LGBTQI History: A Sonoma County Timeline 1947-2000.Wednesdays 1:30-3pm. Online via Zoom. Wed. 1/27/21, we will be talking with members of Lesbian Voters Action Caucus (LVAC) about the community building they did in Sonoma County during the 1980s-90s. Please contact me to enroll in this FREE class and get a Zoom invite: cdungan@santarosa.edu
To register for the LGBTQI Timeline class please click on the appropriate link below. If you have not taken any classes through SRJC in the past year, you are considered a New Student.
Members of the Honduran Congress voted on Thursday to amend the constitution making it much harder to reverse existing hard-line bans on abortion and same-sex marriage, as lawmakers double down on socially conservative priorities.
Lawmakers voted to require a three-quarters super-majority to change a constitutional article that gives a fetus the same legal status of a person, and another that states that civil marriage in the Central American nation can only be between a man and a woman.
With 88 legislators in favor, 28 opposed and seven abstentions, the proposal will still need a second vote in the unicameral legislature next year before it is enacted.
Currently, all constitutional changes require a two-thirds majority vote of the 128-member body.
Mario Perez, a lawmaker with the ruling party of President Juan Orlando Hernandez, explained during a virtual floor debate that the change will create a “constitutional lock” on any would-be softening of the existing articles.
The country’s criminal code sets out three to six-year prison terms for women who abort a fetus as well as anyone else involved.
Abortion-rights proponents accused backers of the proposal of seeking to cement the current bans.
“This legislation permanently condemns pregnant women or pregnant girls who have been raped or risk dying due to health reasons,” said Merary Mendoza, a researcher with the Honduran women’s studies center CEMH.
Kevihn Ramos, the head of a gay rights advocacy group in Honduras, blasted the lawmakers who voted to make it harder to change the two constitutional articles.
“This reform is the product of a state-imposed religion on Honduras,” he said.
U.S. regulators have approved the first long-acting drug combo for HIV, monthly shots that can replace the daily pills now used to control infection with the AIDS virus.
Thursday’s approval of the two-shot combo called Cabenuva is expected to make it easier for people to stay on track with their HIV medicines and to do so with more privacy. It’s a huge change from not long ago, when patients had to take multiple pills several times a day, carefully timed around meals.
Vials of the HIV treatment Cabenuva.ViiV Healthcare via AP
“That will enhance quality of life” to need treatment just once a month, said Dr. Steven Deeks, an HIV specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has no ties to the drug’s makers. “People don’t want those daily reminders that they’re HIV infected.”
Cabenuva combines rilpivirine, sold as Edurant by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit, and a new drug — cabotegravir, from ViiV Healthcare. They’re packaged together and given as separate shots once a month. Dosing every two months also is being tested.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Cabenuva for use in adults who have had their disease well controlled by conventional HIV medicines and who have not shown signs of viral resistance to the two drugs in Cabenuva.
The agency also approved a pill version of cabotegravir to be taken with rilpivarine for a month before switching to the shots to be sure the drugs are well tolerated.
ViiV said the shot combo would cost $5,940 for an initial, higher dose and $3,960 per month afterward. The company said that is “within the range” of what one-a-day pill combos cost now. How much a patient pays depends on insurance, income and other things.
Studies found that patients greatly preferred the shots.
“Even people who are taking one pill once a day just reported improvement in their quality of life to switch to an injection,” said Dr. Judith Currier, an HIV specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. She consults for ViiV and wrote a commentaryaccompanying one study of the drug in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Deeks said long-acting shots also give hope of reaching groups that have a hard time sticking to treatment, including people with mental illness or substance abuse problems.
“There’s a great unmet need” that the shots may fill, he said.
Separately, ViiV plans to seek approval for cabotegravir for HIV prevention. Two recent studies found that cabotegravir shots every two months were better than daily Truvada pills for keeping uninfected people from catching the virus from an infected sex partner.
As a broad who has taken shelter in Virginie Despentes’ writing during her own perennial gender malaise, I initially mistook the title of Torrey Peters’ debut novel for a cheeky nod to Apocalypse, Baby, the 51 year-old dyke author’s hard-boiled novel wherein two female private investigators are tasked with finding a missing teenage girl. Yet as anyone who bothered with the book jacket copy can report (and as I soon learned mere pages in), the ‘baby’ in Detransition, Baby’s title is a literal one, nodding to a fetus conceived by transwomen at the expense of cisgender misfortune. A trans woman herself, Peters is a knowing mistress of the endless quotidian foils of the cis circumstance.
