The new rule will appear in the 2017 edition of the AP Stylebook, which will be available May 31. Poynter interviewed Tiffany Stevens, a reporter at The Roanake Times who identifies as non-binary, about the change. “The fact that it’s being accepted by The Associated Press, that’s super exciting,” said Stevens. “Non-binary people as an identity aren’t recognized in general in America.”
The entry in the stylebook now reads:
“They, them, their In most cases, a plural pronoun should agree in number with the antecedent: The children love the books their uncle gave them.They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy. However, rewording usually is possible and always is preferable. Clarity is a top priority; gender-neutral use of a singular they is unfamiliar to many readers. We do not use other gender-neutral pronouns such as xe or ze.”
The entry also includes the following:
“In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun. Be sure that the phrasing does not imply more than one person.”
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Commerce for communications related to the Trump Administration’s exclusion of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” recommendations regarding data collection in the American Community Survey. Materials produced from this request will help determine how this shameful decision was made.
HRC President Chad Griffin said, “The Trump Administration has launched a deliberate campaign to erase LGBTQ people from federal data used to inform budgets and policies across the government. Their intent is clear: by denying we exist, the Trump Administration hopes to deny us equality. It won’t work. Today, we’re resolved to be louder and fight even harder, because Donald Trump and Mike Pence #CantEraseUs.”
The Census Bureau issued a statement correcting an earlier version of a report to Congress in which they stated, “inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix.” The correction suggests that the draft report included LGBTQ data collection recommendations or plans. Many federal agencies, including the Census Bureau, have been collecting and/or planning to collect similar data.
This is the Trump Administration’s latest move in a larger campaign to erase LGBTQ people from federal surveys and disrupt programs that provide direct assistance to the LGBTQ community. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services removed a question about sexual orientation from the National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants. Earlier this month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development withdrew two notices impacting data collection and implementation guidelines for a homelessness prevention initiative targeting LGBTQ youth.
Earlier this month, Jacqui Helbert of WUTC, the NPR affiliate at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), accompanied a high school gay-straight alliance from Cleveland, Tennessee to the capitol in Nashville as they spoke with lawmakers who were supporting an anti-transgender bill. That legislation would have required public schools and universities to discriminate against transgender students, but it died in committee last week. It was still, however, a live concern when the students made their visit.
Helbert, decked out in her recording gear, followed the students to the office of Sen. Mike Bell (R), a supporter of the anti-transgender bill. After referencing an unconfirmed report from Breitbart News about a trans woman supposedly raping students in a women’s prison, he said to the students, “Is it how I feel on Monday? I feel different on Tuesday? Wednesday I might feel like a dog.” He went on to reject the legitimacy of transgender identities, calling them “hogwash.” “It’s my DNA. It doesn’t matter what I present myself as. It’s my DNA. It’s science.” Helbert recorded two of the students crying after they left the meeting because of how incendiary his remarks were.
The students also met with Sen. Kevin Brooks (R), who actually said he probably would not support the bill, describing it as “divisive solution in search of a problem.”
Helbert on a different reporting assignment with her mic in tow. CREDIT: Jacqui Helbert
After the story ran on WUTC on March 9 and again on March 13, Bell and Brooks both objected to being included. Brooks’ concern was specifically that the comments might make him sound like he supports LGBT equality, which he doesn’t. They claimed that Helbert had not properly identified herself as a reporter during the meetings and that the 32-year-old must have been trying to hide among the high school students. This was despite the fact she was wearing an NPR press pass, headphones, and pointing a 22-inch fuzzy microphone at the lawmakers as they spoke. “I even had to fumble with all my equipment to shake Bell’s hand,” she told the Times Free Press.
Bell complained to the station as well as to some of his colleagues, who happened to be meeting with university officials a week later on unrelated business. At the end of that conversation, Sen. Todd Gardenhire (R), who represents the district that contains UTC, mentioned Helbert’s story, expressing his own “issues with the journalistic ethics of the reporter.” At least one of the lawmakers in that meeting also mentioned the fact that UTC receives funding from the state.
After this meeting, the university fired Helbert and removed her story from WUTC’s site — decisions apparently made without the input of any of the editorial staff at the station, which receives over half a million dollars in support from the university.
Though the article has been officially taken down, it remains archived, so anybody can still listen to it in its entirety.
George Heddleston, senior associate vice chancellor of marketing and communications for UTC, said in a statement that Helbert was fired “based on a violation of journalism ethics.”
Helbert’s termination letter from Heddleston likewise stated, “A review of the matter was conducted and it has been concluded that you did not identify yourself properly as a journalist.”
