This morning, we headed to Capitol Hill with a BOLD message for the new Congress: We won’t be punished by politicians who want to shame or bully us, deny our coverage, or put women and doctors in jail.
We were up bright & early on Tuesday, 11/29 to support the #Fightfor15 day of action to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr. Each of us, in every job, should earn a fair wage that allows us to live with dignity and plan for the future. Shout out to our BOLD New York partners for showing up in full force!
[“It’s not like anyone came right out and said they hated disabled people. But disability was depressing or embarrassing to write about, or just something that “most people wouldn’t be able to relate to as a subject.” There was a huge echoing silence in POC and/or queer activist communities. I had a few friends who whispered to each other about our chronic illnesses—but the most we could say was “It sucks, right?” We had no idea we could be part of a community, a history, a movement.
But in the past decade, disability justice culture has bloomed, through the hard work of disabled people who are also queer feminists of color, and it’s not like that anymore—at least, not all of the time. It’s not that ableist disregard for crip lives, both in the mainstream and inside our movements and communities, doesn’t still exist. But I no longer worry that every single person I encounter at an event will be awkward or pity me or just not get it. I do not feel like I am the only person I know who is talking about disability justice. I no longer feel like one of a tiny handful of people talking about access or worry that if I produce a crip show of course no one will come to it. I think more people know that not all disabled people are white. When I first started offering sick and disabled writing workshops for queer and trans people of color around 2010, sometimes no one would come out, or just a few people, or the idea would be shot down because the organizers were sure no one would come. But when I went on tour with Bodymap in 2015 and read explicitly disability-focused work, almost all of my gigs were standing and sitting room only. When I did a writing workshop by and for sick and disabled people of color at the 2015 Queer Students of Color Conference, the room was spilling over with queer people of color who wanted to talk and write about everything from pesticide exposures they had received doing farm work to intergenerational trauma. Disabled Black and brown queer voices are no longer uncommon on popular feminist and queer blogs like The Body Is Not an Apology, Everyday Feminism, GUTS, andAutostraddle, and I see articles including and thinking about ableism instead of forgetting about it. The Disability Visibility Project, Wear Your Voice, the Spoonie Collective, the Deaf Poets Society, Autistic Hoya, Krip-Hop Nation, and many other sites by and for intersectional disabled people are live. Everywhere people are talking about care work, emotional labor, femme emotional labor, access, and crip skills and science.
None of this happened because the able-bodied people decided to be nice to the cripples.”]
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Coming back to ask y'all if you know any good cartoon series for children where you can see the portrayal of families/ the role of mother and father.
To keep it short and crispy i’d use the intersectional approach and i need a series for my final paper but i’m struggling to find one with at least 3 episodes that i can write about cuz i wanna write about how children from the young age see how the mother e.g. is in an apron and cooks while the father is at work etc.
[Screencaps of a series of tweets by twitter user sydnerain, reading as follows:
Alright. Here is one indigenous woman’s take on the #WomensMarch [female symbol emoji] on Washington, in a sea full of white women (WW). This will be a thread.
Many women of color (WOC) have criticized this march already. I’d like to share an indigenous experience of colonization and stolen land.
First off, I’d like to point out I marched with a group of indigenous women/people with @indigwomenrise. We stayed together as a collective.
Before I begin my critique of the march, I want to thank every single organizer and marcher in our group. The experience was invaluable.
We were surrounded by good medicine in DC, the belly of the beast. You could tell by our spirits we came from 100’s of years of resistance.
We started a prayer circle in the morning in front of the American Indian Smithsonian museum, next to all those ancestors. It was powerful.
We took smoke from Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek, we sang warrior songs together. There were so many nations that came together as one.
I want to make it clear that I had my people with me, that I had a home in this march that was absolutely plagued with white supremacy.
I everyone [sic] to understand that our prayer circle was sacred & full of good spirits in those moments. And how leaving the circle was toxic.
I want everyone to know how disturbing it was during those brief moments I left the prayer circle and became surrounded by the gaze of WW.