Still, in true Despentes fashion, Peters tosses the reader a helmet and instructs her to climb on for a bitchseat ride into the big city. For the reviewer, Detransition’s contemporary Brooklyn is a familiar one, full of friction and stickiness. There are heated conversations between exes in Prospect Park, recollections of Hey Queen!, and an amiable sex worker joke or two that left me radiant (and hoping all the more that someone passes this book onto Despentes). There is ample queer drama; all traversed with an adult grace that Detransition’s seem grateful to experience. It’s here that we meet Reese, a Venus of Willendorf of a trans girl gifted with a maternal streak despite never permitting herself to be topped as such; Ames, formerly Amy, formerly Ames, a clever detransitioned transwoman in tech who once dated Reese but has now, despite the scientific odds, produced an unplanned, viable embryo with the cishet Katrina, his biracial divorcée boss.
It’s all deliciously femme, though not without self-critique. Some of the novels’ bitterest pills, literal and figurative, are thrust at the ganglions of Peters’ hard-headed sisters; call it Estradiol and Come to Jesus. Yet any true ire or embitteredness is directed at the cismen with whom trans women often engage out of necessity, nevermind their insistence on demanding a femininity that quickly becomes asphyxiating. “Life as a woman was difficult, so people gave up,” Peters writes of Amy’s detransition. Though a more thorough explanation comes with time, this alone should suffice. After reading one of the novel’s jabbing diatribes against cismen, I texted a friend to say, “Surprise, surprise. My Andrea Dworkin is a transfemme.”
Much of Detransition is spent turning between Ames’ pasts as Amy and Ames: Amy’s ungainly experience of being a trans teen already grappling with the impossibility of living up to a gold standard dictated by cis people, then a trans young adult Reese’s dedicated tutelage; the equally ungainly experience of Ames becoming a father when, despite conventional appearances to the contrary, he so isn’t a guy and Katrina so isn’t a housewife. Given that everyone here seems to be a dyke in everything but name, I won’t fuss over pronouns (Peters uses them interchangeably depending upon who Amy/Ames is in the moment) but instead recklessly borrow from Monique Wittig. Ames devises a lifehack for the sake of everyone’s needs: the three should co-parent.
Before Reese and Katrina accept the proposal, they are quick to laugh it off as the plot of an old black comedy starring Carey Grant. However, with the news of the baby, imagination’s seed is planted. Lovers—former and current, cis and trans—humbly seek out ways to obtain the love and care they deserve.
Needless to say, there’s a whole lotta grey in Detransition, and it is not a pollutant, but a breath of fresh air; melancholic but liberating, the novel is further enhanced by Peters’ willingness to engage with the most undeclared of internal and external trans conflicts. While reading a chapter that, through rigorous flashback, details the agony of Amy’s teen years in the Midwest and the impossible binary foisted upon him, I was reminded of a conversation Peters had with a fellow writer, Harron Walker, three years ago in Condé Nast them. “Trans women are fucked up and flawed, and I’m very interested in the ways in which trans women are fucked up and flawed,” she told Walker.
And thus, we see “fucked up and flawed” here at critical mass. When teenaged Amy, still presenting as the conventional ideal, shows up at high school dress-up day in a large brassiere in the likeness of a busty female classmate, she receives congratulatory high fives from a male peer while her female classmate looks on in abject humiliation:
Amy arrived to school on Switch Day with the bra stuffed under Amy’s otherwise everyday clothes. Mary Anne’s face fell the second she saw Amy; it was a look of pure hurt, crestfallen with disappointment in what Amy found to imitate in her existence and body. “Why are you so mean?’ she asked Amy. And suddenly Amy saw what she had done: a pair of tits. She was saying that’s all Mary Anne was. And at that moment, when she might have apologized, might have found the courage to ask Mary Anne for help, to tell her she wanted to understand her better, that she wanted to be like her, if only for a day. Jon McNelly came by, pointed at Amy’s stuffed bra and said, ‘Nailed it!’ Mary Anne managed a smile with her mouth, but her eyes went wet, and she nodded and said, ‘I hope you have a good day being me.‘
Amy considered taking off the bra, abating her cruelty for Mary Anne’s sake. But she didn’t. She wore it all day. She liked wearing a bra. She liked people commenting on her boobs. That night, she wore the bra again when she jerked off to the fantasy of Mary Anne forcing her to dress up in her clothes, then tossed it in a dumpster on her way to school the next morning.
The transdyke tragedy of it all—Amy desperately yearning for the companionship of other girls and their naive affirmations in lieu of all this bro back-patting; Amy settling for the secret of the brassiere that contains a beating heart that wishes it could’ve truly dressed the part—is so damn good because, yes, Ames is “fucked up and flawed” and, in this moment, a misogynist; as are all women for at least a solid day in our lives.
