Tokyo will open Pride House, Japan’s first permanent such center, next month to raise awareness of LGBTQ rights before and during the rearranged Olympic Games in 2021.
Although there have been similar initiatives before previous Games, organizers said Pride House Tokyo, which will open its doors on International Coming Out Day on October 11, is the first to get official International Olympic Committee backing.
“Pride House Tokyo aims to educate the world and also Japan of the difficulties the LGBTQ community has playing and enjoying sports … while helping create a safe space for the community too,” Pride House Tokyo said in a statement on Monday.
“Many people might think that Japan is a human rights defender, but actually there are no laws to protect LGBTQ people.”
GON MATSUNAKA
It is traditional for most nations competing at the Olympics to have a hospitality “house,” where they promote their country and hold parties for winning athletes.
Gon Matsunaka, the head of Good Aging Yells, one of the organizations supporting the project, said Japan lags behind many other developed nations when it comes to LGBTQ rights.
“Many people might think that Japan is a human rights defender, but actually there are no laws to protect LGBTQ people,” Matsunaka told Reuters via email.
“Society is filled with prejudice, discrimination and harassment towards LGBTQ community.”
“While we have to change the sports arena, we also hope Pride House Legacy can help change society as a whole as well.”
Gay marriage is illegal in Japan and although about two dozen cities, towns and wards issue same-sex partnership certificates, they lack legal standing and prejudice persists.
Fumino Sugiyama, a transgender man and former fencer for the Japanese national team, said little had changed in 15 years since retiring from professional sport.
“Even now looking around, there are few LGBTQ athletes that live their lives openly and that is the reality here in Japan,” Sugiyama told a news briefing to launch Pride House Tokyo.
A gay New York City councilman and U.S. congressional candidate is calling on an NYPD union leader to step down after a tweet sent from the union’s official Twitter account called the councilman “a first class whore.”
The now-deleted tweet is credited to Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, a union representing approximately 13,000 active and retired police sergeants, and was directed at Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat running for Congress in November.
“He we go America this is what a first class whore looks like RITCHIE TORRES,” said the tweet, typos untouched, which was originally posted on Sept. 4. “Passes laws to defund police, supports criminals, & now because he’s running for office he blames the police to protect what he voted for. Remember Little Ritchie? Meet LYING RITCHIE.”
In a since-deleted post, the official Twitter account of the NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association refers to openly gay congressional candidate Ritchie Torres as a “first class whore.”@SBANYPD
That social media message is just part of an ongoing war of words between Torres — who has called the sergeants union “a bona fide hate group masquerading as a union” — and the union, which has accused Torres of supporting anti-police violence.
The deleted tweet included a video of Torres criticizing the NYPD for making fewer gun arrests and solving fewer gun-related cases as the number of summertime shootings doubled in 2020 compared to last year. In the video, Torres calls for an investigation into whether the NYPD initiated a “work slowdown” and, if so, to what extent the slowdown has “driven the growth of violence in New York City.”
“Calling a black NFL player a ‘wild animal.’ Calling a Latina Health Commissioner a ‘bitch.’ Calling an openly LGBTQ Afro-Latino a first-class whore.’ There is NOTHING benevolent about the bigotry of the @SBANYPD. Ed Mullins must resign,” Torres wrote.
Torres’ message referred to a tweet last September by the sergeants’ union calling a Black NFL player a “wild animal” for allegedly punching a police officer, and a tweet from earlier this year calling a female health official a “bitch” after she said she had told a police official, “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops” in response to a request for face masks (she since apologized for the remark).
On Tuesday, Mullins issued a response to the call for him to step down, saying that he’d “never resign” and that his comments about Torres “had nothing to do with his race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.”
A Miami-Dade County jail is facing potential legal action after two transgender women said they were mistreated and humiliated at the jail following their arrests at a Black Lives Matter rally.
“Initially I think we can all say it was a very inspiring experience,” Viola, one of the arrested women, said of the rally. “Even through the rain, we were chanting, screaming our lungs out.”
