More than 60 House Democrats are calling on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to lift the State Department’s blanket ban on U.S. diplomats lobbying for gay marriage in an official capacity.
The lawmakers’ request comes after testimony in June from Scott Busby, the acting principal deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, revealed that the department’s official policy is to not “advocate for or against same-sex marriage overseas.”
In a letter addressed to Blinken on Wednesday, the group of lawmakers said the policy was “outdated” and should be “rescinded as a matter of urgency.”
“We do not ask the State Department to speak to marriage in every country or context,” the representatives wrote. “But we do ask the Department to provide the opportunity to U.S. personnel to defend our values and the dignity of our LGBTQI families at appropriate moments when the power of our example might make a meaningful difference.”
The effort, which has the support of 61 Democrats, is being led by members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, including Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada and Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island,who is one of the 11 openly LGBTQ members of Congress.
The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, and 28 other countries have done the same, including in Asia and Central America.
In 71 other nations, however, same-sex relations are criminalized, according to Human Dignity Trust, a global advocacy group for LGBTQ rights. In 11 of those countries — including Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran — homosexuality is punishable by death, according to the group.
The lawmakers acknowledged in their letter that while many countries “are not at the point” to legalize gay unions, “where marriage is a significant public issue abroad, we trust you would want your Administration to be standing on the right side of history.”
Mark Bromley, chair of the Council for Global Equality, a Washington-based advocacy group that promotes LGBTQ rights abroad, agreed, saying that U.S. diplomats should be advising international lawmakers on passing same-sex marriage in countries where it is a “real possibility,” including Japan, Chile and the Czech Republic.
“It might have made sense 20 years ago, but now we’re at a point where there are countries where having the U.S. speak up and explain our own path to marriage equality could make a difference,” Bromley said.
However, he added that the State Department’s policy “came from a good place,” arguing that in countries where homosexuality is still criminalized, talks of gay marriage may disincentivize lawmakers from legalizing same-sex relations.
“What the embassies have to do first and foremost is listen to the LGBTQI community and ask them, ‘What can we do that would be helpful or not helpful?'” Bromley added.
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged to advance global LGBTQ rights and reverse the Trump administration’s “utter failure to defend American diplomats who speak out for LGBTQ+ rights abroad.”
In February, the president issued a memorandum to “promote and protect the human rights” of LGBTQ people around the world. The memorandum also directed U.S. agencies to review and rescind “inconsistent directives” that counter the administration’s objective to expand LGBTQ rights globally.
The State Department did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment regarding the letter from House Democrats.
A survey asking students if they think “queers” should be allowed to use the school restroom with “normal people” circulated at an Illinois high school this week, the latest of a recent slew of reported attacks on LGBTQ students across the country.
The survey was distributed at Anna-Jonesboro Community High School in Anna, Illinois, on Wednesday by an unidentified number of students who called themselves the “Anti-Queer Association,” according Rob Wright, the school’s superintendent.
It asks students to vote either “(YES) I WANT QUEERS TO GO IN THE BATHROOM” or “(NO) I DON’T WANT QUEER KIDS TO GO TO THE BATHROOM WITH US NORMAL PEOPLE.”
A survey made its way around a Southern Illinois high school asking if students want “queers” to be able to use school bathrooms.via WPSD
Wright told NBC News that only a few copies of the poll were handed out before the school discovered them Wednesday morning, but an image of the survey was posted on Facebook. He added that the number of students involved in the debacle was “very limited” and that disciplinary measures were taken against them.
“I really can’t give any specific information regarding any individual students or what those measures were taken, but I can tell you that this type of harassment is taken very seriously by the district,” Wright said. “We’re not going to tolerate it under any circumstances.”
The Rainbow Cafe LGBTQ Center in nearby Carbondale, Illinois, shared a post on Facebook letting local queer youth know they are supported and the center is “working with statewide agencies to determine the best course of action.”
