1,500 rally for Mark Carson in NYC - It was New York City’s largest LGBT rally in years, according to organizers. On Monday at least 1,500 people showed up to honor the life of Mark Carson and make a stand against the hate that led to his death. Carson was an openly gay 32-year-old black man who was shot and killed over the weekend in what authorities are investigating as an anti-gay hate crime.

The randomness of Carson’s death has shocked the city’s LGBT community. “Mark is not going to die in vain. We are not going to get beat up in vain,” one rally participant told Mother Jones. “Gay rights, we’re still fighting for them, and the fight is not over. We need to protect each other.”

TW: Hate crime - Friends remember Mark Carson, black gay man shot & killed in NYC, as a ‘beautiful, fabulous gay man’
May 20, 2013

More than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil for Mark Carson, a 32-year-old gay black man who was shot and killed in Greenwich Village over the weekend. Carson’s death is being investigated by police as a hate crime after he was allegedly chased out of a restaurant by a man brandishing a gun and yelling homophobic slurs.

Carson’s friends and family shared their grief with the local press.

“I thought that kind of hate stuff was gone, but I see that it’s not,” the victim’s father, Mark Carson Sr., told the New York Post. “It’s simply ridiculous. People are what people are. They do what they do. You can’t knock down who people are.”

Carson’s brother, Michael Bumpars, told the New York Daily News described him as “a beautiful person…he was our foundation.”

Kay Allen, a friend of Carson’s for more than a decade,told the New York Times: “He was a proud gay man. A fabulous gay man.” She added that he loved going to the Village: “His spirit was too big for this city. He didn’t have a negative bone in his body.”

Carson’s violent death has come as a shock for many in New York City’s iconic West Village. The area was home to the infamous Stonewall riots, the event largely credited with sparking the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970’s. Blogger Joe.My.God. reported from last weekend’s rally and has photos from the event.

Thirty-three year old Elliot Morales has been arrested as a suspect in the crime.

Gothamist reports that Carson’s death was the fourth hate crime targeting a gay man in the last two weeks in Manhattan, and the 22nd anti-gay attack so far in New York City this year.

Source

The People’s Record Content Moderators
April 30, 2013

We’re trying to expand the number of mods posting content on Tumblr (and also on FB & Twitter, although those mods prolly won’t be topically specific) & I’d like some feedback on how best to organize that process?

Should we have mods accountable for covering certain topics? I don’t want to cram anyone in a corner and so many things overlap: racism, Black politics, and mass incarceration all are areas of interest to us, for instance, and all have unique content specific only to that topic but also overlap in many ways. Could anyone suggest a short list of topics broad enough to cover? Or would it be better if we didn’t specify content and just had more mods posting on everything? We’d like to be as inclusive as possible.

Here’s a start:

• The economy
• International social movements
• The environment
• War & empire
• Leftist philosophies, tactics, histories & quotes (covering Anarchist & Marxist politics – or should those be uniquely specified)
• All the politics related to identity with appropriate mods:

1. Womanist
2. Anti-racism
3. Gender/LGBTQ
4. Anti-colonialism
5. What are we potentially lacking here? Are these offensively general?
   

I’ll post the official request for mods tomorrow or Thursday but I’m just trying to figure out how to best organize it and how we can least-offensively cover these topics even more extensively and how many mods we should be looking to add. Basically, I’m looking for suggestions that can help me hone our direction before we try and stumble our way through this process.

Additionally, we’re always looking for original content submissions & other ideas to expand this media project. We’ve suggested topically based columns in the past, but interest in participating was lacking (understandably, its a lot of work). Keep in mind, we’re interested in spreading information related to resistant politics.

We can be reached with such ideas at: thepeoplesrec@gmail.com

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

Ealier in the week I went to an action after work, disrupting the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board meeting„ in support of equal benefits for the LGBTQ workers employed by  DART. The board recently voted to delay providing equal benefits. Here’s some text from the event-page on Facebook:

Dallas Area Rapid Transit has again delayed a vote on adding domestic partner benefits for its LGBT employees, this time to see how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on marriage equality.

Rightfully, as tax payers and members of the LGBT and ally community we are outraged!

Resource Center Dallas has promised to have speakers address the board at every single board meeting between now and the court ruling.

Please join us in a show of support for Resource Center Dallas, LGBT families and marriage equality at the DART board room (483 N. Field St.Dallas TX, 75202) Tuesday, April 9th at 6:30pm. Please wear red in support of equality. When one of our scheduled speakers addresses the board, we will all stand with them in a show of unity and strength.

