“I think that as we have seen in the news a growing presence of ICE in communities—despite San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city—we are also seeing a growing trepidation and hesitation as people are seeking care,” said Liliana Schmitt, recruitment and retention coordinator for Clínica Esperanza at Mission Neighborhood Health Center.
Schmitt, who works with new clients at the clinic, said there are a variety of barriers that people from other countries seeking HIV care may face, but that clinic staff focus on making entry and retention in HIV care as easy as possible.
“We work with clients to figure out how to document things like identity, proof of income, residency, and insurance status—which can be difficult for many of our clients. Luckily, we have a lot of ways we can qualify that documentation. We don’t need official pay stubs, or an official lease or utility bill, for instance.”
HIV care staff at Clínica Esperanza and other HIV navigation and care centers in the Bay Area also work successfully with clients to figure out medication needs (for example, to find a similar medication to one the person had access to in another country), troubleshoot issues around traveling safely with HIV medications, and figure out how to pay for medications.
“These should not be limiting factors if you need HIV medications or PrEP,” said Schmitt. “It’s really important for people to know that many community sites and clinics in San Francisco—including ours—have payment programs and eligibility programs to help pay for HIV medications regardless of immigration or payment status.”
There are HIV care resources and protections for people of any immigration status in the Bay Area.
“It doesn’t matter what your immigration status is,” said Marco Partida, an HIV services navigator at San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “We are able to serve people regardless of what their immigration status is. We help people start or continue HIV care, get emergency supplies of medications, figure out how to pay for medications, and more.”
HIV navigation options in San Francisco
Navigation services help people living with HIV connect to any clinic or provider in the San Francisco Bay Area.
San Francisco AIDS Foundation staff provide services to all people living with HIV including people who are undocumented, people living with HIV and hepatitis C, transgender and gender non-conforming people, people who use drugs, and gay, bi and queer men. The team can help establish health care coverage and there are no insurance restrictions.
Call 415-602-9676 or 415-487-3000 and ask for the health navigator. Email assist4hiv@sfaf.org with questions.
St. James Infirmary provides navigation support for people who use drugs, current and former sex workers, and transgender and gender non-conforming people. Call 415-554-8497.
Shanti provides HIV navigation to all people living with HIV, including women, people who use drugs and people who are living with HIV and hepatitis C. Call 415-674-4760.
Glide provides HIV navigation to all people living with HIV, including people who use drugs, people living with HIV and hepatitis C, and transgender and gender non-conforming people. Call 415-674-6168.
HIV care options in San Francisco
The following clinics offer wrap-around care that includes medical care, benefits support and other social services.
Clínica Esperanza at Mission Neighborhood Health Center provides services for all people living with HIV, and specializes in care for Spanish-speaking and Latinx communities. Call Liliana Schmitt at 415-552-1013 x2234. http://www.mnhc.org/
Positive Health Program at Ward 86 provides HIV care for any person living with HIV. Call 415-206-2400.
San Francisco City Clinic provides care for people living with HIV including people who are uninsured or not currently in care. Call Andy Scheer at 415-487-5511.
Christine Hallquist leaned back in her swivel chair inside a private room at the Northshire bookstore and dialed up potential donors, trash-talking the plummeting approval numbers of Vermont’s incumbent Republican governor and touting her chances against her Democratic rivals. “It’s clear it’s for us to lose, which I won’t, ’cause I’m disciplined,” she assured one prospective contributor of the upcoming primary.
Beating her fellow Democrats and then defeating a sitting Vermont governor for the first time since 1962 are only the beginning. From there, Hallquist, a first-time candidate, plans to reverse the decline of rural Vermont and maybe even solve climate change.
All of this, Hallquist thinks, will be relatively easy, because she has already done the hardest thing she will ever do. In 2015, she began wearing a wig and a blouse to work, publicly coming out as a woman named Christine to her employees at the Vermont Electric Coop, the utility she had led for years as a man named Dave. It was the culmination of an eight-year gender transition that, after a lifetime of experiencing gender dysphoria, had filled her with dread at the ostracism she knew would follow.
“I was sure when I transitioned, I’d end up sleeping in a gutter somewhere,” she said.
But Vermonters greeted her transition with overwhelming acceptance, so she forgot about the gutter and began contemplating the governor’s office instead.
In April, she officially announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination from a dive bar in her hometown, becoming the first openly transgender gubernatorial candidate in the nation’s history.
In large parts of the country, the appearance of a viable statewide transgender candidate would have caused a political earthquake, but here, her transgender status has been largely an afterthought.
“It will be irrelevant in Vermont,” former governor Howard Dean, who recently offered Hallquist campaign advice over breakfast, told POLITICO.
Rather than making her gender identity a focus of her campaign, she is running, essentially, as a wonky technocrat. Her signature issue is a plan to revitalize rural Vermont by laying high-speed, fiber optic cable statewide. It’s a platform that plays to her record turning around the fortunes of the electric utility she ran until early this year.
That her transgender status has been relegated to a non-issue — in fact, she’s starting to wield it as an asset — is in part, a testament to the state’s longstanding progressive culture. Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery, the first to grant same-sex couples civil unions with full marriage rights, and the first to legalize same-sex marriage through its legislature, rather than by court ruling.
It is also a sign of the arrival of transgender Americans as a small but burgeoning political force.
***
That was on display at a July fundraiser for Hallquist in Washington, where a small group of supporters, many of them transgender, gathered in the rooftop lounge of an upscale apartment building off Dupont Circle. A group of trans donors gathering to support a transgender candidate is not something you would have expected to see in Washington even just a few years ago.