Nashville Scene talked to Helbert, as well as many of the students she was following, about her actions, how small the rooms were, and how unlikely it was that either lawmaker was unaware of her presence and her recording equipment. Brooks nevertheless insisted, “I have no recollection of anyone who looked like they were recording anything.”
This was Helbert’s vantage point as the students met with Sen. Kevin Brooks (R), who insisted he was unaware she was there or recording. CREDIT: Jacqui Helbert via Nashville Scene
Helbert’s supervisor, news director Mike Miller, was sympathetic to Bell’s concerns, telling her after the lawmaker complained that she had essentially goofed by not publicly stating that she would be recording, but that he otherwise believed she was “doing a great job, and I’m not criticizing you.” Helbert had only been working for the station for six months, having been trained by The Transom workshop, which teaches new journalists about narrative storytelling.
Nashville Scene’s reporting takes issue with UTC’s version of events. At one point, Heddleston seemed to invent a new concern that Helbert had “edited comments from Brooks that seemed to fit her story.” This was never mentioned in any of his actual meetings with her, nor did it come up in his letter of termination. As part if its apparent investigation, the university notably never spoke with the students or teachers who she accompanied to hear their version of events.
Terry Denniston, chief of staff in the chancellor’s office, likewise insisted that the lawmakers did not threaten funding. “At the end of the meeting, funding for the station came up — it was just mentioned, that’s all,” he told the Nashville Scene.
With all this controversy brewing over the weekend, NPR officially weighed in on Monday, defending both Helbert and the station. A statement from Michael Oreskes, senior vice president of news and editorial director, and Mark Memmott, supervising senior editor for standards & practices, made the following points:
The decision to fire Helbert “was made by university officials, not the news editors at WUTC.”
The decision to remove Helbert’s story from WUTC’s website was also made by university officials, “not WUTC’s editors.” Oreskes and Memmott link to the archived story.
Citing Nashville Scene’s reporting, the NPR officials believe “serious questions have been raised about whether university officials were pressured to take those actions by state lawmakers — who could cut state funding to the school and WUTC.”
“Her mistake was not, her editors say, a firing offense. Instead, it was a learning moment for a new reporter and she was counseled about her mistake. Her editors did not view the story as fatally flawed — she had not hidden her equipment or misled anyone. They say they would not have removed it from WUTC’s website if they had not been ordered to do so. Removing a story — except in the most extreme circumstances — is a breach of the standards practiced by NPR and other credible news organizations.”
UTC and WUTC should “reach an agreement that ensures the station’s editorial independence in the future.”
So far, the university’s only response has been to defend its intervention, because “the station is part of UTC’s Marketing and Communications division.”
Helbert, on the other hand, told the Times Free Press that she feels vindicated, defending her editors who were “caught in the crossfire” from the university. “They are a scapegoat just like I am,” she said.
Gardenhire, the senator who complained to the university on behalf of his colleagues, accused Helbert of being a “martyr” who “dug her own grave.”
Here again is the link to listen to or read Helbert’s story, complete with the recordings she made of Senators Bell and Brooks.
Today, the Trump Administration submitted to Congress a report of the list of categories of data it plans to collect for the 2020 Census and the American Community Survey (ACS). In this morning’s version of the Administration’s report, while it conspicuously excluded lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQ) people on the list of “planned subjects” for the nation’s decennial census and longer form survey, “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” were included as “proposed” subjects in the appendix—indicating that data collection on these categories may have been in the works in an earlier version. Last year, a number of federal agencies urged the Census Bureau to collect sexual orientation and gender identity data, explaining that the information was critical to their ability to implement and enforce the law.
“Today, the Trump Administration has taken yet another step to deny LGBTQ people freedom, justice, and equity, by choosing to exclude us from the 2020 Census and American Community Survey. LGBTQ people are not counted on the Census—no data is collected on sexual orientation or gender identity. Information from these surveys helps the government to enforce federal laws like the Violence Against Women Act and the Fair Housing Act and to determine how to allocate resources like housing supports and food stamps. If the government doesn’t know how many LGBTQ people live in a community, how can it do its job to ensure we’re getting fair and adequate access to the rights, protections and services we need?” said Meghan Maury, Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director, National LGBTQ Task Force.
This decision is part of a string of actions by the Trump Administration to remove sexual orientation and gender identity questions from federal surveys and to stall assessment of programs targeting the LGBTQ community. The Census does collect data on same-sex couples through its “relationship to householder” question; this results in a very narrow depiction of the needs and experiences of our community.
“We call on President Trump and his Administration to begin collecting sexual orientation and gender identity data on the American Community Survey as soon as possible and urge Congress to conduct oversight hearings to reveal why the Administration made the last-minute decision not to collect data on LGBTQ people,” said Maury.