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

I saw this on Facebook - hadn’t seen it on Tumblr yet so I wanted to share it. 

Source.

Homophobic drama on my sister’s Facebook page that I thought was worth sharing.

More than ten years ago, when I was a scared & closeted 13-year-old boy, I could have never imagined that my former-pastor, former-missionary, ex-marine dad whom I was terrified to identify my sexuality to would eventually come so far.

I’m not religious or anything but still love the sentiment and the way everyone (all political moderate-to-conservative conservatives in Texas, btw) responded. 

I “liked” the bigot’s responses for the passive-aggressive-irony. 

“A Facebook page is the internet equivalent of someone’s living room. When someone is nice enough to invite you into their living room, you don’t repay their kindness by taking a shit on their living room rug.” -My Dad

-Robert

dentonsocialists:

Our friends in Corpus just got their shirts in for the march. Check out their event page (and possibly get an awesome shirt too!) http://www.facebook.com/2012CorpusChristiMarriageEqualityMarchAndRally

More scandal for the catholic church: the top cardinal in the UK resigns after accusations surface of ‘inappropriate’ behavior with priests
February 25, 2013

On the same day as his last public blessing Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI confronted the threat of a fresh scandal within the church hierarchy, with Vatican officials informing him of new allegations that Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric had engaged in inappropriate behavior with priests.

In Britain, the accusations against Cardinal Keith O’Brien — head of the church in Scotland and one of this nation’s most strident opponents of gay rights — were escalating into a national furor. The controversy revolved around a report first published Saturday night on the Web site of Britain’s Observer newspaper, saying that four men — three priests and one former priest — had denounced O’Brien this month, accusing him of engaging in “inappropriate” and “intimate” behavior.

Through a spokesman, O’Brien denied the allegations and said he was seeking legal counsel.

If proven true, the accusations could rock the church at a highly sensitive time, highlighting a Vatican in crisis as its cardinals begin to gather in Rome to pick the pope’s successor after his surprise resignation this month.

The exact nature and timing of the alleged contact, which the Observer said was reported to the Vatican’s emissary in London a week before Benedict’s Feb. 11 resignation, were not spelled out. But one of the alleged victims said O’Brien had started a “relationship” with him in the 1980s that resulted in the need for long-term counseling. Another of the men said O’Brien had initiated “inappropriate contact” during nightly prayers, according to the paper.

Poised to join the coming conclave to elect a new pope, O’Brien missed Sunday Mass in his dioceses of St. Andrews and Edinburgh. His auxiliary, Bishop Stephen Robson, read a statement at the cathedral in Edinburgh, saying: “A number of allegations of inappropriate behavior have been made against the cardinal. The cardinal has sought legal advice and it would be inappropriate to comment at this time. There will be further statements in due course.” He added, according to the BBC, that it “is to the Lord that we turn to now in times of need.”

The Vatican declined to confirm details of the allegations against 74-year-old O’Brien, who was due to retire next month, saying only that Benedict had been informed of the “problem” on Sunday and the matter was now “in the hands” of the outgoing pope.

The allegations surfaced a week after the church became the focus of fresh leaks in the Italian news media, which cited an internal Vatican report as detailing the existence of a gay lobby inside the institution that was subject to outside blackmail. Responding to the reports, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State chided the media for what it called the “widespread distribution of often unverified, unverifiable or completely false news stories that cause serious damage to persons and institutions.”

In Britain, however, the Observer report was considered additionally explosive because of O’Brien’s public stance on homosexuality. Last year, O’Brien decried the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage here as a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right.” He has described homosexuality as immoral and was singled out by the London-based gay advocacy group Stonewall for a 2012 “bigot of the year” award.

“You have to understand the relationship between a bishop and a priest,” the paper quoted the man as saying. “At your ordination, you take a vow to be obedient to him. He’s more than your boss, more than the CEO of your company. He has immense power over you. . . . He can move you, freeze you out, bring you into the fold. . . .He controls every aspect of your life.”

The paper said the men recently reported their allegations to the Vatican emissary in London with the aid of an intermediary from their diocese in the week before the pope’s resignation. The move appeared pegged to O’Brien’s planned retirement next month. The men were demanding O’Brien’s immediate resignation and apparently went public in an effort to block the cardinal from taking part of the papal conclave.