“We can enter political space,” said attendee Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who served as Barack Obama’s last director of LGBT outreach and was the first openly transgender White House staffer, of transgender people’s greater visibility in the electoral realm.
She observed that a transgender political community was beginning to take form more distinctly from the umbrella of the broader LGBT movement. “Just as siblings grow old together, we’ll find our different paths, but we’ll always be family,” she said.
While the LGBT rights movement has won an astounding series of victories across the Western world over the past two decades, transgender people remain among the most stigmatized and marginalized groups in Western societies, including the United States. Forty-one percent of respondents reported attempting suicide in one survey of transgender Americans, and young black transgender women in the U.S. are more than four times more likely to be murdered than their peers in the general population, according to an investigation by Mic.
For most of the 20th century, being transgender was considered a bizarre curiosity or a mental illness, when it was heard of at all, and openly transgender officeholders were unheard of. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a handful of openly transgender candidates won local elections, but it was not until 2006, with the election of Kim Coco Iwamoto to Hawaii’s board of education, that one won statewide office.
Iwamoto, who is running for Hawaii’s lieutenant governor this year, remains the only person to accomplish that feat. Hallquist appears to be only the third openly transgender candidate to even seek statewide office — the other being WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, who ran for Senate in Maryland earlier this year — according to former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, president of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ candidates and recently endorsed Hallquist.
“Christine will be a historic figure if she wins the nomination, whether or not she becomes the governor,” Parker said. “If she becomes the governor, she has the potential to be a role model for every trans kid in America.”
According to LGBTQ Victory Fund communications director Elliot Imse, transgender candidates are regularly subjected to whisper campaigns and other forms of discrimination, even within Democratic primaries. “We hear of people saying to influential party people that ‘Of course, I’m not transphobic, but we can’t let the transgender candidate win because general election voters would never vote for a trans person,’” he said.
When journalist Danica Roem, a transgender woman, ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates last year as a Democrat, the Republican Party of Virginia paid for campaign fliers that repeatedly referred to her with male pronouns, considered a slap in the face to someone who identifies as a woman.
But Roem went on to win her race, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature and one of a record eight transgender candidates who won nationwide on Election Day last year (the other seven were municipal candidates).
According to Mara Kiesling, founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a Hallquist confidant, races like Roem’s illustrate that transgender candidates can overcome hang-ups about their identities by focusing on constituent needs. “Nobody’s looking for a transgender person to run for office,” Kiesling said. “They’re looking for somebody who will make their life better.”
In June, Roem traveled to Vermont to campaign with Hallquist, and offered similar advice. “When someone else wants to make that the narrative of the race, you acknowledge it and say, ‘Yes I’m trans and’ — in her case — ‘I happen to know a lot about our infrastructure,’” Roem said in an interview. “In my case it was, ‘Yes, I’m trans and I also know a lot about transportation.”
***
Other advice has been more tactical.
In the bookstore backroom in Manchester, Hallquist called around to potential donors with the help of commercial sales software called Phoneburner, which she called her “secret weapon” and which Roem turned her on to. Such tips are invaluable for a candidate who did not enter politics until late in life.
Born male in 1956 and raised as a boy named Dave in upstate New York, Hallquist made Vermont her home in young adulthood when her father’s job was relocated to Burlington.
She studied engineering, worked as a consultant and joined the Vermont Electric Coop in 1998, rising to become its CEO in 2005. Though her record on renewables is now being scrutinized for the compromises she made to keep rates down and the coop’s reliance on hydro- and nuclear power sources, it forms a core part of the rationale for her candidacy. It also, she argues, serves as a model for addressing climate change globally. During her time at the helm, she steered the utility from the brink of financial ruin and increased the share of its energy coming from carbon-free sources while limiting rate hikes.
That outward success masked inner turmoil.
Since childhood, Hallquist had felt she was a girl, a feeling her mother had warned her to keep to herself or risk being committed to an asylum. But it’s a feeling she never shook. Throughout her life, she found herself buying women’s clothing and wearing it in secret. She suffered from the pain and confusion of gender dysphoria even as she married a wife, Pat, and fathered three children.
Later in life, she came out as a woman to Pat, a discreet transgender support group, the rest of her family and eventually, in 2015, to the world. She began wearing women’s clothing and accessories in public, along with a wig. She also started hormone replacement therapy, reporting that she felt angry less often and began crying more.
Hallquist, 62, said Trump’s election a year later depressed her, but also helped inspire her to enter electoral politics earlier this year.
“Thousands of people have fought for freedom before me and died for freedom,” she said. “The least I could do is give up my retirement.”
Now, Hallquist is picking up politics on the fly. In Manchester, she spoke with enthusiasm about the details of a campaign “ground game” and rued a recent faux pas that led a deep-pocketed donor to cut her off. “I did a protocol violation,” she said, but declined to elaborate, other than to say, “You’ve got to give you high-value donors special treatment.”
Despite her novice status, she exuded total confidence at the bookstore in a sleeveless white blouse and thigh-length skirt. Between calls, she chatted with her communications director, David Glidden, about plans for her primary night gathering, emphasizing the need to find a venue that serves booze.
“People party a lot as you lose or win,” Glidden remarked.
“People are going to party because we won,” she said.
During her donor calls, Hallquist noted that the Republican governor’s slide in approval ratings — an astounding 38-point net drop between the first and second quarters of this year, in Morning Consult’s polls — has coincided with her entrance into the Democratic primary.
