LGBTQ+

alt-text: [yellow words saying "abolish cis puberty" next to a trans flag on a digital art wooden background]

It is victim blaming, we are not the reason homophobia exists or that people become extremely homophobic. It is not oppressed people that cause their own oppression, we don’t in some way “deserve” it.

Some aspects of the identity of sexuality may be related to physical and things we cannot control, but at the end of the day it is an identity. If they do not see themselves as gay, they are not. It is not for you to assign an identity to someone, even someone you don’t like. Even if someone might identify as gay outside of these power structures, in here they aren’t. Even if they would be gay, they participate in our oppression because being straight is beneficial to them, not because they “are secretly gay”. If they did homophobia because they were “ashamed” it wouldn’t be helping so many of them get into positions of power

yo, one thing about actually abolishing oppression towards us trans people: it requires not putting any specific puberty above another. All puberties are permanent, not just trans ones.

We have the ability to sit every person down before puberty and talk them through what it entails, and then let them choose what exactly they want to go through. Making it an explicit choice places trans and cis people into the same situation.

Even with zero medical barriers to transition once someone realizes they are trans, the social barrier of what you are "expected" to be is an issue, for multiple reasons. People who want to make big changes are often questioned and forced to prove that what they want is what they “actually want”, because it deviates from what is expected. People who deviate in smaller ways are punished in their own ways, with those deviations being treated as mistakes or failures, because another major role can't be easily assumed. They are pushed to drop everything that is not perfectly aligned with the role to not be constantly torn apart. We have the technology to provide agency, not allowing its use is oppression. The only way to abolish the hierarchy around puberty is to abolish expectations around puberty.

If you think a child doesn’t have the ability to decide what puberty they want to go through, forcing them into a random one isn’t better. If they can’t say no, then they definitely can’t say yes. People will always know themselves better than others do.

Headline undersells how he did this during the 90’s during the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell era. Was not nearly as socially or politically acceptable then as it is now in the US to do that.

And not just for one person, he was the facility adviser of a gay-straight alliance club

People who identify as LGBTQ can face major disparities and stigma when it comes to cancer care, often resulting in later-stage diagnoses and poorer outcomes than other patients.

Dr. Elizabeth Cathcart-Rake, an oncologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, is determined to change that.

This summer, Cathcart-Rake and a team at Mayo launched Rainbows, a cancer clinic tailored to meeting the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, gender-diverse and intersex patients. Rainbows will initially focus on supporting patients with breast cancer, with the goal of eventually expanding to include other types of tumors already treated at Mayo.

https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/redefining-our-terms/queer-a-term-from-of-the-global-south

Archived version

The Arkansas Supreme Court recently reinstated a ban on using a nonbinary gender designation on state ID cards. A lower court had previously blocked a rule barring the use of “X” as an option for gender, but now the ban is back in effect. Opponents have attacked the rule as “erasing” trans and nonbinary people.

Arkansas governor Sarah Sanders has been leading a similar charge throughout the state bureaucracy. Early in her term, she issued executive orders banning the use of “woke” terms like “LatinX,” “pregnant people,” and “birth giver.” Sanders herself admitted that the actual use of these terms was almost nonexistent—able only to cite a single state Health Department example for using language like “human milk.”

The purpose of the policy is to “foster a learning environment that is safe and free from discrimination, harassment and bullying; and (2) assist in the educational and social integration of transgender and gender expansive students.”

Some good news for once!

Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.

Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine.

Wilson, 20, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, responded to comments Musk made Monday about her and her transgender identity. On social media and in an interview posted online, Musk said she was “not a girl” and was figuratively “dead,” and he alleged that he had been “tricked” into authorizing trans-related medical treatment for her when she was 16.

Wilson said that Musk hadn’t been tricked and that, after initially having hesitated, he knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment, which required consent from her parents.

Musk’s recent statements crossed a line, she said.

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”

Transgender people in Russia have had their human rights systematically eroded by the government’s broader political strategy of attacking vulnerable minorities, according to UN independent expert, Graeme Reid.