But that empowering experience escalated into something more humiliating and degrading, according to Viola and Gabriela Amaya Cruz, a trans woman who was arrested alongside Viola. The women said officers started using excessive force and alleged Viola was pushed to the ground and tackled by two officers. Dramatic video shows the moment things took at turn at the protest.
More than a dozen people were arrested and all were transported to Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center where the women alleged things got worse.
“They had no idea to where to place me,” Cruz said. “And when they said my legal name, I had to raise my hand, obviously, because it was me. And that’s when it started to get like, ‘That’s not a woman, that’s a man,’ and that’s when things got very transphobic.”
A spokesperson for the Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department released a statement to NBC Miami saying, in part, that the department is “committed to ensuring that all inmates in our custody including transgender persons are treated appropriately throughout our intake, classification and housing placement process.”
Andrew Gillum, former rising star of the Democratic Party, said he “cried every day” after being found in a Florida hotel room with a gay escort.
A former Tallahassee mayor who ran for Florida governor in 2018, Gillum’s political career plummeted in March when he was found in a Miami Beach hotel room with a sex worker who had reportedly overdosed on crystal meth.Read More
Now, Gillum and his wife are set to appear on chat show Tamron Hall for his first interview since coming out of rehab, one that the eponymous host said is “one of the most difficult” in her 27-year career as a journalist.
“Everybody believes the absolute worst about that day,” Gillum reflected in the pre-recorded interview, due to air Monday (14 September). “At this stage, I don’t have anything else to conceal.
“I literally got broken down to my most bare place, to the place where I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to live, not because of what I had done, but because of everything that was being said about me.”
Andrew Gillum interview was ‘heartbreaking’ says Tamron Hall.
Tamron Hall said her interview with Andrew Gillum interview was “intense, and at moments it was heartbreaking, upsetting and it was disorienting”.
“I’m only there because they’ve agreed, but I still felt like I was prying,” Hall, 49, told PEOPLE magazine.
“They agreed to talk with me, but as a journalist, there’s moments where you wonder: How far are we really supposed to go?”
An outpouring of first responders hit the Mondrian South Beach hotel midnight on March 13, where officers found Gillum “inebriated” and vomiting in the bathroom, according to a police report.
Paramedics treated a man found struggling to breathe, who police suspected had overdosed on crystal meth. He was later identified as Travis Dyson, an escort through the website Rent Men.
Former Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, a name once floated to be on the 2020 vice-presidential ticket. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Gillium, 41, checked into rehab for alcoholism and depression two days after the incident – a stunning and swift fall for the promising politician once considered a potential kingmaker in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, so sought after was his endorsement.
Rivky strolled through the Zara store in Manhattan’s fashionable SoHo neighborhood, one eye examining the racks of skirts and blouses and the other looking out for anyone she might know. She was looking for something that would fit her broad frame. Rivky made her way to the women’s dressing room line, dresses and skirts piled on her forearms. The female attendant looked confused and then chuckled. Why was this male-presenting person — wearing traditional Hasidic Jewish men’s attire — walking into the fitting room with women’s clothing?
Rivky, 41, is not your typical gender-conforming religious observer. Her white dress shirt, black vest and black slacks — the daily dress code for Hasidic men — serve as culturally acceptable covers for the bra and women’s underwear she frequently wears underneath. She feels her best when dressed in women’s attire, and at home she regularly strips down to just a bra, panties and nylon tights when she knows her wife will not be back for hours.
“It makes me feel like I want to dance for joy,” said Rivky, who asked that her full name not be published because she is not out to friends and family about her gender identity.
“If you take a magnifying glass and look into my heart, you will see 100 percent I am a girl.”
RIVKY
Rivky identifies as transgender but deeply buries these emotions and feelings away from her ultra-Orthodox community in Borough Park, Brooklyn. She fears that if she were to come out of the proverbial closet, she would face social expulsion or, worse, abandonment by her wife and four children. While there is no set Hasidic policy regarding those who come out as transgender, the community’s strict code of living does not condone even the slightest deviation from the Hasidic norm.