Source

Breaking news as of this morning: he’s resigning because of the accusations. Because they’re true. 

redplebeian:

Israel’s Apartheid State

Sherry Wolf is a smart & entertaining, Brooklyn activist, speaker and writer. Wolf wrote the book Sexuality & Socialism (which I’ve read and enjoyed) as well as Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (which I haven’t read but maybe will one day). 

She’s a Jewish-American anti-zionist, strongly against imperialism and Israel’s apartheid state; she was an important organizer for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in New York City.

Here’s a link to the articles she has written for The Nation. Here is a link to the articles that she has written for Socialist Worker. Here is a link to her follow-able public Facebook profile (on which she is active, often-poignant and usually entertaining).

This talk is from the 2012 socialism conference (which Gracie & I were lucky enough  to be able to attend). More video and audio lectures/talks on various topics from racial justice to strategies for combating capitalism at wearemany.org.  

Hey NYC Tumblr family, our incredibly talented friend Alejandro is putting on his show, THE BROWN QUEEN, on March 12 at the LGBT Center in Brooklyn. He was generous enough to let us stay at his place while we were working on our project in New York. He’s a passionate performer, a compassionate human being, and super queer queen with an incredibly bright mind & personality. Help us return the support and share this show on your dash & with all of your NYC contacts. Come out and see it if you can. It’s going to be really entertaining. 

The story of a gay Chican@ boy born in El Paso, Texas, who eventually claimed New York City as his queendom. 

The Brown Queen begins with Diana Ross on the radio, while cruising downtown El Paso in a 1963 Rebel Rambler. The story travels from an early Chican@ upbringing in the borderlands of Tejas, to Sioux City, Iowa, and finally New York City. Through his tale, discover how the Brown Queen arrives at a fabulously queer life in New York City. 

A performance of growth, endeavor, and celebration. 


Friends and Foes:

It would be an honor to have y’all come and watch me take it to the floor at my place of employment. 
CATEGORY IS: CENTER REALNESS

In the past three years I have had the opportunity to bring small excerpts of my show at different events and now I’m gonna do it all. Not just the tip. 

So please come support me—it’s gonna be a shit show, but really funny. 

THE BROWN QUEEN
TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2013
8pm
$5
The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011

photo by: Camilo Godoy
postcard: Untitled Queen 


Much love, 

Alejandro
aka
Mz. Bootz
aka
The Brown Queen
aka
Quesa

Here’s a link to the event.

The People’s Record Daily News Update 
Here’s a collection of news stories for February 13, 2013 that you may not otherwise have a chance to see/learn about.

In Uganda, a British theatre producer has been deported over staging a play about homosexuality

A British theatre producer who angered Ugandan authorities by staging a play about homosexuality has been deported back to the UK, leaving behind his partner and two children.

David Cecil’s deportation came as a shock to his family and legal team, who had been hoping to appeal against proceedings to expel him from Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal (thanks to the efforts of Republican lawmakers & the Christian-right who intentionally cultivated and exasperated homophobia in the region).

A New York town has banned fracking discussions, silencing critics & protecting the natural gas industry

The small New York town of Sanford has enraged environmental groups by prohibiting all discussion of natural gas drilling at town board meetings and is now facing a lawsuit for violating free speech rights.Those opposed to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” have been unable to discuss their environmental concerns since the ban was implemented in September. To justify barring the environmental talk, the town board alleges that there had already been hours of discussion against gas drilling and that no more was needed.

Military forces from Italy & Qatar in Libyan port to prevent protests during revolution anniversary

Libya is stepping up security nationwide, and is set to close its borders with Egypt and Tunisia at 2:30am local time on February 14 until February 18, according to a statement by the Prime Minister. The anniversary of the start of the uprising falls on February 17. Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said that international flights would also be suspended at all airports except for those in the capital Tripoli and second largest city Benghazi in the east, according to state news agency Lana. Security services were placed on alert, and checkpoints have been established across Tripoli ahead of the anniversary.

Monsanto takes home $23m from small farmers; seeks to maintain ‘seed oligarchy’

The lawsuits concern Monsanto’s patent rights as the company strives to prevent farmers from replanting crops grown from the company’s seeds. It’s a concept that a study published on Tuesday – titled ‘Seed Giants vs. US Farmers’ – referred to as creating a “seed oligarchy.”

In the report, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) said it discovered 142 patent infringement suits against 410 farmers and 56 small businesses in more than 27 states as of December 2012. The amount of money pocketed by Monsanto comes to a whopping $23 million. The study was co-produced by the Save our Seeds (SOS) campaign.