“I’m not taking credit,” she said between calls, but added, “If there hadn’t been a strong alternative in the race, maybe the drop wouldn’t have been as precipitous.”
In fact, Gov. Phil Scott’s popularity problems appear to be mostly about guns. He ran on a promise to impose no gun control measures, but after a school shooting scare in February, he signed a sweeping law in April that has angered his base and inspired a write-in Republican primary challenge.
In response to requests for comment about Hallquist, the fall in approval rating, and the guns issue, Scott’s campaign manager, Brittney Wilson, wrote that Scott “had the most successful first term of any Governor in Vermont” and ticked off a list of fiscal accomplishments, but did not mention guns.
Vermont’s gun culture is such that gun control is thorny even in a Democratic primary. “I would prefer not talking about this issue,” Hallquist said.
But what is her position? Well, she owns five hunting rifles, which she doesn’t use because most of them she acquired a long time ago to teach her son to hunt, which she wasn’t very good at, anyway.
“I’m beating around the bush,” she said, and after some more explanation, “I’m really beating around the bush.”
Finally, she confided, “I would support regulating guns like we regulate automobiles, but I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s a little bit off the record,” Glidden chimed in.
On issues of economics and inequality Halquist speaks of her desire to support marginalized communities. But she also makes it a point to take issue both with rich people who loathe the poor and with those who blame all the problems of the poor on the rich. When I suggested that the latter sounds like an oblique critique of the state’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, she clapped her hands and let out a laugh, before regaining herself.
“I wouldn’t ever criticize Bernie,” she said.
What she would do is say Sanders’ rhetoric is inconsistent with the concerns of managing a state budget and making a state’s economy competitive with those of its neighbors: “He’s great on the national platform,” she said. “I don’t think it works from a governor’s standpoint.”
***
After wrapping up her calls in Manchester, Hallquist drove to the small town of Ludlow for an evening candidates’ forum.
On the second floor of Ludlow’s town hall, the race’s four Democrats held forth in front of a handful of campaign staffers and an audience of actual voters that numbered about a dozen (a showing that was “big for Ludlow,” Glidden claimed). A moderator wielded a rusty old cowbell to silence anyone who exceeded their allotted answer time.
On Hallquist’s right sat environmental advocate James Ehlers, a handsome and solemn silver-haired Navy veteran who counts himself an admirer of psychedelic guru Ram Dass and is running somewhere to the left of the state’s socialist senator.
Ehlers is considered Hallquist’s chief rival for the nomination. Hallquist had raised $132,000 through mid-July to Ehlers’ $50,000, and her statewide name recognition was at 41 percent in a recent poll, more than 10 points ahead of any other Democratic candidate.
She and Ehlers are not above taking swings at each other. “I celebrate Christine for the example she’s setting,” Ehlers said before the forum, “But fundamentally we’re very, very different people and that’s reflected in my lifetime of service to people and the planet and Christine’s decision to spend her time in the corporate world.”
Hallquist scoffed at the charge, saying she could have made more money in the private sector but chose to end her career leading the local electric coop instead. “If you’re going to be negative, try to get real shit out there,” she said the next day, adding that Ehlers “keeps shooting himself in the foot.”
To Hallquist’s left in Ludlow sat activist Brenda Siegel. A single mother with purple and yellow streaks in her hair, she often gets together with Hallquist after the forums to make fun of the other candidates, and themselves, at a local bar.
On Siegel’s other side side sat rising high school freshman Ethan Sonneborn, a precocious 14-year-old who has exploited a loophole in the state constitution to make himself a legally viable candidate.
Asked to reveal a surprising personal detail in her opening statement, Hallquist spoke of the annual week she spent with a friend in the wilderness of northern New York state in the dead of winter, telemark skiing and practicing cold-weather survival techniques for 22 years straight years.
Earlier, Hallquist had said that she believes those excursions were a way of coping with her gender dysphoria — going to the extremes of masculinity to resist her feelings of identifying as a woman. It’s the same reason, she hypothesizes, that a disproportionate number of transgender women serve in the military before transitioning.
In Ludlow, Hallquist’s transgender status came up only at the end of the night, when she recounted her experience of coming out and being embraced by Vermonters in her closing statement.
The next morning, Friday, Hallquist visited the offices of her hometown newspaper, the Morrisville News & Citizen, to face an hour of questioning from a trio of bearded journalists — Tom, Andrew and Tommy — as her son, Derek, a filmmaker, taped the sitdown for a forthcoming campaign video.
Huddled over a small conference table, Hallquist described her plan to wire the rural parts of the state with a high-speed, fiber optic network as “probably one of the most bold and visionary goals we’ve seen since the electrification of Vermont.”
Her transgender status was mentioned only when she was asked whether any “assholes” were attacking her for it. Very few, she said. Still, though Hallquist said her transgender status is not a relevant factor in the race, she is finding way to make it part of the rationale for her candidacy.
When it came up at the News & Citizen, she took the opportunity to argue that a transgender governor could help cement the state’s global image as an open and welcoming place.
“Vermonters should be thrilled that we’re continuing to perpetuate our wonderful brand,” she said.
As for the political downside, Hallquist points out that any Vermonters turned off by her gender transition would probably not be voting for a liberal Democrat anyways.
From the newspaper offices, Hallquist, Derek and Glidden strolled a few blocks to a cluttered three-room office space that serves as her campaign headquarters. A smattering of colorful sticky notes stuck to the walls reminded her how she wanted to campaign (“Pay attention to details”; “low ego”; “can dish and take it”) and commingled with a framed panoramic photo from a Phish concert.