My @IndigenizeOU partner and best friend Ashley and I wore our regalia. She wore her jingle dress and I wore my ribbon skirt & ribbon comb.
We were visible. They took pictures of us and then refused to take our fliers on pipelines, fracking, and #MMIW in Oklahumma.
The WW told us we “looked beautiful” and took pictures of us without our permission, but wouldn’t listen to what we face as NDN women.
Ashley and I started a chant, “You’re on stolen land.” WW shot us ugly looks. One shouted in her face, “We know but it isn’t our fault!”
Multiple WW scolded us for being “too loud.” Multiple WW mocked me for lulu'ing (war cry, of sorts) alongside Ashley while she chanted.
You could hear what the WW said. “They’re real Indians.” “They’re still here?” “I think they’re faking it.” “Why do they look like that?”
All the while I kept trying to focus on the energy & history of the land I was standing on. Washington DC. Capital. Stolen Piscataway land.
I always try to think about my connection to the land. Think about whose ancestors I’m standing on. And these WW ask me if I’m a real human.
Outside the prayer circle WW are taking pics & videos of us in round dance. Several WW roll up in R*skins hats. WW asking me “What is this?”
WW try to walk through our prayer circle and are immediately called out by our elders present. This is all before the march even starts.
When the march starts several WW try to join our group to march with us. Two WW beside me told me “Guess we’re Indians today!” and laughed.
We responded, “We don’t get to choose if we’re native or not. This is our reality & you are not Indian. You are disrespectful & need to go.”
WW responds: “I’m from Minnesota. I can name a lot of the lakes around me and they’re all in Indian. I even know some tribes too.”
None of us are amused and we ask her to leave. She calls us and our march “rude” and said “it’s unfortunate that Indians can’t take jokes.”
When the march begins I am surrounded by WW holding up signs like “smash the patriarchy”[,] “keep your hands off our pussies” and so forth.
We begin our first chant, “Mni Wiconi, water is life.” WW look confused. WW staring at us or just acting oblivious like we weren’t there.
And it makes me so, so fucking angry to type this. The tone-deafness of all these “angry” white supremacists around me. Their lack of care.
Our lives as indigenous women are intersectional BY NECESSITY. Everyday it’s life/death for us in this settler colonial terrorist regime.
I’m crying now typing this. One day it’s a pipeline. The next our babies are stolen. Next our sisters go missing. Next we’re killed by cops.
And I’m marching and trying to hold my head up and remembering my Mvskoke ancestors who marched on the Trail of Tears for me to be here.
The whole time I am treated by non-Natives and especially WW like a marching spectacle while they refuse my fliers. Like a real life museum.
They only stopped to pay attention to us when we drummed & sang our women’s warrior song, round danced, or to say we have “pretty costumes”.
These WW are saying “this is just the beginning.” Our ancestors have marched since 1492. This is our whole lives. This is who we are.
WW do not understand the complexities of our reality as children of this grandmother earth, indigenous to her lands. And they don’t want to.
WW want to call me their “sister,” but my sisters don’t touch me or my regalia without my permission. They don’t speak over me.
You, WW with a transphobic sign about your vagina being your womanhood, WW that is a colonizer on my land, are not my sister. The opposite.
You want me to hold hands with you and sing kumbaya and be “equal,” while you stand on our ancestor’s graves and this is your first march.
You, WW, are complicit in my genocide, & until you abandon ur white fragility & acknowledge this[,] you’re a white supremacist, not a feminist.
What did I learn from the way WW treated native women at #WomensMarch [female symbol emoji]? That we aren’t human. Just museums of a past you know nothing about.
To WW we are living museums of a past you refuse to acknowledge & refuse to learn about. Treated as a guest on our own ancestral lands.
White feminists treat us like we are burdens or that we are divisive. Because it’s inconvenient for you to let go of your whiteness.]