For over a decade, the National LGBTQ Task Force has been at the forefront of national data collection advocacy efforts by urging the President, Congress, and the Census Bureau to collect data that accurately reflects the country’s population of LGBTQ people. In 2010, the National LGBTQ Task Force launched the “Queer the Census” campaign calling on LGBTQ people to urge the Census Bureau to count them in the 2010 Census. More than 100,000 LGBTQ people placed a “Queer the Census” sticker on their 2010 Census envelops, asking the federal agency to count them and collect data on LGBTQ people. Since 2014, Maury has served on the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations, where she provides advice to the Census Bureau on this and various other data collection issues.
A 2009 hate crimes law meant to make federal prosecutions easier has resulted in relatively few convictions nationwide. An Associated Press analysis using data gathered by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that 47 people nationwide have been prosecuted using the law, with 37 convictions.
Another 300 people were referred for prosecution, but hate crimes charges were never filed. In at least half those cases, there wasn’t enough evidence or prosecutors couldn’t prove intent, a key threshold.
Shown here are the total number of cases that law enforcement agencies presented to federal prosecutors in each state, followed by the number of convictions.
Gay marriage has been a hot topic in and out of courtrooms for the past several years.
Another issue is being fixed to help those who lost loved ones before the epic court ruling.
Florida widows and widowers whose spouses died before the U.S. Supreme Court declared state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional can have the death certificates of their loved ones changed without having to go to court, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
The decision in favor of gay widows and widowers is the latest ruling from U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle against the state on the issue of same-sex marriages and was hailed as a major victory by Lambda Legal, which represented the plaintiffs in a class-action suit filed in 2015.
The plaintiffs sought to have the death certificates of their spouses show they had been married, but the state argued that Florida law prohibited officials from changing the documents without a court order.
“Not so,” Hinkle wrote in Thursday’s eight-page opinion.
Hinkle’s ruling came more than two years after he struck down Florida’s voter-approved ban on gay marriage in November 2014. Cementing Hinkle’s decision in a landmark case known as Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court months later ruled that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry.
While Florida officials complied with the Obergefell decision by including the names of same-sex spouses on death certificates for people who died after the June 2015 ruling, the state maintained that the Office of Vital Statistics required a court order to amend the documents of those who had died prior to the decision.
But Hinkle disagreed.
“As a matter of federal constitutional law, a state cannot properly refuse to correct a federal constitutional violation going forward, even if the violation arose before the dispute over the constitutional issue was settled,” he wrote. “If the law were otherwise, the schools might still be segregated.”
The state “must correct a constitutional error that affected a death certificate’s information on both marital status and a spouse’s identity,” he ordered.
Hinkle’s ruling requires state officials to amend death certificates without a court order “if the decedent was a party to a same-sex marriage that was recognized as lawful in the jurisdiction where it was entered” and the surviving spouse provides documentation, such as an affidavit, showing that the marriage wasn’t recognized or the same-sex partner wasn’t identified.
The plaintiffs include Hal Birchfield, who married James Merrick Smith in New York in 2012, and Paul Mocko, who married William Gregory Patterson in California in 2014. Smith died a year after he and Birchfield were married, and Patterson died the same year he wed Mocko. The two men filed the class action lawsuit on behalf of other similarly situated surviving spouses in Florida.
“The state of Florida discriminated against us and disrespected our relationship in life and even in James’ death, but this decision will ensure that I and all the other surviving same-sex spouses will finally have accurate death certificates that honor our
Today, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin signed SB 17 into law, a measure that allows student groups at colleges, universities, and high schools to discriminate against LGBTQ students.
SB 17 undermines inclusive “all comers” policies at public colleges, universities, and now high schools, by allowing student organizations to discriminate against students under the guise of religion. Many public colleges and universities have long had “all-comers” policies that require student organizations receiving financial and other support from the institution not to discriminate against students based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. These policies are important because they allow all members of the student body to participate in students groups and prevent such groups from discriminating against students with state funding. The Supreme Court upheld these all-comers policies as constitutional in the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez decision in 2010.
“Gov. Bevin’s shameful decision to sign this discriminatory bill into law jeopardizes non-discrimination policies at public high schools, colleges, and universities,” said HRC Legal Director Sarah Warbelow. “No student should fear being excluded from a school club or participating in a school activity because they are LGBTQ. While of course private groups should have the freedom to express religious viewpoints, they should not be able to unfairly discriminate with taxpayer funds.”
The word “radical” is often used to mean “extreme” but it also means “root”. Being gay is the root of who I am. All the other aspects of my personality including my elder journey revolve around that core of my being.