While she plowed through more call time, Derek directed me to the family residence, a modest house perched on a fairy-tale piece of land off a gravel road overlooking a lake at the southern end of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Pat had taken Derek’s two young children, 3 and 5, to visit relatives nearby. When Hallquist and Pat became grandparents, Pat decided she wanted her grandkids to call her Oma, the German word for grandmother. At the time, Hallquist was still navigating her transition and identified as “Whatever,” a term of her own making. Rather than Oma or Opa — the German word for grandfather — the grandkids called her “Owa.” They have not gotten to the point of asking about the unique term.
As Derek bobbed in the water off the dock out back, he recounted the family’s trepidation over his parent’s run (he now calls Hallquist his “parent,” occasionally reverting to habit and calling her “dad”). When Hallquist first began considering a run, she held a family conference call with Derek, her two daughters and her wife, Pat. They were concerned that entering the race, especially given the rancor in the current political climate, would expose them all to a flood of nasty transphobic attacks.
But Vermont’s political culture is notoriously genteel, and aside from some nasty remarks on social media, there have been few problems. Derek said he was worried that would change with the approach of the Aug. 14 primary and the heightened profile he expected his parent to take on if she wins it.
As it happened, Hallquist arrived home in the mid-afternoon, excited to announce that a teaser video for an upcoming news segment about her had been released on social media by the UK’s Channel 4 and that it was quickly racking up tens of thousands of views. She also revealed that the video was unleashing a torrent of online vitriol directed at her from men around the world.
During a swing through Washington at the beginning of the week, she had been advised to contact a specific FBI agent for help with the threats she would be expected to face if she wins the primary and gains widespread attention. Now that the wrong kind of attention had arrived early, she resolved to call the FBI agent that day.
But she did not seem scared, and she said she viewed the call to the FBI as a “precaution.”
Soon, Pat returned home with the grandkids, who greeted their father and their owa enthusiastically.
The threats became an afterthought as Hallquist talked about the possibility that Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden could stump for her if she wins her primary. Then she wandered off to push her granddaughter on a swing set out back.
According to the Mexican news site ContraMuro.com and Forbes Mexico, a 248-room LGBT resort featuring five bars and three restaurants will open next year on or near (this is unclear) Cuba’s resort island Cayo Guillermo.
The “luxurious five-star” hotel is reportedly the project of MGM Mutha Hotels, which currently operates about two dozen resorts in Europe and India, and already has two locations in Cuba, including one on Cayo Guillermo.
According to the first report linked above, further details on the project will be revealed once Cuba’s National Assembly votes to reform the country’s constitution, which would include the legalization of same-sex marriage. The first draft of the reform was approved last week.
Since she transitioned in 1998, at the age of 16, all of Danni Askini’s identity documents have read “female.” But last month, when Askini went to renew her passport, her request was denied. Askini says the U.S. Passport Office told her she had “failed to disclose” that she was transgender and needed to provide proof of gender transition — after 20 years of having a passport that says she’s female.
“Make no mistake, this was an intentional action by the State Department to withhold recognizing my gender,” says Askini, who was eventually granted a temporary two-year passport that allowed her to travel from her Seattle home to Sweden. The activist and executive director of Gender Justice League needed to leave Seattle, she says, after a series of death threats posted on the anti-trans website Kiwi Farms, as well as threats from local alt-right groups in the Pacific Northwest. She’d had her most recent passport for 10 years, but it was up for renewal.
Askini’s battle with the U.S. Department of State — which oversees the Passport Office — began last month, and a June 29 tweet she posted about the ordeal went viral.
Just this week, another trans woman encountered the same problem.
New York-based technology researcher Janus Rose says she’s had her passport, with a female gender marker, since November. But recently she finalized a legal name change, and sent in paperwork along with her current passport to renew the document with the new legal name. It seemed like a simple formality, until she received a phone call from a passport processing center in South Carolina.
“She basically told me that even though the government had changed my gender marker in the last year, that was a mistake,” says Rose. The passport official told Rose that the State Department should not have allowed her to change her gender on the document — and that the medical documentation she’d supplied at the time was invalid.
“This letter is something my clinic has been using as a boilerplate for years for so many people,” Rose says. “The clinic says I’m the first person to get a rejection.”
Rose had successfully changed the gender marker on her passport in 2017 using a letter signed by the nurse practitioner at her clinic. The clinic, she says, told her they’ve never encountered a person being told that that letter is invalid or that they need to have it written by an M.D. instead.
“It seems pretty clear that even if the policy hasn’t changed, something has changed in terms of guidance on how to enforce this — because it’s being enforced differently now,” says Rose.
According to the State Department’s policy, a person seeking a gender change on a passport must submit an ID “that resembles your current appearance,” a recent passport photo, proof of legal name change if applicable, and a “medical certification that indicates you are in the process of or have had appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.”
In response to an emailed request for comment, a State Department official said the department doesn’t comment on individual applications — but provided more context on the gender change policy in general.
“Every applicant who applies for a U.S. passport undergoes extensive vetting of their identity, claim to U.S. citizenship and entitlement to a passport,” said the State Department official. “When a passport applicant presents a certification from a medical physician stating that the applicant has undergone or is receiving appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition, a new passport will be issued with an updated gender marker. Sexual reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite for updating the gender marker in a passport and documents proving sexual reassignment surgery are not required.”