IT was snowing in Maine on Jan. 9. I’d been to the dentist’s the day before. The staff there were pleasant enough when I changed genders 12 years ago. “We’ll just change your forms,” the receptionist had said, cheerfully. “It’s no problem.”
That night, Papi Edwards, 20, a transgender woman of color, was shot to death outside a hotel in Louisville, Ky.
If you’d told me in 2000, as a transgender woman just coming out, that I was a person of privilege, I’d have angrily lectured you about exactly how heavy the burden I’d been carrying was. It had nearly done me in: the shame, the secrecy, the loneliness. It had not yet occurred to me that other burdens, carried by other women, could be weightier.
On Jan. 17, I moved into a new apartment on 106th and West End in Manhattan, in anticipation of the spring semester at Barnard College, where I teach English. My son Zach came down with me, helping to carry my luggage. He was heading back to college the next day. We had lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant called Awash, on Amsterdam. I pointed out the window at the building across the street, where I’d lived with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in the early 1980s. I wasn’t out as transgender then; I couldn’t imagine it. Yet here I was, 30 years later, a Barnard professor, having lunch with my son, who is a drama major at Vassar.
Lamia Beard, a 30-year-old black trans woman, was shot early that morning in Norfolk, Va. It was the weekend before the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday.
Feminist scholars write of the concept of “intersectionality” — the way people who occupy multiple oppressed identities can be understood only in terms of their sum, rather than as a set of independent experiences. As two trans women, Ms. Beard and I had some common experiences. But the differences between us have to be understood not only in terms of race but also in the way the oppressions generated by race and gender are bound together.
It snowed hard on Jan. 26. The subways closed that night. The day before I’d gone to services at Riverside Church. Sitting in the pews, staring at stained glass, I’d felt the power of God shining on me like a bright light.
Later, I talked to a friend about the thing I’d felt. My friend, an astrophysicist at Columbia, is a trans woman, too. We are both white.
They found Ty Underwood’s body in her car that morning. She was a black trans woman, a nursing assistant who lived in Tyler, Tex.
Like a lot of white people, a lot of the time I’m not aware of having “white privilege.” In a similar way, I can tell you that I wasn’t aware of having “male privilege,” either, in the years before transition. It’s something you come to understand only when it’s gone, like the first time I walked down an empty street alone after midnight as a woman, and heard a man’s heavy footsteps behind me.
On Jan. 31, my wife came down from Maine. We went to see the movie “Selma” at the AMC theater on West 84th Street. There, we saw the actor playing Dr. King say, “It is unacceptable that they use their power to keep us voiceless.”
Firefighters found Yazmin Vash Payne that day in an apartment in Los Angeles. She’d died of multiple stab wounds, reportedly the third trans woman killed in Los Angeles in four months.
On Feb. 1, I spent the day grading papers. That morning I worshiped at Riverside again. Sitting there listening to the carillon, I remembered the words my mother used to say: Love will prevail.
Around the time I was at Riverside, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus was found dead in a stairwell in San Francisco. She’d been stabbed. A trans woman of color in her 30s, she was a member of Bayview Church. Her mother described her as “beautiful inside and out.”
The 2012 National Transgender Discrimination Survey reported that trans people faced pervasive bias in housing and employment and suffered from higher rates of suicide. In almost every area, black trans people reported that they were doing worse than white trans people.
On Feb. 11, I appeared on MSNBC with the anchor Thomas Roberts and the actress Judith Light, who stars in the Amazon series “Transparent,” about a family with a transgender parent. We talked about the progress being made on transgender issues. But the progress isn’t equal for everyone.
Penny Proud, a 21-year-old trans woman of color, was shot to death the day before, in New Orleans.
On Feb. 16 Barnard — an all-women’s college — had a community forum for students, alumni, faculty and staff members to talk about the issue of admitting transgender women. I spoke at the event, and told everyone to open their hearts.
Kristina Gomez Reinwald, also known as Kristina Grant Infiniti, was found dead the day before in Miami. She was a transgender Latina in her mid-40s. A Miami TV station reported that, since there were no signs of forced entry in her home, she may have known her killer — a person whose heart, one might guess, had not been opened.