One year after Russia passed a law banning gender reassignment surgery, he says that transgender Russians had been deprived of their “most basic rights to a legal identity and access to healthcare”.

The new legislation also stopped people from changing their personal details on documents - Ada was one of the last people to get her name officially changed before the law came into effect in July 2023.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has lashed out at the West and LGBT rights, saying he is fighting for traditional Russian values. At a cultural forum in St Petersburg last year, he dismissed transgender people as “transformers or trans-something”.

And at the end of 2023, Russia’s justice ministry announced another new ruling, declaring the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organisation.

It didn’t matter that no such organisation existed. Anyone guilty of supporting what is now deemed “extremist activity” faces up to 12 years in jail. Even displaying a rainbow flag risks a fine, and a possible four-year prison sentence for repeat offences.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/14954788

West Virginia is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review rulings that found the state’s refusal to cover certain health care for transgender people with government-sponsored insurance is discriminatory, Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said Thursday.

[alt text: a screenshot of a web search result, showing an article from healthline.com and the web search provider's attempt to summarize the article. The article is titled, "Genderqueer: What Does It Mean?", and the summary seems to turn into a recipe halfway through. The recipe text says things like, "Ingredients: 1 pound Small Red Potatoes, 2 pounds Extra-Large Shrimp, 6 ears Corns...." and "Nutritional: 710 Calories, 106 g Carbohydrates, 14 g Total Fat...."]

He surmised that the isolation of such places may foster a “make do” attitude. “There is a fair amount of sexual contact among older males in Western rural areas, the type of homosexuality which was probably among pioneers and outdoor men.

Today it is found among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general that are virile and physically active. These are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild. They live on realities and on a minimum of theory. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex.”

What was perhaps most shocking about homosexuality in the Old West was not that it was so common but that it wasn’t a big deal. In fact, miners and cowboys settled into convenient partnerships called “bachelor marriages.” When the miners in Angel Camp in northern California had dances, half the men wore bandanas around their arms to signal their feminine role. It was also very common and accepted for same sex bed mates to sleep together in small beds.

https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/amp/homo-sexuality-on-the-range

In a landmark ruling for gay rights in South Korea on Thursday, the country's Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples qualify for the national health insurance's dependent coverage, a decision that rights activists hoped could pave the way for legalizing same-sex marriage in the country.

The decision would allow same-sex couples in the country to register their partners as dependents in national health insurance coverage like married couples or couples in a common-law marriage can. It was one of the numerous benefits denied to same-sex and other couples living outside of the traditional norms of family in South Korea.

In its ruling on Thursday, the country's highest court ruled that denying a same-sex couple national health insurance dependent coverage "just because they are of the same sex" constitutes a serious discrimination that infringed upon citizens' "dignity and values, their rights to pursue happiness, their freedom of privacy and their rights to be equally treated by the law."

In its final say on the case on Thursday, the Supreme Court endorsed the appeals court ruling. It said that same-sex couples formed an "economic cohabitation tantamount to" married and common-law couples.

Archived version

In an interview with the French publication “Le Parisien”, Brenda Biya, the daughter of Cameroonian President Paul Biya, explains why she came out, what her family’s response has been, and how she hopes to make a difference for Cameroon’s LGBTQ community. This is an English translation of that interview.

Archived version

In an appeal to Sberbank head German Gref, the lower-house State Duma’s Family, Women and Children Committee said that it had received messages from parents who were “outraged” by the cards.

“We ask you, dear German Oskarovich, to take into account the opinion of parents and deputies of our committee on preventing violations of Russian legislation and to halt the issuance of the Children’s SberCard with the ‘rainbow unicorn’ — a symbol of the LGBT movement,” the state-run TASS news agency cited the committee’s letter as saying.

Sberbank issues cards for children aged 6 to 13 with seven different designs, including the rainbow unicorn.

Russia’s Supreme Court designated the “international LGBT movement,” which does not formally exist, as a banned “extremist” organization in November 2023.