The State Department did not respond directly to a question about why someone’s gender marker would be “revoked” after already being changed years ago.
Rose says she’s frustrated that a simple name change turned into a reevaluation of the validity of her gender.
“I spoke to someone the other day, a cis person, who had their legal name changed and it was fine,” says Rose. “There was no asking for additional documentation or proof. She literally did the same thing just the other day. That’s what this is about. A cis person can go in and make this simple change, and a trans person cannot.”
Askini, in contrast, was disturbed by the fact that the State Department even knew she was transgender. In her specific case, her legal gender transition was granted by a judge when she was still a minor — and in relation to a sex trafficking case and a safety effort to conceal her identity, all of the child welfare records were sealed at the time.
“None of my documentation would disclose my trans status,” says Askini. “No databases that are local, state, or federal should note my gender as anything other than female.”
Askini believes the only reason she was eventually granted a temporary passport is because Seattle-based congresswoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s office put direct pressure on the passport agency on the well-known activist’s behalf.
“I believe that the Trump Administration or someone in the Seattle Passport Office has targeted me politically and politicized the process for obtaining passports,” says Askini. “Their actions and statements are NOT consistent with the actual letter of the code related to trans people.”
Rose has similar suspicions. Though she’s careful to steer clear of “the temptation to blame everything on Trump,” and notes that trans people have faced bureaucratic discrimination for years, she says it feels like a very sudden change has occurred at the State Department.
“It seems like they’re applying a different standard of enforcement to these cases now. I’ve never heard of a person having a problem changing their name on a passport until now,” says Rose.
Although the State Department did not directly respond to a question asking whether there had been a recent change in policy or internal guidance mandating new enforcement rules, a change would hardly be surprising. Since Trump took office, his administration has altered existing transgender-inclusive guidelines at the Department of Education, the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Census, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Even the Centers for Disease Control was instructed in an internal memo not to use the word transgender — along with terms like “diversity” and “evidence-based.” It’s not unfair to say the Trump administration has stopped just short of outlawing transgender people entirely.
“I think there’s an internal policy change to make it as difficult as possible for trans people,” says Rose. “The goal is to create friction. They can’t change all these laws right away, but they can make it really hard.”
A former employee at Tesla’s Fremont factory filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the electric carmaker, alleging he was fired in retaliation after seeking protection from anti-gay harassment, TheGuardian reported today.
The defendant, an assembly line worker named Jorge Ferro, claims he was taunted for being gay and threatened with violence. “Watch your back,” one supervisor told him after mocking his “gay tight” clothing, the paper said. After complaining to an HR representative, Ferro was repeatedly moved to different assembly lines, but the harassment didn’t stop.
Ultimately, HR told him there was “no place for handicapped people at Tesla” after noticing an old scar on his wrist, according to TheGuardian. He was sent home, and eventually terminated.
In a strongly worded statement to the paper, Tesla denied the allegations and defended itself against the charges. “There is no company on earth with a better track record than Tesla,” a spokesperson said.
The lawsuit is the latest to paint an unflattering picture of life at the popular carmaker. Earlier this week, three former African-American employees sued Tesla, claiming they’d suffered constant, often daily racial discrimination and harassment, and that the company did little to nothing to stop the behavior.
In both cases, Tesla argued the defendants were actually employed by third-party contractors. To be sure, Tesla’s full-time employees have to sign arbitration agreements that force them to settle harassment claims privately. Even so, the company says it attempted to separate Ferro from his alleged harasser. Ferro’s lawyer told TheGuardian Tesla erred by moving the defendant after he complained. “It’s perceived by many to be retaliatory,” said Chris Dolan, Ferro’s attorney. “It sends a message to other employees that if you complain, you’re the one who’s going to have your job changed. In essence, you’re penalizing the party who’s making the complaint.”
In a statement, Tesla’s spokesperson also attacked the media for reporting on lawsuits against the company, as well as the lawyers for filing the complaints:
“Media reporting on claims of discrimination at Tesla should bear a few things in mind: First, as one of the most highly reported-on companies in the world, anyone who brings claims against Tesla is all but assured that they will garner significant media coverage. Second, in the history of Tesla, there has never been a single proven case of discrimination against the company. Not one. This fact is conveniently never mentioned in any reporting. Third, as we have said repeatedly, even though we are a company of 33,000 employees, including more than 10,000 in the Fremont factory alone, and it is not humanly possible to stop all bad conduct, we care deeply about these issues and take them extremely seriously. If there is ever a case where Tesla is at fault, we will take responsibility. On the other hand, Tesla will always fight back against unmeritorious claims. In this case, neither of the two people at the center of the claim, Mr. Ferro and the person who he alleges to have mistreated him, actually worked for Tesla. Both worked for a third-party. Nevertheless, Tesla still stepped in to try to keep these individuals apart from one another and to ensure a good working environment. Regardless of these facts, every lawyer knows that if they name Tesla as a defendant in their lawsuit, it maximizes the chances of generating publicity for their case. They abuse our name, because they know it is catnip for journalists. Tesla takes any and every form of discrimination or harassment extremely seriously. There is no company on Earth with a better track record than Tesla, as they would have to have fewer than zero cases where an independent judge or jury has found a genuine case of discrimination. This is physically impossible.”
Tesla is still in the middle of lawsuit from a former employee who alleged that women experienced “unwanted and pervasive harassment.” And just last week, the company fired hundreds of workers during a time CEO Elon Musk has described as “production hell” as it attempts to ramp up production of the Model 3.