The gut wrench of this scene was further compounded when I recalled the late writer Bryn Kelly. A Lambda fellow and an incisive thinker, Kelly’s musings can be found on Twitter. One smoke-curling sentence of many, pinned at the top of her profile, resonated: “also reminder that this is late capitalism, we all buy our genders, some are just more expensive than others.”
Peters has a line early on in Detransition, voiced through Ames, that does not solve this dilemma of gender’s exorbitant cost. But it does provide a salient motive for why one would put their bodies through such a maddening wringer—day after day, year after year—for as long as they can bear it: “Basic comprehension of capitalism’s arbitrary mechanics doesn’t satisfy—the heart demands a human explanation.”
What will propel readers along isn’t simply Peters’ confident literary throttle, but their hope in the unorthodox, too: Can love, as Reese, Amy, and Katrina have come to define it at thirty-four, twenty-nine, and thirty-nine, respectively, exist? Is there possibility for, not the compromise that Eartha Kitt famously scorned, but identification of and nurturing of existing common ground? If Amy, Reese, and Katrina pull it off, the success would be greater than anything: satisfying sex void of dissossociation, internal and external identities that seamlessly align, a dress that is both comforting and flattering. Peters religiously casts out the silks that bind cis and trans experiences, imagining and then crafting a neo-nuclear family. At the end of the day, a web is still a home.
The political merits of a tale centering transgender and cisgender harmony are great, and so my primary critique of Detransition, Baby is an oblique one, pointed squarely in the direction of reviews that extoll Peters’ “remarkable” aptitude for knowing where she and women like her stand in relation to the sanctified cisgender majority. Inevitably, these reviews have less to do with Peters’ literary prowess than assumptions made about her experiences of trauma.
Likewise, singling out Peters’ take on cis/trans kinship too heavily in critical responses risks eclipsing the cis and trans women who’ve testified to the very tangible powers of a cis-trans utopia for decades. The New York Chapter of Daughters and Bilitis regularly had Marsha P. Johnson over for dinner; Tourmaline made a film on Marsha P. Johnson with Sasha Wortzel; Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice funds transwomen’s grassroots organizations; Imogen Binnie’s 2013 roadtrip novel Nevadais all but a love letter to the dyke punk. While Peters’ book is groundbreaking in its ability to go deeper than we’ve ever been, this connection is old news.
Furthermore, it feels safe to assume that Peters, who self-published two novellas prior to Detransition to circumvent the publishing machine’s secondary glass ceiling, would much prefer to not be the only transgirl entering 2021 with a major publisher’s blessing of her fiction (which is to say, an endorsement of the glowing and grimy corners of the trans imagination). All this ache of loneliness on the page, only to be the only one tokenized or placed on a pedestal? Never.
While I was measurably off in my impression of the tone and shapes that Peters’ new writing would take, I am inclined to cling to my Virginie Despentes error. Despentes, a dyke and a former hooker, refused to suffocate beneath the wool blanket of social stigma and simplistic artistic renderings that only served to stifle her further. Rather, she drew a sword—one that only she could possess—and sliced through the inanity of whorephobia, misogyny, and fear to present readers with the captivating (but hardly singular) idea-riddled woman whom publishing had rendered mute for generations too long.
A decade later, Peters has drawn a sister weapon. Her labrys cuts through the clutter just as sweetly.
Detransition,Baby
by Torrey Peters
One World
Hardcover, 9780593133378, 352 pp.
January 2021
It’s the silent stories — those too dangerous to tell — that characterize much of queer history. That fear-induced secrecy has left large swaths of our archives absent of queer narratives, especially queer Black narratives.
The writer, Robert Jones Jr., has answered that silence with “The Prophets,” an expansive and lyrical novel celebrating the love story of Samuel and Isaiah, two enslaved Black teenagers in the antebellum South. Jones said he wrote the novel because he had to.
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
“I was honestly terrified to write this book,” he said, and quoted the novelist Toni Morrison, who famously stated, “If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Jones, 50, speaking from his home in Brooklyn, New York, said his mission was to write a story with characters he’d never seen but knew existed.
“How could it possibly be that Black queer people did not exist prior to the Harlem Renaissance?” he asked. “Maybe we did not have the word ‘queer’… maybe we didn’t have the language, but people don’t appear because of the language. They’re here, and then we find the language to describe their experiences later on.”
Samuel and Isaiah love each other, and that love represents a beacon of hope to others enslaved on the sprawling Mississippi plantation, also known as Empty. The others find that “simply bearing witness was a treasure,” even as they all endure together, living under the atrocities committed against them by the white family who enslaves them.
“It was essential for me in writing this novel about such a brutal part of history that I infuse it with as much love and hope as I possibly could, because so many novels that deal with this period focus on slavery as the character,” Jones said. “I wanted to make sure that these characters were the character, and that I provided them with a whole, dimensional, full-bodied humanity.”