Another case is now on the horizon, and it’s drawing wide public attention: The verdict of the trial will determine who controls the rights to seeds planted in the ground. It will also determine whether patent owners of other products which can make copies of themselves – such as stem cells and strains of bacteria used for medical research – and can continue to control the use of their products after selling them. It’s a scenario that wasn’t even considered until recently.

It’s been dubbed a ‘David and Goliath’ trial by many, as multi-billion-dollar Monsanto goes head to head against 75-year-old Indiana farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman, who said that fighting for justice is his main concern.“I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath,” Bowman told the Guardian. “I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong.”

In Washington DC, man callously billed for ambulance that arrived after his father passed away

When 71-year-old Durand Ford Sr. was struggling to breathe on New Year’s Day, his family called 911. But the man died waiting for an ambulance that took 40 minutes to arrive – and that man’s family has now received a $780.85 ambulance bill.

The hefty bill adds insult to injury. Durand Ford Jr., whose father died waiting for help that came too late, said he is angry about the city’s behavior. His 71-year-old father went into cardiac arrest on New Year’s Eve and his family called 911 shortly after 1 am, seeking emergency medical assistance.

—

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Going beyond the Western gender binary - unlearning our backward cultural conditioning 

In Western colonial society (which dominates many aspects of the globalized, capitalist world today) we operate under the presumption that there are only two genders, male and female. But gender is a social construction. One’s options for what gender they identify with are shaped by the culture they are born into. Biological factors are most-often the primary driving forces that choose among the available socially-constructed gender categories.

Cultures around the world have different ways of talking about, thinking about, and identifying gender. It’s often a challenge for (particularly cis-sexual) Westerns to think about other ways gender can be socially constructed. Westerns have the false equivalency of gender and sex drilled into their eternal psyche from the time they are very young, and re-enforced through examples in popular culture. There is no biological reality to gender. Many Westerners have the bizarre belief that one’s XY-sex-determination should also inform one’s gender identity, a socially constructed role in society.

In some cultures, there is no distinction made between gender and sexual orientation and the same can be said for sexual orientation - our culture socially-constructs the options and our biology helps us identify which socially-constructed option feels most ‘right’ and best resonates with us.

I’ve attached some photos to offer some examples of non-colonial, non-Western construction of gender. They’ve all been uploaded onto our Facebook page photostream in case you’d like to ‘like’ or ‘share’ them there. There are literally hundreds of ‘third-gender’ identifying peoples around the world. The eight I’ve chosen are mostly examples I remember from some of my anthropology courses but if you google ‘third genders’ you can find many lists and examples.

Who cares? Why it matters.

The most obvious reason to care about the way our culture has constructed gender and sexual orientation is to deepen one’s capacity for solidarity with people who identify as transgender, transsexual, and others whose gender or sexual identity exists outside of binary Western culture.

But there are other reasons as well. Western culture’s binary nature often creates non-sensical, problematic binary identity constructions that are inherently problematic. For example, I believe that Western masculinity (dominance, aggression, lack of communication, lack of emotional expression, etc) is inherently problematic. I believe that to be the reason why most acts of large-scale-violence and terror are committed by men (see: 100% of the mass school shootings in the United States), and I believe it fosters a degree of internal misery within people who heavily adopt these particular ‘masculine’ traits.

In the age of information, and the age of global connectivity, there is no longer any reason (particularly for young people) to feel isolated or restricted to Western definitions of gender, sexual orientation and identity in general. I think the social ramifications of a generation where more and more people begin to identify outside of the gender binary would be tremendous, and I think we should all consider how we can unlearn our cultural conditioning to embrace other, perhaps less exploitative and dominating identities.

Background information on the identities depicted in the above images:

Hijras
Hijras are male-body-born, feminine-gender-identifying people who live in South Asia (mostly in India & Nepal). Many Hijras live in well-defined, organized, all-Hijra communities, led by a guru.

Although many Hijras identify as Muslim, many practice a form of syncretism that draws on multiple religions; seeing themselves to be neither men nor women, Hijras practice rituals for both men and women.

Hijras belong to a special caste. They are usually devotees of the mother goddess Bahuchara Mata, Lord Shiva, or both.

