Tag Archive for "Transgender Issues"

Posts Tagged Transgender Issues

Guest Post: Fear of a trans college

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Emma Caterine. Emma is a prison abolitionist, decriminalization advocate, socialist, and cat lover. She has written in the past for Autostraddle, RH Reality Check, The Feminist Wire, and Tits and Sass. You can find more of her writing at sassysyndicalist.tumblr.com.

Fear, perhaps more extremely than any other emotion, motivates people to make some strange and terrible decisions. Prejudice is very often such a decision. I disagree with those who want to abandon words like homophobia or transphobia: fear can make no rational sense and though it never excuses horrific decisions, it can explain them.

Transphobia is particularly apt when discussing the prejudicial attitudes of some cisgender feminists towards trans women. The idea ...

By Maya Dusenbery • 9 years ago

Why the NWLC’s video featuring Sarah Silverman “getting a penis” to avoid the gender pay gap fails

This week, the National Women’s Law Center, an organization that does good work, released a video starring Sarah Silverman, a comedian we often love, to highlight the injustice of the gender pay gap, a worthy cause indeed.

Unfortunately, it seems that at some point in the creation of the video, everyone involved forgot that trans people exist. As far as I can tell, that’s the most generous way to explain why the resulting video is such an embarrassingly offensive mess.

By Suzanna Bobadilla • 9 years ago

The Feministing Five: Darkmatter

Janani Balasubramanian and Alok Vaid-Menon make up the incredible trans South Asian art and activist collaboration Darkmatter. Masterfully using humor, language, and rhythm, Darkmatter pushes their audience to reflect and take action on racial justice, anti-colonialism, and gender and sexuality politics. Their spoken performances share stories from their childhoods to conversations during their young adult lives, and they invite you to find the poetry in your own world, relationships, and journey toward social justice.

Excitingly, Darkmatter’s brilliance can also be found within their written poetry, prose, interviews, and tweets (seriously, follow them now). Like their individual work, which has been featured in outlets such as Black Girl Dangerous, Racialicious, The New York Times, and Upworthy, Darkmatter’s ...

By Jos Truitt • 9 years ago

Mt. Holyoke college changes policy to admit trans women

This week Mt. Holyoke, a women’s college in the Pioneer Valley in MA, announced it will be changing its admissions policy to include trans women as applicants who will be considered for admission:

Mount Holyoke College welcomes applications for our undergraduate program from any qualified student who is female or identifies as a woman.

Mt. Holyoke released a FAQ on transgender admission explaining the policy and how the school came to this decision:

This week Mt. Holyoke, a women’s college in the Pioneer Valley in MA, announced it will be changing its admissions policy to include trans women as applicants who will be considered for admission:

Mount Holyoke College welcomes applications ...

By Maya Dusenbery • 9 years ago

New Jersey school bans trans girl from school unless she dresses as a boy

A New Jersey middle school is refusing to allow 13-year-old Rachel Pepe to return to her school unless she dresses and identifies as a boy.

As reported by the Asbury Park Press, Thorne Middle School in Middletown, New Jersey informed Rachel’s mom, Angela Peters, that she must come back to school prepared to dress like and act like a boy as well as use the name on her birth certificate. No accommodations would be made for her gender identity; Peters suggested letting Rachel use the bathroom in the nurse’s office, but the school rejected that idea.

Peters believes sending Rachel to a new private school that is accepting would be the ideal solution, but Middletown School District is also not willing to ...

A New Jersey middle school is refusing to allow 13-year-old Rachel Pepe to return to her school unless she dresses and identifies as a boy.

As reported by the Asbury Park Press, Thorne Middle School in Middletown, New ...

By Suzanna Bobadilla • 9 years ago

The Feministing Five: #FreeMarichuy’s Olga Tomchin

Marichuy Leal Gamino, 23, has been detained at the for-profit ICE center in Eloy, Arizona for over a year. A trans woman forced into a men’s facility, she has faced sexual harassment and threats from men. Despite her efforts to report these threats to the facility guards, she has no received protection and was recently raped by her cellmate.

After reporting her assault, Marichuy was pressured into signing a document saying that the assault was “consensual.” After reaching out to external organizing groups like the Transgender Law Center, Arcoíris Liberation Team, and the Puente Movement, she was involuntarily placed into solitary confinement.

#FreeMarichuy has assembled a coalition of over 70 LGBTQ and immigration rights activists to, ...

By Jos Truitt • 9 years ago

GLAAD gives two major movie studios failing grades for LGBT representation

GLAAD has released their second annual studio responsibility index, which tracks LGBT representation in major Hollywood films. Like last year, the report found a lack of LGBT representation in movies; additionally, a lot of the representation was negative:

By Jos Truitt • 9 years ago

Against Visibility

When Jared Leto won a Golden Globe and then an Oscar for playing a (caricature of a) transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club, I witnessed so much cis mansplaining about how Leto’s performance and award show appearances were good for trans women, because we needed visibility. Lots of folks don’t know about trans people, they argued, and Leto was educating them – plus his performance wasn’t that bad, it was accurate to how trans women were (seen by these cis men) at that time. When Laverne Cox made the cover of TIME, Andrew Sullivan responded by arguing that trans people should be willing to talk about our genitals when asked because people ...

When Jared Leto won a Golden Globe and then an Oscar for playing a (caricature of a) transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club, I witnessed so much cis mansplaining about how Leto’s performance ...