That humanity does bring with it a betrayal, and it isn’t long until Amos, another enslaved man, begins to turn the others against Samuel and Isaiah, using his newfound enthusiasm for Christianity, as well as his own fears, to influence the others and chastise them for their acceptance of the two young men. The decision to shun Samuel and Isaiah quickly spreads through the community, jumping “from one face to the next, like lanterns being lit in quick succession.”
Christianity, and the way it has both harmed Black Americans and been used as a tool of white supremacy, is a throughline of the novel. Jones used Biblical names and concepts throughout the story as a way to subvert and challenge the teachings of Christianity.
Author Robert Jones Jr.Alberto Vargas / RainRiver Images
Raised Nation of Islam on his mother’s side and Southern Baptist on his father’s, Jones said he gravitated toward Christianity as a child because he loved the music. However, he knew from a young age he was queer and said any homophobia he felt growing up was directly related to religion.
“When I was writing this book,” he said, “I wanted to make the case that the origin of anti-queerness, at least as it’s practiced in many Black communities, is Christianity in particular.”
It’s why part of the novel stretches back to the history of a pre-colonial African community with a female “king,” who oversees the joyful marriage of two men, Kosii and Elewa, whose love is described in parallel to Samuel and Isaiah’s. The wedding is a reminder that same-sex Black love is something that has existed — and has been celebrated — across centuries.
“When you look at the history, particularly the oral history of people who are continental Africans … you find that queerness was always a part of the landscape, always a part of the community,” Jones said. “They just never felt a need to give it a separate name or to single it out, because to them it was just love or sex or lust — and it was whether that was between two women, two men, or a man and a woman, or people who defied gender binaries.”
In the crowd at Kosii and Elewa’s wedding is a group of Portuguese intruders. They do not understand what they are seeing at first (“Are these two being initiated into manhood?”). The king, frustrated by their ignorance, tells the outsiders that this is a marriage. After an uncomfortable silence, one of the Portuguese men, Brother Gabriel, says, “I think your people would benefit from our religion.”
It is not long after that the woman-led, queer-inclusive tribe is captured and forced onto a ship to America.
“When Christianity is introduced [on the plantation], it’s so seductive, because it gives people who are already being harmed, who are already oppressed, someone else to blame, over whom they have power, or could have power, and that’s incredibly seductive,” Jones said.
Power and its many forms infuse the novel, and Jones said he thought about power every time he wrote a sentence. That translates to a book that is layered with dynamics of privilege, perilousness, fear and courage.
“Why aren’t they afraid?” one character, Maggie, asks herself of the relationship between Samuel and Isaiah. She can’t imagine why they continue to love each other knowing their own fates aren’t up to themselves, and that they could be separated or killed at any moment.
In an interview, Jones slipped into character as Isaiah, and spoke in his voice, describing how Isaiah would speak to Samuel when asked about the danger of being together: “I want to love you as hard as I possibly can while I have you, and I’m not going to let what anyone else thinks about that deter me. And they’re going to have to drag me away from you, kicking and screaming. And even then, after we’re separated, I’ll know I loved you and I will carry that for the rest of my days.”
After reading “The Prophets,” you’ll carry that, too.
US president Joe Biden will reverse Donald Trump‘s ban on transgenderpeople serving openly in the military “in the coming days and weeks”.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday (20 January) that, while the transgender troops ban wasn’t one of the Biden administration’sfirst 15 actions, it would be among the “additional executive actions” that will be taken “in the coming days and weeks”.
Amid a wave of anti-LGBT+ policies, Donald Trump first announced on Twitter in July 2017 that he would be banning trans people from serving in the military. The ban came into force in April 2019 following a series of legal challenges, and plunged trans service people into uncertainty and fear in the process.
Writing on Twitter at the time, Trump said: “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming … victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”
However, his nominee for defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, is still going through the confirmation process. It’s unclear if this is why reversing the trans troops ban didn’t happen on the first day of the Biden administration.
During his Senate hearing on Tuesday, Austin – who will become the first Black defence secretary in US history – said that he supports trans people being in the military.
“If you’re fit and you’re qualified to serve and you can maintain the standards, you should be allowed to serve and you can expect that I will support that throughout,” he said.
Before Austin can be confirmed, Congress has to waive a rule that requires former military service members to have been retired for seven years before they can serve as defence secretary. It will be voted on Thursday (20 January).
Trump claimed his policy was not an outright ban on trans troops serving, but it meant that a trans person could only enlist if they served in the gender they were assigned at birth. Serving trans troops were permitted to remain in the forces, but trans servicepeople who came out as trans after the policy was brought in were not permitted to transition.