Some of us may remember the Radical Faeries who surfaced in the 1970’s. This counter-culture movement emphasized the unique capacity of LGBT individuals to challenge cultural norms including traditional gender roles and definitions of relationships. The Radical Faeries affirmed our differences and were in sharp contrast to those who sought assimilation into the mainstream culture by focusing more on our similarities with non-LGBT individuals.
Since then we seem to have found a comfortable balance, achieving equal rights such as same-sex marriage and the right to serve in the military by focusing on our similarities while still maintaining a vibrant LGBT community that celebrates its uniqueness with pride.
What are the commonalities and differences in our aging? While we share the same concerns as non-LGBT older adults about the “unknowns” (How long will I live? Will I maintain my health, mobility and mental acuity? Will I need care? Will my money last?), there are some unique additional challenges for us. Many of us do not have the support of adult children or other family members; we might not have the same retirement assets as straight couples acquire after a lifetime together, and our long history of discrimination and harassment may have left us hesitant to now access the benefits and services we need.
So how can we LGBT elders approach our aging by focusing on our roots? For starters, I think our long history as “cultural outsiders” gives us a unique capacity to not fall into aging stereotypes and pitfalls. Growing up in a society with such strong gender stereotypes and sexual myths, we who have not fit those norms had to create a unique identity for ourselves. That has better prepared us for facing the “identity crisis” that many face as aging diminishes the sense of self that is tied to cultural expectations, careers, parenting, and independence. We can adapt to age-related changes with a deeper sense of self that is based on the root of our authentic nature, our essence.
Another strength we bring to aging is our resilience. We’ve survived so many individual and collective struggles that our wounds have made many of us stronger. We learned to meet challenges with courage, compassion, creativity, strength, humor, optimism and persistence, as well as an ability to develop supportive connections, so that we are now empowered to enjoy our aging with dignity and pride. Let’s approach our aging radically by remembering our roots and experiencing and expressing even more of our uniqueness!
Buz Hermes is co-facilitator of the Sonoma Valley LGBT Seniors Group and a former staff member of Spectrum’s Senior Outreach Program. He is currently a consultant on LGBT aging and can be reached at [email protected] or (707) 227-6935.
The Florida Supreme Court has determined that “sexual intercourse” isn’t just between a man and a woman.
The question arose during a case in which a man was charged with a third-degree felony for failing to reveal to his male partner that he was HIV-positive. His lawyer argued before the state’s high court in February 2015 that Florida laws were so narrowly defined that “sexual intercourse” didn’t apply to sexual activity between same-sex partners or any activity beyond traditional sex.
The court rejected that argument Thursday, ruling that the Legislature’s goal was clearly to reduce the spread of human immunodeficiency virus when it enacted the law, even if it didn’t clearly spell out what it mean by “sexual intercourse.”
Today, as the United Nations begins its annual gathering on women’s rights, a coalition of international women’s, LGBTQ, and immigrant justice organizations have launched a joint initiative called: No Borders on Gender Justice.
This coalition, participating in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), highlights that this year’s session takes place under the shadow of escalated anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-Muslim policies of the United States. The organizers point to the new executive order by the Trump Administration, set to take effect this Thursday, as the latest in an exclusionary trend that prevents women from exercising their rights to political participation at UN Headquarters.
Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, spoke out in solidarity with women’s rights activists excluded by these policies. “This is not the time to keep us out of the meeting rooms, out of the decision-making spaces and away from our sisters at CSW,” she said.
An Indigenous Ixil women’s rights activist from Guatemala, who requested not to be named, said, “I was denied a visa to travel to the US for CSW. Coming from Guatemala or from Central America, we know the obstacles and discrimination that have stood in the way of us accessing international spaces in the US, like the UN in New York. This is a barrier to our work for human rights, worsening in this political climate of fear and exclusion.”
Organizers of this initiative have emphasized that the risk extends not only to access to CSW. Also at risk is rights advocates’ access to UN and international advocacy spaces year round. Moreover, those most affected are women and their families, far from UN spaces, who face hate crimes, criminalization, detention and deportation due to xenophobic policies.
The No Borders on Gender Justice initiative seeks to renew strategies to reclaim space to defend the full range of women’s human rights, protest racist and Islamophobic policies that bar access, amplify the demands of those who have been excluded, and deepen collaboration with women most at risk from authoritarianism.
Organizers have also released a platform of principles, available here. The organizations co-sponsoring this initiative are: MADRE, Just Associates (JASS), Center for Women’s Global Leadership, AWID, Urgent Action Fund, Women in Migration Network and OutRight Action International.