An anti-LGBT+ Christian legal advocacy group has asked the US Supreme Court to review a ruling that bans employers from discriminating against transgender people on religious grounds.
Alliance Defending Freedom filed a petition to the court last week, which means that the Supreme Court, if it decides to go ahead and hear the case, now has the option to rule whether the country’s civil law right prohibiting sex discrimination in the workplace also includes discrimination based on gender identity.
This Court of Appeals ruling was issued after a transgender employee from Detroit was fired by her employer because she is transgender.
Aimee Stephens was fired from her job at a funeral home after coming out as trans to her boss.
She took her case all the way to the Court of Appeals with the support of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], after a district court dismissed her legal challenge, claiming that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act gave the funeral home an exemption from the federal law – Title VII – of the Civil Rights Act, which covers sex discrimination in the workplace.
However, the Court of Appeals overruled this district court decision, saying that sex discrimination includes discrimination against trans people – and that there is no exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“Discrimination against employees, either because of their failure to conform to sex stereotypes or their transgender and transitioning status, is illegal under Title VII,” Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the Court of Appeals.
(Mark Makela/Getty Images)
“Discrimination against employees, either because of their failure to conform to sex stereotypes or their transgender and transitioning status, is illegal under Title VII,” Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the court.
“The unrefuted facts show that the Funeral Home fired Stephens because she refused to abide by her employer’s stereotypical conception of her sex.”
A representative from the ACLU, who argued the case for Stephens, said at the time that it was “an exciting and important victory for transgender people and allied communities across the country.”
A community march in Amsterdam, where the 22nd International AIDS Conference was held. Photo by: Matthijs Immink / IAS
AMSTERDAM — The fight to end HIV/AIDS was given a boost by a star-studded week of presentations, panel sessions and the occasional protest at this year’s International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam. However, tensions within the community remain, and with few new funding pledges announced, there are questions about how to translate strong rhetoric into action.
Some 16,000 stakeholders from more than 160 countries gathered in the Dutch capital last week for AIDS 2018, the conference’s 22nd edition and one of the biggest events in the global health calendar, featuring sessions on the latest HIV science, policy, and practice.
Held under the theme of “Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges,” the real story of this year’s conference was the growing realization that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is in crisis, with 1.8 million new infections in 2017. There are also alarming spikes in new HIV cases among key groups including adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa and drug users in eastern Europe and parts of Asia, according to recent figures from UNAIDS. At the same time, development assistance for HIV dropped $3 billion between 2012 and 2017, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
“The feel is definitely less congratulatory than past conferences and more sobering,” Rachel Baggaley, coordinator for HIV prevention and testing at WHO, told Devex, but added that it was good to see the community responding with force. The activist spirit which has defined the fight against AIDS in the past was never far away, she noted, with many sessions interrupted by campaigners.
“It is very positive to see the AIDS movement hasn’t gone away … I went feeling rather down and have come away challenged and inspired; there’s a lot of things we must do and a lot of people who continue to take this [AIDS agenda] forward,” she said.
One protest challenged the leadership of the U.N.’s dedicated AIDS agency, UNAIDS, with more than 20 female campaigners interrupting Executive Director Michel Sidibé — who has been criticized for his response to a sexual harassment scandal — during his address on stage at the opening plenary. Sidibé insists he has made changes and has resisted calls to step down, but his presence was a source of controversy.
The key now will be turning the strong rhetoric and passion seen throughout AIDS 2018 into action on the ground, according to youth HIV activist Mercy Ngulube.
“We are all going to build bridges this week … but where is your bridge going to lead us? Don’t let your bridge be a bridge to nowhere,” she said during the opening plenary.
A Devex team was on the ground throughout the week and rounds up the key takeaways.
1. Target key populations
Attendees agreed that, without drastic change, the world will see global HIV targets missed and a possible resurgence of the epidemic. But Peter Piot, founding executive director of UNAIDS and now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, warned the targets themselves could leave key populations even further behind.
Speaking on Thursday, Piot reminded the audience that the 90-90-90 targets set by UNAIDS in 2014 will miss 27 percent of HIV patients. The framework calls for countries to get 90 percent of people living with HIV diagnosed; 90 percent of those diagnosed to be accessing treatment; and 90 percent of people on treatment to have suppressed viral loads by 2020.
“The 90-90-90 targets are actually 90-81-73,” he said, adding that “what the future of the epidemic is going to be determined by is the 10-10-10” — those not hit by the targets.
The 10-10-10 is likely to be made up of key populations including sex workers, men who have sex with men, LGBTI groups, people who inject drugs, and young people — all of whom are less likely to access HIV services due to social stigma, discrimination, criminalization, and other barriers, Piot said. These groups currently account for 47 percent of people with new infections, according to UNAIDS data.
Reaching these key populations was high on the agenda last week. Dudu Dlamini, a campaigner for sex workers’ health and rights who was awarded the Prudence Mabele prize for HIV activism during the conference, spoke to Devex about the need to decriminalize sex work in order to remove barriers to HIV services for sex workers.
Leading HIV scientists also put out a statement in the Journal of the International AIDS Society about laws that criminalize people with HIV for not disclosing their status and for exposing or transmitting the disease. Such laws, which exist in 68 countries, “have not always been guided by the best available scientific and medical evidence,” it said, and when used inappropriately can reinforce stigma and undermine efforts to fight the disease.