Joe Biden’s new secretary of state has made several promises to the LGBT+ community, including “urgently” appointing an LGBT+ envoy.
Antony Blinken, who will lead the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of State, made the comments at his confirmation hearing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday (19 January), according to CNN.
He outlined changes he would make to ensure that the US government was “standing up for and defending” the LGBT+ community once Biden is in office.
The position of LGBT+ envoy, which was created to oversee US government efforts to support LGBT+ human rights, was left vacant during Trump’s presidency.
But Blinken said that filling the role was “a matter, I think, of some real urgency”.
He added: “We’ve seen violence directed against LGBTQI people around the world increase.
“We’ve seen, I believe, the highest number of murders of transgender people, particularly women of colour, that we’ve seen ever.
“And so I think the United States playing the role that it should be playing in standing up for and defending the rights of LGBTQI people is something that the department is going to take on and take on immediately.”
The new secretary of state also said that while working for the Biden administration, he would officially repudiate the findings of Trump’s anti-LGBT+ “Commission on Unalienable Rights”.
The commission, which was supposedly based on “natural law”, was formed by the Trump administration in July, 2019, to undercut the US government’s existing human rights laws.
Lastly, Blinken said he would allow all US embassies to fly Pride flags, after Trump banned US embassies from flying it for the entirety of June, 2020.
US President-elect Joe Biden should work with global leaders who have sought to shore up a defense of human rights around the world, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2021. His administration should also look for ways to entrench respect for human rights in US policy that are more likely to survive the radical changes among administrations that have become a fixture of the US political landscape.
“After four years of Trump’s indifference and often hostility to human rights, including his provoking a mob assault on democratic processes in the Capitol, the Biden presidency provides an opportunity for fundamental change,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, in his introductory essay to the World Report 2021. “Trump’s flouting of human rights at home and his embrace of friendly autocrats abroad severely eroded US credibility abroad. US condemnations of Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran rang hollow when parallel praise was bestowed on Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Israel.”
World Report 2021, Human Rights Watch’s 31st annual review of human rights practices and trends around the globe, reviews developments in more than 100 countries.READ IT HERE
Roth said that other governments recognized that human rights were too important to abandon, even as the US government largely abandoned the protection of human rights, and powerful actors such as China and Russia sought to undermine the global human rights system. New coalitions to protect rights emerged: Latin American governments plus Canada acting on Venezuela, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation defending Rohingya Muslims, a range of European governments acting on such countries as Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Hungary, and Poland, and a growing coalition of governments willing to condemn China’s persecution of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.
“The past four years show that Washington is an important but not indispensable leader on human rights,” Roth said. “Many other governments treated Trump’s retreat as cause for resolve rather than despair and stepped up to protect human rights.”
Biden’s presidency provides an opportunity for fundamental change, Roth said. He said that the president-elect should set an example by strengthening the US government’s commitment to human rights at home in a way that cannot be easily reversed by his successors.
Biden should speak in terms of the human rights involved as he works to expand health care, dismantle systemic racism, lift people out of poverty and hunger, fight climate change, and end discrimination against women and LGBT people. The slim Democratic Party majorities in the US Senate and House may also open possibilities for more lasting legislation. Biden should also allow criminal investigations of Trump to proceed to make clear that no one is outside the rule of law.
Abroad, to better entrench human rights as a guiding principle, Roth said, Biden should affirm and then act on that principle even when it is politically difficult. That should include:
Curbing military aid or arms sales to abusive friendly governments such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel absent significant improvements in their human rights practices;
Condemning the Indian government’s encouragement of discrimination and violence against Muslims, even if India is seen as an important ally against China;
Re-embracing the UN Human Rights Council, even though it criticizes Israeli abuses;
Voiding Trump’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court, even if he doesn’t like the prosecutor’s investigations; and
Abandoning Trump’s inconsistent, transactional unilateral policy towards China and adopting a more principled, consistent, and multilateral approach that will encourage others to join.
“The big news of recent years isn’t Trump’s well-known abandonment of rights but the less-noticed emergence of so many other countries in leadership roles,” Roth said. “The Biden administration should join, not supplant, these shared efforts. These governments should maintain their important defense of rights, not relinquish their leadership to Washington, while Biden works to entrench a less variable US commitment to human rights.”
We asked four partners to respond to Human Rights Watch’s call on US President-elect Joe Biden and other leaders to prioritize human rights at home and abroad, and why international attention is important to their work. Here are selected quotes:
The United States Dr Tiffany Crutcher, of the Terence Crutcher Foundationand Black Wall Street Memorial in Tulsa, recalls the racist history preceding the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and urges President-elect Biden to tackle white supremacy:
In 1921, it was a lie that incited the Tulsa race massacre where mobs of white rioters burned down the Black community of Greenwood. And almost 100 years later on January 6, 2021, it was a lie that incited mobs of white rioters to storm our nation’s capital to overthrow our democracy. Confederate flags were waved, nooses were erected, and white supremacy showed its ugly head.
