have been acceptable to Disney only were she an animated character. This is not Mickey Mouse bigotry — it is cold and calculating religious intolerance unacceptable according to our laws and most cherished values.”

Another ACLU attorney, Anne Richardson, said: “At Disney, animated characters have more civil rights than the people who work there. This is modern day Jim Crow. Muslims who want to express their religion by wearing a headscarf have to work in the back, out of sight.”

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Dozens of people demonstrated outside the law courts in the Lebanese capital on Saturday to protest the use of anal “tests” on men suspected of homosexuality, which is a criminal offence in the Arab country.

The rally followed a July 28 police raid on a gay venue in a working class district of Beirut when 36 men were taken into custody and forced to undergo the examinations, reportedly to determine their sexual orientation.

Signs read, “Tests to prove homosexuality are against human rights” and “Isn’t a forced test considered rape?” 

Philippine college bans Muslim students from wearing hijab
August 5, 2012

The ban was ordered at the Pilar College in the mixed Muslim-Christian port city of Zamboanga. 

Head of the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos (NCMF) Mehol Sadain, along with local politician, have asked the college to reconsider its decision.

In an open letter to Pilar College Sadain wrote: “I am writing, not to argue, but to enlighten; and not to object, but to appeal for your kind reconsideration and compromise, in behalf of the hijab-wearing Muslimah enrolled in Pilar College.” 

Sadain added that wearing hijab was a “sign of modesty and obedience to God” and posed no threat to the educational institution’s teachings. 

“Pilar College should realize that while educational institutions can formulate their own policies, the same should not run counter to existing laws and state policies,” the NCMF head said. 

The college, run by the Congregation of the Religious of the Virgin Mary has defended its actions, saying that the core of its curriculum is based on Christianity. 

The complaint has reached the local city council, which asked the school to provide answers.

The school is believed to be the first in the mainly Catholic but largely tolerant Philippines to enforce an outright ban on wearing the hijab. 

More than 80 percent of the Philippines’ nearly 100 million population are Catholic, while Muslims form a large minority in the south of the country.

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Eagle Scouts send their medals back to Texas in protest
July 25, 2012 

Last Thursday, Martin Cizmar of Williamette, Oregon penned a letter to the Boy Scout bosses in Irving, Texas to voice his vehement opposition to their policy banning gay scouts and scout leaders. The Scouts early last week had officially reaffirmed their position after “a confidential two year review,” a position that has remained controversial since the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld it in 2000. Cizmar’s letter pinballed around social media, where I read it. It says, in part:

I am not gay. However, I cannot in good conscience hold this badge as long as BSA continues a policy of bigotry. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was acquainted with a number of gay scouts and scouters. They were all great men, loyal to the scout oath and motto and helpful to the movement. There is no fair reason why they should not be allowed to participate in scouting. I suspect you know this too.

I don’t want to be an eagle scout if a young man who is gay can’t be one too. Gentlemen, please do the right thing. 

Cizmar’s simple act of defiance lit a fire under several other Eagle Scouts and now the medals are beginning to pile up down there in Irving, Texas. There’s Christopher Baker: “It is a stain on the otherwise exceptional reputation of the Boy Scouts of America. You and the current leadership at the national level should ‘be prepared’ for significant fall-out from this decision.” There’s Leo A.P. Giannini: “I don’t want to have my son or daughter one day say to me, ‘Did you know you were a member when the Boy Scouts used to not allow gay people to join?’” There’s Peter Straub and Rob Tornoe and Matthew Hitchens, and the list is growing.  

The Scouts’ marketing logo is “Prepared for Life.” Really? How does fostering a peer group without a diversity of sexual orientations prepare young men for life? The Girl Scouts of America have given up their homophobic ways, but the Boy Scouts of America are swiftly becoming out of step with broad cultural shifts and its own elite may very well lead the charge to end the bigotry. It’s time for you high profile Eagle Scouts to start sending your medals back too. Steven Spielberg, we’re looking at you. When you’re ready, here’s the address.

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Florida groups protest Obama’s lack of action on LGBTQ discrimination at the work place.

June 26, 2012

GetEQUAL Florida and Students Working for Equal Rights (S.W.E.R.) plan to protest President Barack Obama during his visit to South Beach on Tuesday afternoon.

The groups are angry that Obama hasn’t signed an executive order ending workplace discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans.

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