Michael Coleman, a board member of the Rainbow Cafe LGBTQ Center, told WPSD-TV, an NBC affiliate that covers Southern Illinois and the surrounding area, that students had been reaching out to the center in response.
“They really feel very unsafe in that environment in Anna-Jonesboro and that they felt that nothing was going to get done,” Coleman said. “That by us taking that stand, that initiative, they really feel like it’s not going to happen anymore.”
At a high school near Jacksonville, Florida, several weeks ago, students were accused of harassing classmates in a gay-straight alliance club and stomping on Pride flags. In Georgia last month, a high schooler was charged with attacking another student draped in a Pride flag in a school cafeteria. And this month, students at a high school in Missouri held a peaceful protest following what a parent described as a bullying incident of a gay student that led to a physical altercation.
These reports come as Thursday marked Spirit Day 2021, an annual celebration where people show their support against the bullying of LGBTQ youth by wearing the color purple.
Recent surveys also show that bullying of LGBTQ students remains a pervasive issue in the U.S.
A study this year by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that 52 percent of LGBTQ middle and high schoolers reported having been bullied in person or online in the past year. Transgender youths reported higher rates of bullying than cisgender gay, lesbian and bisexual youths — 61 percent and 45 percent, respectively.
And 29 percent of LGBTQ middle schoolers in the survey who were bullied attempted suicide in the previous year, compared to 12 percent of those who said they were not bullied, The Trevor Project found. Over 34,000 LGBTQ youths were surveyed for the study last year.
Wright said private bathrooms are available for students in the school’s principal and nurses offices. He added that counseling has always been and will remain available for students who inquire for it.
“We see this in the real world with adults having a hard time expressing their differences in an appropriate manner,” Wright said. “We have to start doing that with our students at this age, too, and know that everybody’s welcome and everybody deserves to be treated with respect and dignity.”
A gay man from Afghanistan who was burned by a Taliban member has said he is “shocked” by the lack of support and solidarity shown by the international LGBT+ community.
Sohil – whose surname has been withheld to protect his identity – is a young gay Afghan whose life was thrown into disarray when the Taliban seized power in August.
Afghanistan was never accepting of homosexuality, but he was in contact with a small network of other gay people. Now, they’re all “living in the shadows” – hiding themselves to evade capture and torture by the extremist group.
“Imagine you have all the great hopes for your life, you have everything, and then one day you wake up and everything is gone,” he tells PinkNews. “I lost my university, I lost my life, I lost my community. Even the boys I was in contact with, they are all living in the shadows. They are all hiding themselves.”
His daily life is very different to what it was before the Taliban took over. Sohil says he was just a “normal person” before extremists weaponised his sexuality. He was a medical student who had ambitions to get out of Afghanistan and build a life for himself. Now, he’s been forced to flee his home – he told his family his history of supporting human rights could make him a Taliban target.
“I live like a prisoner. I was living in my own house with my family. After the Taliban attacked me, I couldn’t live in my house because they would recognise my face and they knew who I am. Now I am living in a different home. My family doesn’t know about my sexuality. If I tell them I will lose their support too.”
Sohil is in danger every day he remains in Afghanistan. He was recently left traumatised after a Taliban member burned him with scalding water. The incident occurred when he went to a local government office in an effort to get a passport and a copy of his birth certificate.
“I was wearing just regular jeans and a T-shirt,” Sohil says. “Suddenly someone grabbed my hand. I was wearing a mask because I didn’t want anyone seeing my face. My heart was pounding. I saw there was a guy who had a gun on his shoulder.
“He asked me: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I have come for my birth certificate.’ He said: ‘Why are you wearing that T-shirt? You’re wearing western clothes.’ I said: ‘It’s just normal clothes, everyone wears it.’ I knew that it wasn’t about my clothes. I know that he somehow had identified that I am not straight.”