Which is why I’m calling on the Biden administration to attack white supremacy head on its first 30, 60, 90 days of taking office. You must prioritize racial justice and you must re-engage on the issues of human rights, and most importantly you must reverse the regressions from the Trump administration. We don’t need another Breonna Taylor, we don’t need another Tamir Rice, another George Floyd, another Terence Crutcher. You must demand a just America and be the change that we so desperately need in this country right now.
Russia Tatiana Glushkova, a board member of the Russian group Memorial Human Rights Center, recalls the arrest on bogus charges of Memorial’s lead researcher in Chechnya, Oyub Titiev, and the difference international attention made in his fate:
The goal was to force Memorial to close its office in Grozny and to complicate the collection of information about human rights violations in Chechnya. However, the case itself was so crudely and clumsily fabricated and so obviously in retaliation for Oyub’s human rights work, that it attracted intense attention from the international community. Oyub’s case was discussed at the Council of Europe, the UN, European parliament, and FIFA. It was discussed in foreign ministries of many different countries, and numerous human rights organizations, both Russian and international. For nine months, foreign diplomats and journalists regularly visited the Shali city court [where Titiev’s trial was held].
Such attention did not escape the authorities of the Chechen Republic. Their most important reaction was, of course, the fact that Oyub’s verdict was relatively light, and also that he was very quickly released on parole. Such a reaction by the Chechen authorities, given their longstanding and deep hatred for Memorial, can only be explained by their desire to quickly turn this page, get rid of this case, of this political prisoner, and of the intense interest of the international community. The result we now have, that our colleague has been free for over a year, would not have been possible without [this] international attention. We are extremely grateful to everyone who took part in this effort.
Cameroon Cyrille Rolande Bechon, head of Nouveaux Droits de l’Homme Cameroun, a human rights organization based in Yaoundé, discusses the international response to the massacre of 21 civilians in Ngarbuh, Cameroon:
This is the place for me to thank the organizations that come together in the Coalition for Human Rights and Peace in the Anglophone Regions, international organizations like Human Rights Watch, [and countries like] France, the United States, who supported us and conveyed the message with us about the need to set up a commission of inquiry into this massacre.
Although this commission has announced its conclusions and a trial opened last December 17 against the four members of the security forces identified by the commission as having participated in this massacre, we’re still dissatisfied. Dissatisfied because the chain of responsibility in this massacre has yet to be established. We would like all those responsible, whether directly or indirectly, including high-ranking army officials, to be prosecuted and sentenced.
Venezuela Feliciano Reyes, a Venezuelan human rights defender deeply involved in providing humanitarian support to Venezuelans in need, on the country’s humanitarian emergency:
The complex humanitarian emergency that has affected Venezuela for at least four years has caused enormous damage to the population, for example, their lack of access to food, health services, [and] education. [These things] also generate mass forced migration because it’s so hard to survive in the country. The root causes include political conflict and years of abuse of power, of erosion of the rule of law. The international community has a fundamental role to play, not only in terms of diplomatic political actions in fora such as the Human Rights Council, the United Nations General Assembly, [and] the Security Council, to help find solutions to the political conflict, but also in providing vital international humanitarian assistance for Venezuela.
This has produced visible effects but is still insufficient. We hope the World Food Program will enter the country this year, for example, since there are reports of Venezuelans facing serious levels of food insecurity. This work is fundamental. This work of political and diplomatic pressure and humanitarian cooperation to restore decent living conditions for the Venezuelan people, and, eventually, to redirect the country towards development and well-being for its people.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is calling on the LGBTQ community to participate in several planned virtual inaugural events that reflect the theme of “America United,” an inaugural official told LGBTQ representatives at a Jan. 12 online briefing.
“We are looking forward to the inaugural ceremonies in which the American people and the world will witness the peaceful transition of power,” said Rina Patel, the inaugural committee’s Associate Director of Coalitions before a Zoom gathering of close to 50 representatives of LGBTQ organizations from across the country.
“This will mark a new day for the American people focused on healing our nation, bringing our country together, and building back together,” she said.
Patel noted that the inaugural swearing-in ceremony for Biden and Harris, which will take place outside the U.S. Capitol, will not be open for in-person viewing and will be restricted mainly to members of Congress.
“In order to be mindful of COVID-19 guidelines there are no public tickets available for the inauguration,” she said. “I know some folks are excited about being in D.C., but we are really encouraging everyone to stay home and not to travel to D.C.”