2. Prevention pay off
With new infections standing at 1.8 million last year, the recent UNAIDS report describes a “prevention crisis.” Traditionally, prevention has received only a tiny proportion of HIV funding, with the bulk going toward treatment. But there was a new buzz around the prevention agenda at this year’s event, in part driven by excitement around oral pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which can prevent HIV infection among those at high risk. The antiretroviral medication has been successfully rolled out in North America, western Europe, and Australia, and has been shown to help reduce new infections among men who have sex with men.
WHO’s Baggaley said PrEP had “energized the prevention agenda.” However, questions remain about the feasibility of rolling it out in low-income countries, and about its efficacy for women.
“There is a prevention crisis and we need to find better ways of addressing it,” said Christine Stegling, executive director of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. But while PrEP is a promising tool, a full approach to prevention needs to include a range of methods, combined with interventions that tackle human rights issues and gender inequality, she said.
3. A youth bulge
It was impossible to miss the strong youth presence at this year’s AIDS conference, which organizers said had a larger number of young people attending than ever before, and featured dozens of youth-focused events. This is linked to a growing recognition that adolescents face a disproportionately high risk of becoming infected with HIV, especially in Africa where the population is set to rapidly increase, and where new infection rates are on the rise among young people.
Ugandan youth advocate Brian Ahimbisibwe, a volunteer ambassador for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, said: “Without the youth, the future of all these conferences, and more importantly [of] services and programs, [is] compromised.”
However, 28-year-old Tikhala Itaye, co-founder of women’s rights group Her Liberty in Malawi, said the youth voice had not been fully integrated and that young people were still being “talked at” during many of the sessions, as opposed to being listened to.
“There’s now acceptance that young people need to be at the center … they do have the demographic weight and power to influence issues around HIV,” she said, but “you still find the different youth events happening in different rooms … Why aren’t we all coming together as one to build the bridges and have a global voice?”
Signs at the 22nd International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Photo by: Marcus Rose / IAS
4. The need for integration
A number of sessions talked about the need to integrate HIV programming, which has traditionally been siloed due to having its own funding streams, into broader health care. This was a key message of The Lancet Commission report on strengthening the HIV response published ahead of the conference, and was also the message delivered by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during the opening plenary.
“We have not truly helped a child if we treat her for HIV, but do not vaccinate her against measles. We have not truly helped a gay man if we give him PrEP but leave his depression untreated … Universal health coverage means ensuring all people have access to all the services they need, for all diseases and conditions,” he said.
Baggaley said integrating HIV into the broader health agenda posed both “an opportunity and also a challenge and risk for those populations most marginalized,” explaining that key populations currently served by externally funded nonstate health services could see their assistance diminished under UHC if the country in question did not believe UHC includes key populations or had punitive laws against gay men or sex workers, for example.
There was much discussion around the need to combine HIV and tuberculosis efforts, especially in the run up to the first U.N. high-level TB event in September. TB is the number one killer of people with HIV, who are up to 50 times more likely to develop it, according to WHO.
Speaking in between interruptions from the crowd, former U.S. President Clinton highlighted the need to address HIV and TB in tandem during the closing plenary and called on world leaders, notably India which has the highest TB burden, to attend the upcoming U.N. TB meeting.
“If you think … anyone ..that we can possibly bring the developing world to where we want it to be by abandoning the fight against HIV/AIDS and the collateral struggle against TB, you need to think again,” he said.
New findings from the Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health program, presented during the conference, showed positive results from a community-based program which combined HIV testing and treatment with other diseases including TB, diabetes, and hypertension. The findings of a three-year randomized controlled trial in Kenya and Uganda showed that communities receiving testing and care for HIV alongside related conditions saw nearly 60 percent fewer new TB cases among HIV-infected people and that hypertension control improved by 26 percent.
5. Medical developments
Concerns about GlaxoSmithKline’s so-called “wonder drug” dolutegravir, which a study recently suggested might be linked to serious birth defects among children in Botswana, sparked debate amongst conference goers about whether potential mothers should be prescribed the drug.
WHO already advises that women of childbearing age wishing to take the antiretroviral have access to effective contraception, and will be re-evaluating its guidance as new evidence emerges, Baggaley told Devex. But there are concerns the agency could introduce blanket restrictions for women of childbearing age, which would force them to take other antiretroviral drugs that have worse side effects. The controversy could also lead to delays in the rollout of other forms of the drug, such as a pediatric version.
The conference also featured new data from the APPROACH study, which is evaluating the safety of several different HIV vaccines currently undergoing clinical trials in the U.S., East Africa, South Africa, and Thailand — but researchers admitted a vaccine will take years to develop.
6. The Trump effect
The shadow of U.S. President Donald Trump’s beefed-up “global gag rule,” otherwise known as the Mexico City Policy, loomed large over the conference, and a number of sessions discussed how it is negatively affecting HIV programs. Unlike previous iterations of the policy — which restricts U.S. funding to non-U.S. organizations that offer services related to abortion — Trump’s version is applied to almost all U.S. global health assistance, including PEPFAR.
Santos Simione from AMODEFA, an NGO that offers sexual health and HIV services in Mozambique, said his organization had lost U.S. funding due to the gag rule and was forced to close half of its youth clinics, which offered sexual and reproductive health services alongside HIV testing, counseling, and antiretroviral therapy.
“We could not provide condoms … testing … we just stopped everything,” Simione said.
Participants also spoke of a chilling effect, whereby organizations have stopped offering services that may not actually be prohibited under the rule, and raised concerns about PEPFAR’s staying power within a hostile Trump administration.