Neither biblical nor rabbinical literature points to changing one’s sex, but the Torah does discuss cross-dressing, said Rabbi Ethan Witkovsky of Park Avenue Synagogue, a prominent Conservative congregation in New York.
Deuteronomy 22:5 reads, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.”
Witkovsky said some rabbinical teachings might support the literal translation of this verse, while others would interpret it otherwise.
From a young age, Rivky was in tune with her womanhood, but always in secret. As a child, she mirrored her sisters and female cousins, and she dressed like a girl when she had the chance. When her mother was away, Rivky, as young as 6 years old, would sneak into dresser drawers and try on her mother’s undergarments. They were large on Rivky’s child-size body but nonetheless “amazing,” she recalled with a smile.
When she grew older, Rivky ventured to women’s stores outside her community and glanced around the racks, wistfully. She was ashamed to admit her presence and found herself telling salespeople that she was shopping for her mother or sister. That prevented her from entering fitting rooms to try on clothes, denying her the satisfaction she craved.
“I should’ve been born a girl,” she said.
Despite temptations, Rivky kept her desires clandestine, believing they were sinful thoughts that needed to be purged.
“I would pray to God, ‘Take this away from me,'” she recalled.
But the more she pushed her womanhood away, the stronger her feminine wishes would return. Rivky continued to fight them off and kept to tradition when the Hasidic community arranged her marriage at 18. More than two decades and four children later, concealing her true identity left Rivky feeling incomplete. Only in the past 10 years has she realized that the only way to make peace with herself is to embrace those thoughts. Her urge to be the woman she has always wanted to be — after decades of hiding — grew stronger and stronger.
“I wanted to take off my beard,” she said. “I wanted to grow my hair.”
Rivky’s face glowed under tangled facial hairs when she discussed how she wants to take hormones some day. She also dreams of growing her hair long and styling it. She does, however, already shave her legs and chest hair from time to time, she confessed.
In small and subtle ways, Rivky increasingly started to express her gender identity, while keeping her friends and relatives in the dark. Her wife, however, had her suspicions and conveyed her disapproval. The couple have not discussed Rivky’s identity as a transgender lesbian, but Rivky said she knows that if she were to come out, she would lose her wife and children.
While coming out to those within her religious community is still a bridge too far for Rivky, she has taken steps to open up to those outside her Hasidic circle.
On a recent Sunday, Rivky attended a monthly feminist gathering in Brooklyn called Sacred Space, which celebrates and empowers women of all and no religious backgrounds. Women of various ages flashed smiles, exchanged hugs and gathered in a large circle around pastel furniture at the meeting room in the borough’s trendy DUMBO neighborhood. Attendees began introducing themselves, and Rivky, dressed in slacks and a dress shirt with her long curly sidelocks falling from her balding head, spoke up.
“If you take a magnifying glass and look into my heart, you will see 100 percent I am a girl,” Rivky announced in a Yiddish accent. She attended the event to see the co-host, Abby Stein, an openly transgender woman who was once an ultra-Orthodox rabbi. Rivky listened to Stein attentively, admiring her courage and openness, and then ducked out of the meeting early, as confidentiality was a concern.
Rivky yearns to assimilate into a larger society that extends beyond Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community, and without blowing her cover, she relies on Facebook as an outlet. Hasidic Jews typically do not use social media, but Rivky’s account is disguised, and it is strictly used for expressing her womanhood. Her Facebook cover image is of a rainbow flag with the words “love is love,” and her profile photo is of a polished woman’s hand holding a red rose. Her tag line reads, “A transgender girl who appreciates seeing a smile on her friends lips when they are painted hot red!”
An estimated 1.4 million adults identify as transgender in the United States, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, although it is unknown how many trans Americans, like Rivky, are not open about their gender identities. For those who do come out, living openly is not without its challenges: According to the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, transgender people often face discrimination in housing, employment and health care, among other hurdles.
Abby Stein appears on NBC’s TODAY show on Nov. 19, 2019.Nathan Congleton / TODAY
Stein, 28, is no stranger to the challenges of both the proverbial closet and coming out as transgender in the Hasidic community. A former rabbi, Stein said she struggled with her gender identity since she was at least 5 years old, recalling anger toward her parents at the time for not letting her wear dresses and telling her mother that the genitalia she was born with “doesn’t belong there.”