Nandi female husbands
Among the Nandi in Western Kenya, one social identity option for women is to become a female husband, and thus a man in society’s eyes. Female husbands are expected to become men and take on all of the social and cultural responsibilities of a man, including finding a wife to marry and passing on property to the next generation through marriage. Female husbands may have lived their lives as women and may even be married to a man, but once she becomes a female-husband, she is expected to be a man. Women married to female-husbands may have sex with single men uninterested in commitment in order to become pregnant, but the female-husband (who is often an older woman, often a widow) will father the child of said pregnancy and treat the child like her own.

Two-spirited people
Two-Spirit is an umbrella term sometimes used for what was once commonly known as ‘berdaches’, Indigenous North Americans who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many Native Americans and Canadian First Nations communities. The term usually indicates a person whose body simultaneously manifests both a masculine and a feminine spirit. Male and female two-spirits have been “documented in over 130 tribes, in every region of North America.”

Travesti
In South America (with a large presence in Brazil), a travesti is a person who was assigned male at birth who has a feminine gender identity and is primarily sexually attracted to masculine men. Therefore, sometimes the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation is not made. Travestis have been described as a third gender, but not all see themselves this way. Travestis often will begin taking female hormones and injecting silicone to enlargen their backsides as boys and continue the process into womanhood.

The work of cultural Anthropologist Don Kulick (a gay male by Western definitions) in Brazil demonstrated that gender construction in Brazil is binary (like Western gender construction), but unlike Western gender construction, instead of having a male-female binary, there is a male-notmale binary.

In this particular construction of gender:

• Males include: men who have sex with women, men who have sex with Travestis but are never on the receiving end of anal sex, men who have sex with men but are never on the receiving end of anal sex.
• Not-males include: women, men who receive anal sex from ‘male’ gay men or from Travestis.

Fa’afafine
Fa’afafine are the gender liminal, or third-gendered people of Samoa. A recognized and integral part of traditional Samoan culture, fa’afafine, born biologically male, embody both male and female gender traits. Their gendered behavior typically ranges from extravagantly feminine to mundanely masculine

Waria
Waria is a traditional third general role found in modern Indonesia. Additionally, the Bugis culture of Sulawesi (one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia) has been described as having three sexes (male, female and intersex) as well as five genders with distinct social roles.

Six Genders of old Israel
In the old Kingdom of Israel (1020–931 BCE) there were six officially recognized genders:

• Zachar: male
• Nekeveh: female
• Androgynos: both male and female
• Tumtum: gender neutral/without definite gender
• Aylonit: female-to-male transgender people
• Saris: male-to-female transgender people (often inaccurately translated as “eunuch”)

Kathoey 
Australian scholar of sexual politics in Thailand Peter Jackson’s work indicates that the term “kathoey” was used in pre-modern times to refer to intersexual people, and that the usage changed in the middle of the twentieth century to cover cross-dressing males, to create what is now a gender identity unique to Thailand. Thailand also has three identities related to female-bodied people: Tom, Dee, and heterosexual woman.

-Robert

EDIT: So let me clearly say that in no way am I intentionally encouraging white people (or anyone else) to appropriate these identities.  Rather, I hope that this post and conversations like this will lead to an understanding of cultural diversity and other gender constructions/identities and an understanding that there is no biological reality to gender, and that gender manifests itself in many beautiful ways across many cultures.

I AM encouraging people in colonial society to have a less-binary, more nuanced approach to gender that doesn’t lead to so much domination and exploitation.

I also understand that in order to talk about these things, words like ‘male-bodied’ or male are inherently western concepts. Each of these societies and cultures have other ways of talking about these identities. Although I wasn’t born in the U.S. I have spent most of my life and the entirety of my adult life in the United States. I speak no languages other than English. There are concepts that I can’t understand, that my language limits me from even talking about, and in order to communicate these ideas, I am restricted by the only language I have available to talk about these concepts with. My perspective is etic. I do not belong to the above cultures, so when I talk about these things and use the English language to describe them, I am limited in my options for describing a concept as abstract as gender. The very categories of gender and sexuality belong to the cultural lens through which I view the world and I could not possibly provide a comprehensive emic analysis of the way the things we call ‘gender and sexuality’ actually are understood (if at all) within these cultures. In that way, mine is a very limited perspective. But it is geared toward other people living in Western society and it is aimed at changing this culture, not to appropriate these others but to not be so terrible toward gender and sexual variant people in this culture and to begin to question the implications of how we define gender and sexuality both personally, and as a whole culture. 

Also, there’s some problematic stuff in the way I framed this and some of these only have one source.

-Robert

(Source: thepeoplesrecord.com)