Sohil continues: “He took me in his office and asked me again: ‘Why are you wearing this and why are you here?’ I said again: ‘I’ve just come for my ID card and my birth certificate.’ He said: ‘You’re lying.’ He slapped me on my face and I fell down on the ground. His two soldiers beat me. He asked again: ‘Who are you?’ I didn’t confess that I am one of the LGBT activists. He then beat me again and kicked me in my stomach.”
The attack escalated when the soldier picked up a teapot full of boiling water and went to pour it on Sohil’s face.
“I just turned my face and the tea fell down on my chest and my shoulder,” Sohil says. “Someone grabbed my hand and pushed me out of there somehow, I don’t know how. I was in so much pain and trauma. I couldn’t sleep for one week after that.”
Sohil is terrified for the future and he is desperate to get out of Afghanistan so he can start a new life away from the Taliban. He is shocked and disappointed that the rest of the world has left people like him to languish there, and he is frustrated by the lack of response from the global LGBT+ community.
“We don’t know if we will be alive tomorrow or not,” he says. “I think the whole world doesn’t think about that. I think our own LGBT+ community doesn’t think about that. In two months, no one contacted me… I had a hope that our LGBT+ community will help us but day by day, I am losing my hope. I don’t know what to do. I hoped that our LGBT+ community will help us, but there is no one standing for us. I used to stand for my guys in Afghanistan, now I want them to stand for us.”
He adds: “I am totally shocked, I had hoped the LGBTQ community will help us, they will listen to our voice, but they are totally gone. No one is listening, no one is looking out for us. In this time we need the most help, there is no one. I don’t know why, do people just forget about us?”
The situation for LGBT+ people in Afghanistan right now is “terrifying”, he says.
“They are searching for people like us that stand against the Taliban. All of my community have deleted their social media accounts. People have told me: ‘Please do not contact me, we are not safe. If someone finds out about our gender or sexuality we will be killed.’”
On June 11, 2019, Botswana moved toward being a state that no longer held some of its citizens (and, by extension, visitors) as criminals if they identified within the LGBTQ spectrum. However, the government didn’t take too long before it declared its intention to appeal the High Court judgment that asserted that consensual same-sex sexual activity in private was not to be a criminal act.
The appeal hearing took place on Oct. 12.
There are some key things to understand about what the High Court did for people in Botswana. The judgment, written and delivered by Justice Leburu, not only put a clear delineation between the state’s powers to intrude in people’s private sexual lives, but it also stated that laws that served no purpose in the governance of the people they oversaw were most likely worthy of “a museum peg” more than being active laws of the land.
In the hearing on Oct. 9, a full bench of five judges of the Court of Appeal was treated to the government’s case—as presented by advocate Sydney Pilane of the Attorney General’s Chambers—along with hearing the rebuttals from the legal counsel representing Letsweletse Motshidiemang, who brought the original case against the government, and LEGABIBO, an NGO admitted as amicus curiae, a friend of the court. The appeal, two years in the making, would have been expected to be based on facts rather than opinions of what could and could not be accepted by hypothetical Batswana. Pilane even went so far as to contest that President Mokgweetsi Masisi’s utterances about how people in same-sex relationships were “suffering in silence” were taken out of context as he was talking about gender-based violence and not endorsing their relationships.
The 2019 ruling of the High Court, the most supreme court of incidence in the country, not only declared people who were or had interest in engaging in consensual same-sex sexual activity not criminals, but it also allowed non-queer people to engage in sex acts that would otherwise be considered “against the order of nature” freely. The latter clause had often been interpreted as being solely about non-heterosexuals but on greater interrogation one realizes that any sex act that doesn’t result in the creation of a child was considered against this ‘order of nature’ and that nullified much of heterosexual sexual exploration—further painting these clauses as out of touch with contemporary Botswana as Leburu expressed.
In some of his appeal arguments, Pilane stated that Batswana “do not have a problem with gay people”, yet he based his contention on the fact that Batswana “respect the courts’ decisions;” as such they would not take up arms at the court’s decision to decriminalize consensual same-sex sexual activity. Pilane maintained that the decision to decriminalize should be left to the Parliament on the recommendation of the courts. The bench was swift to query whether a body of politicians elected by a majority would be the best representatives of a minority that was oppressed by laws that the very politicians benefitted from.