Stein was born into a large family of 12 children, and she socialized with no one outside her close-knit Hasidic circle in Brooklyn growing up. She divorced her wife, pursued a secular education and then came out as transgender in 2015. Stein was ostracized by her religious community, and her ex-wife severed ties, as well, because Hasidic leaders forbade their remaining in contact. She does, however, get to visit with her son from time to time. Now, five years after having left the community, she still savors the freedom fueled by that difficult decision.
“Even sometimes just waking up in the morning and walking in the streets you can be yourself,” she said. “Being yourself every day is really powerful. I can’t overstate that enough.”
She finds value in the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life rather than be confined to one group that shares the same religious and cultural values.
“I could never form strong friendships before I came out,” she said, adding that now, after having traveled to six continents and becoming friends with diverse groups of people, that aspect of her life is thriving. Over the past few years, Stein has become a global LGBTQ rights activist and has given lectures in more than 20 countries, hoping to inspire courage, resilience and inclusion. Her autobiography, “Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman,” was released in November.
But while Stein has found beauty and inspiration in her expanded world, the loneliness that comes from the loss of her Hasidic friends and family still creeps in from time to time. Stein said that for years after she was shunned by her religious community, she would call her mother every Friday, even though her mother would avoid answering the phone or answer and immediately hang up when she realized Stein was on the other end of the line. Stein called less frequently, reaching out only on holidays, and eventually she stopped calling altogether.
“Being yourself every day is really powerful. I can’t overstate that enough.”
ABBY STEIN
The fear of alienation and losing her family is what kept Rivky on guard during her SoHo shopping trip. But despite the uneasiness, the experience was a mini-vacation, because her wife was out of town.
“Just walking into this environment makes me feel womanized, girlish,” she said while walking into Club Monaco.
“I like heels. Something pointy,” she said before settling on a pair of pink pumps at a nearby shoe store. Her size was not available, but that did not stop her from squeezing what she could of her foot into the shoe and admiring the dainty look in the mirror.
Rivky abides by social distancing rules during the COVID-19 pandemic, but she said the most difficult part has been the lockdown on self-expression. Her family is home more than usual now, which means bras, panties and other expressions of her gender identity are relegated to their own version of quarantine.
There’s “very little time to express my feminine self,” she said dejectedly. A quick trip to the market is her excuse to escape the social construct and at least call her non-Hasidic friends to discuss her frustration. Rivky said her fear of “remaining a man” is greater than her fear of contracting a dangerous virus.
Rivky remains caught between two worlds, and she yearns to one day reconcile her inner gender identity with the person she presents outwardly. On some days, she feels that her coming out is closer, but for now, she continues to sneak out for short shopping trips and to message people through her secret Facebook account.
“Keeping the FEMININE flame’s burning and it gets stronger and wider,” she recently wrote on Facebook. “I am getting closer to living my feminine dream.”
Groups of men in Cossack military uniforms have been filmed roaming the Russian city of Yekaterinburg during Pride week in “anti-LGBT patrols”.
According to the Russian news outlet E1RU, the men were on the look out for LGBT+ activists, but succeeded in targeting straight people who they thought looked queer.
The group briefly detained at least one “absolutely heterosexual” student, 19-year-old Alexander Zinovyev, because he had dyed hair and wore an earring.
“Why’d you dress up like this? Are you one of them?” Zinovyev recounted one of the men saying to him. “Do you even know that we control the propaganda of gayness among the people?”
He said the men who intimidated him carried certificates declaring themselves to be “Ural Voluntary Cossack Corps”. While most of the group were dressed in military camouflage, others were patrolling in civilian clothes.
The men reportedly intended to detain LGBT+ people whom they deemed to be in violation of Russia’s gay propaganda laws, and turn them in to law enforcement.
“The prosecutor’s office issued a warning to them about the inadmissibility of propaganda. We’ll be checking how the LGBT movement representatives comply with Russian legislation,” Oleg Bogunevich, the deputy head of a local Cossack organisation, told URA News.