At least three national LGBTQ organizations, meanwhile, were scheduled to hold their own inaugural celebrations in honor of the incoming Biden-Harris administration.
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, announced it is joining “community partners” in holding a virtual LGBTQ Inaugural Ball on Jan. 20 called the Power of Unity.
“This not-to-be-missed virtual event will feature musical performances and special appearances from equality leaders across the LGBTQ movement,” a statement promoting the event says. Among the performers scheduled to appear, the statement says, is Billy Porter, the Grammy, Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor, singer and activist who stars in the FX hit series “Pose.”
HRC is billing the event as a fundraiser with suggested levels of donations of $400, $250, $175, $100, and $35, with financial supporters having access to an online reception and having their name posted as an official sponsor. But HRC says people can also attend the online Inaugural Ball free of charge by registering in advance of the event.
The Center for Black Equity, the D.C.-based national LGBTQ advocacy organization that organizes the nation’s Black Pride events, is holding its own virtual inaugural ball on Jan. 20, according to Executive Director Earl Fowlkes. Fowlkes said some LGBTQ elected officials were expected to speak at the event along with Reggie Greer, who served as the LGBTQ liaison for the Biden presidential campaign.
The LGBTQ Victory Fund, which raises money and provides logistical support for openly LGBTQ candidates running for public office, was scheduled to hold a virtual Inauguration 2021 fundraising event on Jan. 14.
In a statement on its website, the group said the event would celebrate “the queerest U.S. Congress in history!” a reference to the record number of LGBTQ candidates elected or re-elected to Congress in the 2020 election. Nine U.S. House members and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), were expected to appear at the Victory Fund event.
The Biden inauguration was scheduled to take place two weeks after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots in which hundreds of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building in a siege that took the lives of five people, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer.
The Biden-Harris inaugural committee has said it was working closely with the U.S. Secret Service, D.C. police, and a Capitol Police force with new leadership to ensure the security and safety of all those participating in the few in-person inaugural events.
Patel and Carrie Gay, another inaugural committee official, told the LGBTQ representatives at the Jan. 12 online briefing about at least three virtual inaugural events that community-based organizations, including LGBTQ groups, could participate in.
The two said one of the events scheduled for Jan. 18 was being organized in conjunction with the annual Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service. Community organizations throughout the country, including LGBTQ organizations, were being invited to organize events assisting those in need that would be publicized on the inaugural committee’s website, Gay told the briefing. Most of the events were to be virtual.
“Events will focus on COVID-19 relief and address challenges that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, such as poverty, hunger, racial injustice, homelessness, mental health, and educational disparities,” a statement released by the inaugural committee says.
“The Presidential Inaugural Committee is asking Americans everywhere to participate in community service and urging them to sign up to volunteer at bideninaugural.org/day-of-service and encourage their friends, family, and neighbors to join,” the statement says.
Three North Carolina municipalities passed discrimination protections for LGBTQ people this past week, shortly after the expiration of a yearslong moratorium on such measures.
Hillsborough, Carrboro and Chapel Hill passed ordinances protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people from discrimination in public accommodations and employment on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.
They’re the first measures of their kind passed since the 2017 repeal of North Carolina’s infamous HB2 “bathroom bill.” That controversial legislation, which passed in 2016 and restricted which public facilities transgender people could use, spawned national outrage and boycotts that were expected to cost the state billions in lost business. The repeal of HB2, however, was part of a “compromise bill” that placed a statewide moratorium on municipalities passing nondiscrimination ordinances. That bill, HB142, expired on Dec. 1, and advocates were ready and waiting.
Demonstrators call for the repeal of HB2 in Raleigh, North Carolina on April 25, 2016.Jill Knight / Raleigh News and Observer/TNS via Getty Images
The three bills that passed so far are similar, though the Carrboro and Hillsborough ordinances carry a $500 penalty for violation and, according to their text, “Each and every day during which such discrimination continues shall be deemed a separate offense.” Officials in Orange County and the city of Durham are expected to vote on nondiscrimination measures Tuesday, and the Greensboro City Council is expected to discuss a similar ordinance in the coming weeks.
Advocates say it’s been a long time coming.
“We’ve been talking with elected officials since well before HB2 and trying to get these kinds of progressive policies passed,” Allison Scott, director of policy and programs at the Campaign for Southern Equality, told NBC News. “So to see these actually coming up to a vote feels amazing.”
People who live in the municipalities that pass these ordinances will not only be protected on the local level from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — but also based on race, national origin, marital or familial status, pregnancy, veteran status, religious belief, age and disability. That’s because North Carolina is one of five states that only have statewide discrimination protections for people with disabilities, leaving LGBTQ people and other groups open to discrimination in areas where they aren’t currently protected by federal law.