Botswana’s legal system allows for the High Court ruling to remain the law of the land until such a point as it’s struck down. The Court of Appeal ruling in favor of Batswana’s sexual liberties will be a nail in the proverbial coffin of residual colonial sex-related laws plaguing Botswana. This will not be the end by any means though. Where the attorney general can form a case stating that decriminalizing consensual same-sex relations could be likened to people locking themselves in their houses with animals and having their way with them, we know that mindset changes need to be prioritized to ensure that all Batswana understand their constitutionally protected rights to privacy, expression, and freedom of association as relates to their personal and sexual lives.
The 2010 Employment Act of Botswana already protects people from being discriminated against based on their sex or gender identity. The nation’s sexual violence laws were made gender neutral, thus covering non-consensual sex (rape) in all its possibilities. In upholding the ruling of the High Court, the Court of Appeal will allow the LGBTQ and SOGIESC (sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and sex characteristics) movements in Botswana some respite as attention is then channeled toward other pressing matters such as name changes, access to healthcare, and other culturally pertinent issues.
The Court of Appeal is expected to hand down a judgement following their deliberations in 4-6 weeks (mid to late November), however, this remains at their discretion. As it stands, since the High Court ruling in 2019, Botswana has experienced increased social accommodation for LGBTQ matters and figures—however, this is not to say there have not been any negative instances. With the continued sensitization, the expectation is that the courts, the government and NGO players will all contribute to a broad, national, culturing of LGBTQ rights in Botswana devoid of colonial residues.
erry McAuliffe described Republican Glenn Youngkin as the “most homophobic” and most “anti-choice candidate” in Virginia history during an Oct. 21 telephone interview with the Washington Blade.
“I’m running against the most homophobic, anti-choice candidate in Virginia history,” said McAuliffe. “I ran against Ken Cuccinelli. That’s saying something.”
McAuliffe, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, in 2013 defeated Cuccinelli, Virginia’s then-attorney general who vehemently opposed LGBTQ rights, in that year’s gubernatorial race. Youngkin, the former co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, is running against McAuliffe in the race to succeed current Gov. Ralph Northam.
State Del. Hala Ayala (D-Prince William County) is running for lieutenant governor, while Attorney General Mark Herring is seeking re-election. They are running against Republicans Winsome Sears and Jason Miyares respectively.
The entire Virginia House of Delegates is also on the ballot on Nov. 2. The outcome of those races will determine whether Democrats maintain control of the chamber.
Youngkin remains opposed to marriage equality
The Associated Press a day after McAuliffe spoke with the Blade published an interview with Youngkin in which he reiterated his opposition to marriage equality, but stressed it is “legally acceptable” in Virginia and he would “support that” as governor.
The anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has categorized as an extremist group, earlier this month endorsed Youngkin. The Human Rights Campaign and Equality Virginia’s political action committee are among the groups that have backed McAuliffe.
HRC in 2019 named the Carlyle Group as a “Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality” in its annual Corporate Equality Index. McAuliffe scoffed at this recognition.
“They should have checked with their co-CEO who’s against marriage equality,” he told the Blade. “That would have been the first place I would have gone to ask.”
‘I’ve always been out front fighting to protect everybody’
McAuliffe’s first executive order as governor after he took office in 2014 banned discrimination against LGBTQ state employees. He also vetoed several anti-LGBTQ religious freedom bills, created Virginia’s LGBTQ tourism board and became the state’s first governor to declare June Pride month.
McAuliffe noted to the Blade that he is also the first governor of a southern state to officiate a same-sex wedding. The lesbian couple whom he married has recently appeared in one of his campaign ads.
“I spent four years vetoing every single legislation Republicans brought forth and came across my desk that would have discriminated against the LGBTQ community,” said McAuliffe. “I’ve always been out front fighting to protect everybody.”