He claimed that around fifty people were participating in the patrols, with some Cossacks travelling over 200km from Chelyabinsk to support their Yekaterinburg “brothers”.
Opponents of the LGBT+ activists have also organised a rival “traditional values” week that includes a family parade and an Orthodox Christian fair.
The patrols come after Russia adopted a set of wide-ranging constitutional changes, including a provision that defines marriage solely as a “union between a man and a woman”.
Same-sex marriage is already banned, but the constitutional re-write means marriages registered abroad will no longer be recognised, and makes the prospect of it ever being legalised dimmer than ever for Russian activists.
Transgender people are likely to face high barriers to voting in the 2020 election, a report has warned.
An estimated 378,000 transgender people who are eligible to vote do not have ID documents such as a driver’s license reflecting their name, appearance or gender identity, according to the study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Some 35 US states have a form of voter ID law, which require voters to provide identification when voting. The strictest forms, in operation in 12 states, require a government-issued photo ID at the polls, with no alternative for voters who do not have one.
As well as disenfranchising minority groups who are less likely to have any form of government-issued photo ID, such laws present a barrier to trans people because they can “be challenged by poll workers or election officials who find that their voter registration information, ID, and appearance do not match”.
While many states would allow a person whose identity is disputed to cast a provisional ballot, the report’s co-author Jody Herman told Voice of America: “If those poll workers decide that those IDs don’t adequately or accurately reflect the person who is standing in front of them, they wouldn’t be able vote.”
Transgender people are likely to face high barriers to voting in the 2020 election (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
The report notes: “There is no way to predict precisely how election officials and poll workers will treat transgender voters at the polls if their registered name and/or ID do not accurately reflect their gender.
“However, 32 per cent of respondents reported having negative experiences after presenting identification documents that did not match their gender presentation [while accessing services].”
Some 57 per cent of trans people in states with strict photo ID laws do not have an ID that reflects their correct name, according to the report.
Trans people in states without voter ID laws “may still face challenges related to potential mismatches between their gender presentation and their name as listed on their voter registration”, the report warns — with poll workers able to question “a person’s eligibility to vote if they do not believe that the name matches the voter, such as when a name is traditionally masculine or feminine and the voter appears to not match that gender”.
Trans people are worried they could be denied a vote.
Tori Cooper of Human Rights Campaign’s Transgender Justice Initiative told VOA: “We hear about folks in our community who feel so uncomfortable or who are made to feel so uncomfortable that they simply give up when they are challenged on their own identity.
“I know someone who is listed on a voter registration form as female, which does not accurately reflect their current gender identity, which is male. He’s afraid the way he looks and presents himself could actually keep him from being able to vote in person.
“Voting is not about challenging people on their identities. It is giving people an opportunity to express their constitutional right to vote.”
“All female athletes want is a fair shot at competition,” a young woman can be heard saying over a video of several athletes preparing to run a race. “But what if that shot was taken away by a competitor who claims to be a girl but was born a boy?”
That controversial digital ad — which then shows a teen boy outrunning his female competitors and shrugging at them with indifference afterwards — is one of three released this week by the American Principles Project, a Virginia-based conservative think tank, and its PAC. The group issued a statement Thursday saying the political ads are part of a $4 million effort to “target persuadable Democrats and independent voters in key swing states.”
Half of the campaign budget will be spent in Michigan, a state Trump won in 2016 but now lags in the polls, and the American Principles Project confirmed it will release ads in Wisconsin “in the coming weeks.” The group said it hopes the Michigan ads draw attention to the support of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., “for policies which would allow biological males to compete in women’s sports and push children into dangerous, life-altering sex-change” procedures.
The two other ads feature Kevin Whitt, a man who says he lived as a woman for 17 years before deciding to detransition. Whitt warns viewers that “treatments to change the gender of a minor are very dangerous and irreversible.”
The Biden and Peters campaigns did not immediately respond to a requests for comment.
National LGBTQ advocacy groups, including the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, were quick to denounce the campaign.
