Perspectives

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When Will Sports Stop Policing Femininity?

In a report published this week, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recommends that eligibility regulations for women athletes like those enforced by World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, be revoked immediately. The regulations target women athletes with some variations in their sex characteristics that cause their natural testosterone levels to be higher than typical. The regulations deny these women the right to participate as women for running events between 400 meters and 1 mile unless they submit to invasive testing and medically unnecessary procedures. There is no clear scientific consensus that women with naturally […]

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Olympic Swimmer Proudly Comes Out to Set an Inspiring Example for Women Like Her

Retired Olympic swimmer Martha McCabe has come out as a lesbian, saying she hopes her own visibility will encourage other sports stars to do the same. The Canadian Pan Am Games medallist specialised in the 200-metre breaststroke and placed fifth in the London 2012 Olympics, but it wasn’t until after she stopped competing that she began to explore her sexuality. In her eight years on Canada’s national team McCabe estimates she had at least ten LGBT+ teammates. She believes that knowing more out sportswomen could have helped her understand her identity earlier on. “I think because I didn’t see it in […]

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Gay Pride for Me Celebrates the Freedom to Enjoy an Open Relationship

The very act of being a Queer person is radical. Who we love and who we have sex with are acts of political defiance. Being visible, being proud, refusing to hide who we are: These are rejections of tyranny, and Pride Month is an opportunity to celebrate that. Being LGBTQ also means freedom — to define for myself how relationships will look. There is strength there, and Pride is about these things, too. We didn’t want our relationship to feel like a trap. We both wanted to be free to explore and to experience new things, and didn’t want to […]

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LGBTQ Rights: Was Latin America First?

“Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them.” Reads the first lines of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the ban on discrimination that protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees. There is no doubt that this decision opens up the legal system for a new era of trans rights. However, two years ago in Latin America a major initiative undertaken by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights passed almost unnoticed. More than unexpected consequences, that 2018 ruling is showing today its consequent and symbolic impact. It may be seen as a small gesture in a region where some […]

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No Pride for Some of Us, Without Liberation for All of Us

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Beginning today, June 1, we mark LGBTQ+ Pride month in Marin County and globally. It is a critical time to recall the origins of the movement for our hard fought rights – a movement that has achieved massive advances for our community, but which still has far to go. We have achieved things it was difficult to imagine just two decades ago: the ability to marry whomever we love, much broader public support for the idea that LGBTQ+ people deserve equal rights and dignity, and representation of our stories and identities in the media. But we still lack basic protections against discrimination in […]

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The Supreme Court LGBTQ Ruling was the Result of Decades of Work. We Have More to Do.

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The law often operates as the apparatus that facilitates instead of prevents the untimely deaths of so many in historically excluded and oppressed communities – including the LGBTQ community. The deaths of both Aimee Stephens and Don Zarda, whose workplace discrimination cases the Supreme Court decided posthumously in their favor on Monday, are a case in point. Aimee, who died of complications related to kidney disease just weeks ago and Don, who died in an accident, did not live to see the outcome of their cases, in which the highest court ruled that their livelihoods — and, thus, in America today, […]

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George Floyd Protests to End Police Brutality Are the Best Way to honor Stonewall for Pride

Last June, it felt as if the entire world was converging on New York City’s West Village to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, rebranded as World Pride. Around 5 million people from all over the globe descended upon the Big Apple in what was the largest LGBTQ gathering of its kind, and the city’s streets were literally paved with Pride. Storefronts and bars and signposts were festooned with corporate-sponsored rainbow flags, balloons, boas, paint, tinsel and posters — you name it, and there was a rainbow flag and the logo of some corporate sponsor on it. Seemingly every company was […]

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Unhappy Pride

What a difference a year makes.  Twelve months ago, we were preparing for the city’s annual Pride celebration and marking 50 years since Stonewall with parades, galas and Madonna performing in New York City. At the Blade, we were also celebrating 50 years since the newspaper’s founding in 1969.  A year later, more than 100,000 Americans are dead of coronavirus, a pandemic that brought the world to a standstill. Unemployment is at Great Depression-era levels. Small businesses everywhere are hanging on by a thread. Police brutality against black citizens continues, triggering mass protests after George Floyd was murdered by a […]

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Transgender Sports Inclusion Violates Others’ Rights, Trump Admin Says

Connecticut’s policy allowing transgender girls to compete as girls in high school sports violates the civil rights of athletes who have always identified as female, the U.S. Education Department has determined in a decision that could force the state to change course to keep federal funding and influence others to do the same. A letter from the department’s civil rights office, a copy of which was obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, came in response to a complaint filed last year by several cisgender female track athletes who argued that two transgender female runners had an unfair physical advantage. The […]

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Gay Identity Elusive for Little Richard and Roy of Siegfried & Roy

It was perhaps ironic that Little Richard and Roy Horn (of Siegfried & Roy) died within hours of each other this month. Though they were from totally separate pop culture factions, seeing their obits side by side in some outlets, such as the May 10 New York Times, was a sobering reminder of how an older generation of gay men — Horn, who died at 75 was on the outer cusp of the Boomers; Richard was 12 years older — dealt with (or didn’t deal with) their sexuality in a pre-Stonewall era when practically nobody was officially out but demeanor, style, stage persona […]

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