McAuliffe noted that CoStar, a D.C.-based commercial real estate company, moved more than 1,000 jobs to Richmond from Charlotte after then-North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed House Bill 2, which banned trans people from using public restrooms consistent with their gender identity and prohibited municipalities from enacting LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination measures. McAuliffe described HB 2 to the Blade as the “anti-gay bill.”
“There’s real consequences … to discriminatory actions and I will not tolerate any of it,” he said.
McAuliffe last month said during his first debate against Youngkin that local school boards “should be making their own decisions” with regards to the implementation of the Virginia Department of Education guidelines for trans and non-binary students. McAuliffe during his second debate against Youngkin stressed “locals” should provide input on the policy, but added “the state will always issue guidance.”
McAuliffe told the Blade he has “been so offended about how many folks have tried to really demonize our children here in this state.” McAuliffe referenced children with “self-identity issues” during the interview, but he did not specifically cite those who identify as trans or non-binary.
“We’ve got to help our children … we got to help our children who are desperately in need today,” he said. “And we got to show them that we’ll be there for them, as I say, no matter how they identify or who they love.”
Youngkin on Saturday during a campaign event in Henrico County said he would ban the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia schools. McAuliffe criticized his opponent on this issue when he spoke with the Blade.
“Critical race theory is not taught in Virginia, nor has it ever been taught,” said McAuliffe. “These are dog whistles that are used, and especially in the CRT, it’s a racist dog whistle and it just fits into this whole pattern of using our children as political pawns and I hate it.”
Youngkin ‘would drive businesses out of’ Va.
McAuliffe has continued to portray Youngkin as an extremist on other issues that range from abortion and vaccine mandates as polls suggest the race between the two has grown tight. McAuliffe also continues to highlight former President Trump’s support of Youngkin.
McAuliffe told the Blade that Youngkin is “100 percent against abortion” and said his opponent would “bring those Texas-style type abortion” laws to Virginia.
The law, which bans almost all abortions in Texas and allows private citizens to sue doctors and anyone else who helps a woman obtain one, took effect last month. The U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 1 will hear oral arguments in a case that challenges the law.
“We always knew that the Supreme Court would be a backstop on women’s rights issues: Roe v. Wade. That is gone. It’s over,” said McAuliffe. “Donald Trump’s Supreme Court is going to overrule the basic tenants of Roe v. Wade.”
McAuliffe added the Supreme Court “is going to allow these states to roll back women’s reproductive rights, so that’s no longer a talking point.”
“This is reality,” said McAuliffe. “Every woman in Virginia needs to understand it.”
Terry McAuliffe has said Glenn Youngkin poses a threat to abortion rights in Virginia. (Photo courtesy of Terry McAuliffe for Governor)
Trump on Oct. 13 described Youngkin as a “great gentleman” when he called into the “Take Back Virginia Rally” in Henrico County that John Fredericks, host of “Outside the Beltway with John Fredericks” who co-chaired the former president’s 2016 campaign in Virginia, organized.
Participants recited the Pledge of Allegiance to an American flag that was present at the U.S. Capitol insurrection. Youngkin in a statement his campaign released said he “had no role” in the event and said it was “weird and wrong to pledge allegiance to a flag connected to January 6.”
“As I have said many times before, the violence that occurred on January 6 was sickening and wrong,” he said.
Italy has voted down a bill to tackle hate crimes against women, LGBT+ people and those with disabilities, all in the name of religious freedom.
The bill – known as the Zan bill after the Democratic Party lawmaker and LGBT+ rights activist Alessandro Zan, who proposed it – was approved my the Italian parliament’s lower house last year.
The Zan bill, which would protect Italians from violence, hate speech and discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability, has caused a divide in the country since it was introduced, with critics insisting that it would infringe on religious freedom.