Even in areas where LGBTQ individuals are protected by federal law, there may be loopholes that leave some people out. Scott cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, as an example: The landmark 2020 decision ruled that LGBTQ people are protected under federal civil rights law from employment discrimination, but this doesn’t include individuals who work at small businesses with fewer than 15 employees. Those individuals, however, will now be protected from discrimination under these new local ordinances.
“It just shows the importance of why these laws are needed and why cities and counties need to step up,” Scott said.
HB2’s lasting impact
In early 2016, the Charlotte City Council passed North Carolina’s first public accommodations law protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination. The ordinance, however, drew criticism due to a clause that said transgender people would be allowed to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth.
Shortly after, the North Carolina General Assembly called a special session to debate the ordinance. Lee Storrow, executive director of the North Carolina AIDS Action Network, said the ordeal was disheartening to many LGBTQ people in the state.
Lawmakers confer during a negotiations on the floor of North Carolina’s State Senate chamber as they meet to consider repealing the controversial HB 2 law, Dec. 21, 2016.JONATHAN DRAKE / Reuters
“That whole debate was just really hard to be a part of,” said Storrow, who has lived in Chapel Hill since 2007. “Because of the debate in 2016, people are so aware that they’re not protected, and it may not be that they have a specific moment where they’ve directly been discriminated against, but just the threat and knowing that they have no legal protections, that really has an impact on folks.”
In March 2016, just a few weeks after Charlotte passed its nondiscrimination ordinance, then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed into law HB2, or the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act.
When the General Assembly did finally repeal HB2 the following year, municipalities still weren’t allowed to pass their own nondiscrimination measures. While advocates have waited for the moratorium to expire, LGBTQ North Carolinians have continued to face discrimination, they say.
“Just this month, someone in our network reached out about a person who was denied gender-affirming care who works for the state,” Kendra Johnson, executive director of Equality North Carolina, said.
The statewide LGBTQ advocacy group also received calls during the election about people being “policed around their identity, because their name does not match what the particular poll worker thought they should look like if they had a certain gender marker on their ID,” according to Johnson.
“It’s every single month we hear cases of discrimination,” Johnson added. “I know that these measures are necessary because we don’t have comprehensive nondiscrimination in the state, and we do not have it on the federal level, so we have to start where people live and work, and that’s cities and towns.”
The end of the moratorium means municipalities can start passing their own nondiscrimination ordinances, but there are limits. Scott said there’s a clause in HB142 that gives only the General Assemblythe power to legislate bathrooms and public changing facilities.
“That’s why we still need a full repeal of 142,” she said. “We know fully 67 percent of North Carolinians, a supermajority, believe that LGBTQ people should be protected from discrimination.”
‘A sense of relief’
After Carrboro passed its ordinance Tuesday, Mayor Lydia Lavelle said it reminded her of how she felt when same-sex marriage became legal.
“It’s kind of like, ‘About time,’” she said. “I’m feeling like it was long overdue.”
North Carolina will join 47 other states that either have statewide protections for LGBTQ people or allow cities and counties to create their own protections, according to Lavelle, who is a law professor at North Carolina Central University.
“We were an outlier before,” she said. “We’re joining the strong, strong majority of states that allow communities to do this.”
Tiz Giordano, who works in Carrboro, said they’re “elated” that the town passed discrimination protections for LGBTQ people.
“I’ve been able to build queer community, have chosen family and live in safety as my true self due to living in Carrboro and working in an affirming workplace,” they said. “I just want other queer and trans people to be able to feel this way and feel protected, especially in medical settings.”
Though Carrboro is a relatively progressive community, Giordano said their spouse has faced medical discrimination in the past. Under the new ordinance, hospitals and physicians’ offices will be considered public accommodations and LGBTQ people will be protected.
“Knowing that people will be able to have a case in court if they are being discriminated against definitely gives me a sense of relief,” Giordano said.
Vanity Reid Deterville, program director of the LGBTQ Center of Durham, said nondiscrimination laws at any level of government are especially important after the Trump administration rolled back certain federal protections for LGBTQ people over the last four years.
“Protections of any sort when it comes to the LGBT community — and, more specifically, queer and trans Black women, people of color — is critical,” she said, pointing to their level of marginalization in society.
Johnson said she’s confident the newly passed ordinances will help better protect LGBTQ people in the state, but she said she’s also happy to see elected officials coming together to do something for their constituents.
“I think we’re in a moment where there’s been a real ‘us versus them’ mentality coming from the White House down,” she said. “It’s nice to see elected officials recognizing that yes, there is discrimination, people should have the right to pursue their livelihood, to have housing, to not be discriminated [against] in health care and to be treated as equal and valuable citizens of towns, and acting to actually start to make that a reality.”