Meanwhile, there was heated debate about arrangements for the next conference, which the International AIDS Society has said will take place in San Francisco, California, in 2020. The decision has been met with fierce opposition and threats to boycott the event from AIDS campaigners who say many key population groups affected by HIV will have difficulties attending due to strict immigration policies. In 2009, former U.S. President Barack Obama lifted a restriction banning people with HIV from entering the country, but sex workers and people who use drugs still face legal challenges entering.
The LGBT Foundation said there has been a recent rise in cases of shigella among men who have sex with men.
Shigellosis, or shigella, is an intestinal infection caused when bacteria found in poo gets into your mouth.
Last month, health officials in San Diego issued an advisory over the sexual transmitted infection. It said that gay and bisexual men, homeless individuals, and people with compromised immune systems could be at an increased risk for the intestinal disease.
In 2017, San Diego recorded the highest number of cases in 20 years, including a disproportional increase in the gay and bisexual community and among the homeless population.
How do you get it?
Shigella can be caught from rimming, oral sex, or putting your fingers in your mouth after handling used condoms, douches or sex toys, the LGBT Foundation says.
Signs of infection include having an upset stomach, fever, stomach ache, and diarrhoea which might have blood in it.
These symptoms can last for around a week. Shigella is closely related to the E.coli bacteria.
Disease and infections magazine outbreaknewstoday.com reported that the number of cases typically increases in the late summer and fall.
How to lower risk of shigella infection
The LGBT Foundation says you can lower your risk of infection by washing your hands, bum and genitals after sex.
You could also use dental dams, condoms, and fisting gloves to protect you when having oral sex, fisting, and fingering.
It is also recommended that you change condoms between partners, and between anal and oral sex, whether they’re on a penis, hands, or sex toys.
Hygiene as prevention: Wash often and don’t re-use condoms. Photo: Mark Johnson
Shigella treatment
Shigella is treated with a course of antibiotics, the Foundation says. However, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned last month of an increasing number of antibiotic-resistant shigella infections.
If you think you have shigella, go to a sexual health (GUM) clinic or your GP and explain your symptoms. You may also want to say that you think you may have picked up an infection from sex.
A Fortune 500 company has named an openly gay woman to the role of president and CEO.
Effective August 1, Beth Ford will take the reins of food and agricultural cooperative Land O’Lakes, Inc., ranked 216 in the annual ranking of the largest companies in the US compiled by the American publication Fortune.
She joined the company in 2011 and has more than 20 years’ experience specifically in the areas of technology and research and development. The company statement announcing her appointment on Thursday made no reference to her appointment breaking new ground for the LGBT+ business community, although it stated that the new CEO is married to a woman: “Ford and her spouse, Jill Schurtz, have three teenage children and live in Minneapolis.”
Chief Executive Officer of Time Inc., Laura Lang speaks during a Fortune 500 event on May 7, 2012 in New York City (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Time)
Ford joins a small club of openly gay business leaders running a Fortune 500 company. “By Fortune’s count, Ford will be the third openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the first woman,” the publication wrote—Apple’s Tim Cook and the Dow Chemical Company’s Jim Fitterling being the other two.
“Ford said it didn’t even come up in her discussions with the board. But she conceded that ‘it’s not nothing,’” Fortune’s article read.
“If it gives someone encouragement and belief that they can be their authentic self and live their life and things are possible, than that’s a terrific moment,” Ford told the publication, adding that she remembers what it was like not to be out in her workplace when she was in her 20s.
“I think I’ve been fortunate since my mid-30s of being just who I am,” Ford said, adding: “Work is hard enough, and then when you have to feel as though you can’t be who are, that’s got to be incredibly difficult.”
Apple’s Tim Cook and the Dow Chemical Company’s Jim Fitterling are the only other two openly gay business leaders running a Fortune 500 company (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
In a separate statement to CNN, Ford said: “I am extraordinarily grateful to work at a company that values family, including my own.”
The LGBT+ rights group congratulated Ford on her appointment. “Her authentic leadership as an out lesbian is well-known in the LGBT corporate community, and the fact that she is assuming this role as an out lesbian sends an especially powerful message,” says Deena Fidas, HRC director of workplace equality, told CNN.
“This is not a story of someone getting into the higher echelons of leadership and then coming out, this is someone walking into this role with her full self,” Fidas added.
Los Angeles businessman David Cooley was flying from New York back to LA when he and his partner, who had already been seated in their assigned premium seats “for a while,” were approached by a flight attendant.
“My companion was asked to move from his premium seat to coach, so a couple could sit together,” Cooley wrote in a Facebook post about the incident. “I explained that we were a couple and wanted to sit together. He was given a choice to either give up the premium seat and move to coach or get off the plane.”
Cooley and his partner “could not bear the feeling of humiliation for an entire cross-country flight” so they left the plane.
“I cannot believe that an airline in this day and age would give a straight couple preferential treatment over a gay couple and go so far as to ask us to leave,” he wrote. “I have never been so discriminated against while traveling before.”
When contacted by GSN, Alaska Airlines said the businessman and his partner were “mistakenly assigned the same seats as another couple in Premium Class.”
“We reseated one of the guests from Premium Class in the Main Cabin,” the airline’s statement read.
In his posts on Twitter and Facebook, Cooley — owner of the popular West Hollywood club The Abbey — implored his followers to boycott Alaska Airlines and Virgin Airlines, the company it just purchased. He noted that they booked flights through Delta, who he called an “LGBT friendly airline” worthy of patronage.