On Wednesday, Italy’s senate voted 154 to 131 to block further debate on the bill for the next six months, according to Reuters. Advocates of the bill fear it will now be impossible to pass it before the legislature expires in 2023.
Zan described the outcome of the vote on Twitter as a “betrayal of a political pact that wanted the country to take a step towards civilisation”.
Gabriele Piazzoni, general secretary of of Italian LGBT+ rights group Arcigay, said that the state had “once again turned the other way” when it comes to homophobia and transphobia.
“We thank those who fought,” he added. “Shame on everyone else.”
The LGBT+ rights bill faced opposition from the Vatican and Italy’s far-right
The church feared prosecution for openly opposing same-sex marriage and adoption by LGBT+ families, and also opposed the bill’s requirement that Catholic schools would have to mark a day dedicated to fighting homophobia and transphobia.
The bill also faced fierce opposition from Italy’s far-right League party, with the party’s leader Matteo Salvini describing it as a “gagging law” which would mean that “those who think a mom is a mom and a dad is a dad” would end up in jail.
Andrea Ostellari, a League party senator and president of the Italian senate’s justice committee, managed to repeatedly delay the second vote on the bill.
According to The Guardian, Alessandro Zan said earlier this year that lawmakers who backed the bill were “being held hostage by a president who arbitrarily decides that the vote shouldn’t be scheduled because he belongs to a party that doesn’t want it”.
In a pattern that is becoming worryingly familiar around the world, the bill’s opposition also united anti-trans activists with the far-right.
In April, a group of 17 “feminist” and lesbian groups issued a joint statement against the bill.
Despite the bill aiming to protect Italians on the basis of both sex and gender, the groups declared that the term “gender identity” had been “weaponised against women”.
At the time, Zan rejected the letter, and responded: “To say that trans women are not real women is not acceptable.
“We are talking about people who are particularly discriminated against… Unfortunately, some statements by historic and radical feminists have the same content as the extreme right and religious fundamentalists.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin has attacked gay and trans rights in a fiery speech advocating for “traditional family values”.
Speaking at the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin said – apparently unironically – that teaching students about the existence of trans people is “on the verge of a crime against humanity”.
Stressing that Russia should stick to its own “spiritual values and historical traditions” and stay away from “sociocultural disturbances” in the West, Putin added that Westerners believe in “the aggressive deletion of whole pages of their own history, reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of minorities”.
“It’s their right,” he added, according to the Washington Post, “but we are asking them to steer clear of our home. We have a different viewpoint.”
Russia has an abysmal record on its treatment of LGBT+ people, with anti-gay laws in the country contributing towards a hostile and dangerous environment for queer and trans Russians. Despite this, a vibrant queer underground thrives in Russia, with activists determined to create a better future for the Russian LGBT+ community.
Moreover, Putin himself has a long record of actual war crimes. According to Politico, these include “Russia’s criminal behaviour in Syria”, Putin’s history as an “agent of the Soviet secret police, a criminal institution” with a record of “mass killings”, his funding of pro-Russian terrorists in eastern Ukraine, and his involvement in the mysterious deaths of a series of Russian democrats, journalists and opposition leaders.
“The record speaks for itself: Putin is a killer and war criminal,” the Politicopiece says. “He must be treated as such by world leaders with even a minimal commitment to human rights and basic decency.”
In Vladimir Putin’s recent Sochi speech, he also said that trans rights activists are a threat to “basic things such as mother, father, family or gender differences”.
Earlier this month, a senior Russian government figure reportedly said that LGBT+ groups should be designated as “extremists“.
“The record speaks for itself: Putin is a killer and war criminal,” the Politicopiece says. “He must be treated as such by world leaders with even a minimal commitment to human rights and basic decency.”
In Vladimir Putin’s recent Sochi speech, he also said that trans rights activists are a threat to “basic things such as mother, father, family or gender differences”.
Earlier this month, a senior Russian government figure reportedly said that LGBT+ groups should be designated as “extremists“.