“These ads perpetuate dangerous stereotypes, traffic in misinformation, and put the lives of transgender people at risk,” GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement. “Sites and social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook should decline to run them and send a message loud and clear that those who would use their platforms to peddle hate and lies will not be tolerated or validated.”
The Human Rights Campaign also called for social media companies to take down the digital ads, saying they are blatant lies from an “outdated playbook.”
“APP wants a future where LGBTQ people can be fired, denied housing, refused business services or health care solely because of who they are. But they know full well that they’re on the wrong side of this issue and the wrong side of our future.”
Representatives from Facebook and YouTube did not immediately respond to NBC News’ requests for comment regarding the ads.
This is not the first time APP has funded an ad campaign with the hopes of making transgender rights a political wedge issue. Last year, it funded a similar campaign amid the Kentucky governor’s race, though the group’s preferred candidate, Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, lost to Democrat Andy Beshear.
The gruesome killing on Saturday of a second transgender woman in northern Mexico has unnerved the local transgender community and amplified calls for greater protections in the Latin American nation.
The murder of Leslie Rocha in the border city of Ciudad Juarez came days after a transgender civil society group staged a protest there to demand greater protection.
Those demands were sparked by the murder late of Ciudad Juarez-born transgender activist Mireya Rodriguez Lemus, whose body was found earlier this week in Aquiles Serdan, a town in the northern Chihuahua state.
Last year 117 people from the LGBTQ community were killed in Mexico, up almost a third compared from 2018 and the highest since 2015, according to local advocacy group Letra S.
“They’re torturing them, they’re killing them horribly,” said Rocha’s aunt, Leticia Sanchez.
“Justice must be had because they deserve respect,” she said. “Why are they doing this?”
An LGBT+ rights protest at the Poland-Germany border has shone a light on the growing disparity between the two nations on queer issues.
While Germany has progressed significantly on LGBT+ rights in the past few years, introducing same-sex marriage and banning conversion therapy, the picture is far bleaker in Poland – where nationalist politicians have fuelled a rise in public homophobia and anti-LGBT+ extremism.
Around 2,000 demonstrators stood up to homophobia on Saturday (September 5) with a protest held jointly by activists in the closely-connected border towns of Slubice, Poland, and Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, which are separated by a symbolic bridge across the River Oder.
German protesters carried signs and banners expressing their love for their LGBT+ Polish neighbours, as the groups marched across the border.
“This is our response to what is happening in other parts of Poland, where LGBT-free zones are being created,” Kacper Kubiak of the Institute of Equality told Gazeta Lubuska.
Mewa Topolska, a teacher from Slubice and one of the organisers of the march, told Reuters: “The only way we can change people’s opinions is through visibility.
“We don’t have full queer rights in Poland — and won’t for a long time so the main [aim of the march] is solidarity with the Polish side.”
Stella, a care worker in Frankfurt an der Oder, told the outlet: “No one should judge people according to their race, religion or [sexuality]. We are all born different and we don’t choose how we are born.”
A handful of counter-protesters turned up on the Polish side of the border, Reuters reports, bringing with them a van daubed with anti-LGBT+ slogans.
Politicians have repeatedly stoked anti-LGBT+ hatred in Poland.
LGBT+ people are a popular punching bag for Poland’s conservative government, with right-wing president Andrzej Duda narrowly winning re-election in July after making homophobia one of the core planks of his campaign.
In a “family charter” published ahead of the election, Duda pledged to “prohibit the propagation of this ideology” in public institutions and “defend the institution of marriage” as defined as a “relationship between a women and a man”.
With days to go until the run-off vote, Duda also proposed an amendment to Poland’s constitution that would ban same-sex couples from adopting children. He said: “I am convinced that, thanks to this, children’s safety and concern for the good of children will be ensured to a much greater extent.”
The European Parliament passed a resolution that strongly condemned the concept of LGBT-free zones in December, noting that they are “part of a broader context of attacks against the LGBT+ community in Poland, which include growing hate speech by public and elected officials and public media, as well as attacks and bans on Pride marches”.