A sign displayed by a Tennessee franchise of the anti-LGBT+ fast food chain Chick-fil-A has gone viral for condemning discrimination… against anti-maskers and the unvaccinated.
The sign, pasted on the window of the Chick-fil-A in Franklin, Tennessee, reads: “We do not discriminate against unvaccinated, religion, race, sex, vaccinated, maskless, mask. All neighbours are welcome.”
When the message was shared on Twitter by anti-LGBT+ right-wing YouTuber Lauren Chen, social media users were quick to point out that “equating mask/vaccine policy with religion/ race/ sex is so fundamentally stupid”, and that one significant group was missing from the list.
One Twitter user wrote: “They don’t discriminate against sex, just sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Would you like a delta variant combo with your order today?”
The Chick-fil-A sign on discrimination is painfully ironic, considering the chain’s anti-LGBT+ stance
Chick-fil-A has donated millions of dollars to anti-LGBT+ organisations over the years, but in 2019 it announced a decision to end donations to organisations which discriminate against LGBT+ people.
The Chick-fil-A billionaire was found to be donating to the National Christian Charitable Foundation (NCF), the sixth largest charity in the US and the leader in the fight against the Equality Act, which aims to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The money donated to the NCF, a donor-advised fund, then goes to other groups, some of which are at the forefront of the fight against passing the Equality Act.
In 2018, it gave a massive grant of $6,585,923 (£4,647,620) to the viciously anti-LGBT+ Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill Monday banning transgender athletes from playing on public school sports teams that align with their gender identities.
Abbott did not immediately comment on the ban. Rep. Valoree Swanson, a lead sponsor in the state House, has said it is “all about girls and protecting them” in the state’s University Interscholastic League.
“We need a statewide level playing field,” Swanson said on the House floor this month. “It’s very important that we, who got elected to be here, protect our girls.”
Although student athletes had been required to play on teams that aligned with the genders listed on their birth certificates, they could obtain court orders allowing them to change the gender markers and compete in interscholastic athletics.
Under the bill signed into law Monday, that option is no longer available.
Critics of the legislation have said that it is discriminatory and that its supporters haven’t been able to provide examples of transgender athletes’ competing unfairly in women’s sports.
In a statement Monday, Equality Texas, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said that if Texans “want to protect children, the goal shouldn’t be to prevent trans kids from participating in sports, but to give all kids the freedom to make friends and play without fearing the kind of discrimination many older trans people face on a daily basis.”
A Japanese transgender man, Gen Suzuki, 46, has filed a court request to have his legal gender recognized as male without undergoing sterilization surgery as prescribed by national law. His case highlights the urgent need for Japan to revise its outdated and harmful transgender legislation.
In Japan, transgender people who want to legally change their gender must appeal to a family court. Under the “Gender Identity Disorder (GID) Special Cases Act,” applicants must undergo a psychiatric evaluation and be surgically sterilized. They also must be single and without children younger than 20.
In 2017, during its Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations Human Rights Council, Japan pledged to revise the law. But despite mounting domestic and international pressure, the government has failed to do so. In 2019 Japan’s Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that the law did not violate Japan’s constitution. However, two of the justices recognized the need for reform. “The suffering that [transgender people] face in terms of gender is also of concern to society that is supposed to embrace diversity in gender identity,” they wrote.
Momentum is growing domestically as well, as legal, medical, and academic professionals are speaking out against the law. In 2019 a transgender woman sued the Japanese government over a law that prevents her from having her legal gender officially changed from “male” to “female,” only because she has an 8-year-old child.
Even the name of Japan’s law reflects the need to reform it. Referring to “gender identity disorders” is fundamentally out of sync with international medical standards. The World Health Organization (WHO) removed “gender identity disorders” from its International Classification of Diseases in 2019, and governments have until January 2022 to update their diagnostic coding systems, meaning the phrase should no longer be on the books.
From Suzuki’s case to the WHO, to the growing voices of experts at home, the message is clear: Japan needs to change its regressive law now.