I talked to Caitlyn Jenner by phone for the first time on May 18. She struck me as a kind soul, from a very different world than my own, but determined to do good. “We don’t want people dying over this issue,” she told me.
Londyn Chanel, a 21-year-old black trans woman, was found dead in North Philadelphia that night of stab wounds. One of her friends told a local station, “She had a heart of gold.”
On May 30, I was in San Francisco for a meeting of the board of Glaad, the L.G.B.T. advocacy group.
Mercedes Williamson, a 17-year-old trans woman, reportedly disappeared that same night in Rocky Creek, Ala. Her body was found a few days later, in a field behind the house of the alleged murderer’s father.
On July 21, my wife and I were in a Los Angeles restaurant with the transgender minister Allyson Robinson. “God knows us,” she told me, “before we know ourselves.”
India Clarke, a 25-year-old trans woman of color, was found beaten to death in Tampa that morning. A local station referred to her as a “man dressed as a woman.” Her father said: “The Lord made us this way. It’s a shame that we could lose the life because of who we are.”
Two days later, I spent an evening on the set of the Amazon series “Transparent” on the Paramount lot. My son, who knows all about having a transgender parent, is working on the show as a production assistant.
On Aug. 8, I went to dinner at the Village Inn in Belgrade Lakes, Me. The inn is across the lake from our house. My wife and I traveled there by boat.
Amber Monroe, 20, a trans woman of color, was killed in Detroit that day. Someone shot her as she was getting out of a car near Palmer Park.
In the last three weeks, news reports have come out about the deaths of at least five more trans or gender-nonconforming people including Shade Schuler, in Dallas; Kandis Capri, in Phoenix; Ashton O’Hara, in Detroit; Elisha Walker, in Smithfield, N.C.; and Tamara Dominguez, in Kansas City, Mo.
My mother told me that love would prevail, and for me it has, as it often does for people of privilege in this country, people who can find themselves insulated from injustice by dint of race or class or education or accident of birth.
For many trans women, though, especially those of color, something other than love prevails: loss. Did their lives matter any less than mine?
###
Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of “Stuck in the Middle With You: Parenthood in Three Genders.”
I’ve been following Gazi Kodzo’s conversations on periscope and somehow that got me thinking on something that I refer to as black male exceptionalism–where a lot of black men, once they’ve reached a certain status in the black community or have a large following of black people, can do no wrong.
It’s something that’s happened with several black male celebrities–Bill Cosby being the most apparent example where tens of women came forward accusing him of rape, sexual assault and what have you for more than two decades–and multitudes of black people readily came to his defense. Black celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg openly defended him, Raven Simone refused to comment on the subject altogether, Felicia Rashad (I love her to death, but she failed me here) also defended him–not to mention the scores of people, famous and working class alike, defending him tooth and nail on social media.
It has me feeling some type of way that our black “role models” don’t come under fire for the scrutiny they often deserve.
While I call it black male exceptionalism, I can easily rationalize it as an intersection of multiple societal oppressions: the patriarchal overtones mixed with racism, sexism, colorism, and rape-culture intersecting to create this perfect storm that allows the wrongs done against black women to go completely unanswered when prestigious, wealthy and well-known black men commit them.
heyyyyy guyssss. so it’s been awhile, senior year’s been a lot, and for a while i wasn’t really doing work that i felt like applied to this tumblr, but i figured, why not just upload whatever i’ve been working on? so here’s an old poster that i did last year for the RISD Feminists!
(and i know there’s a lot of work that is the literal same idea, but whatever, the idea here was conceived by the club as a whole!)
For patients with a history of sexual trauma, pelvic exams may trigger PTSD symptoms. The techniques of trauma-informed care can lead to an easier exam.
Studies show that trauma survivors want providers to ask about sexual trauma before the exam (that is, while the patient is clothed and seated). During the exam, patients prefer that the clinician listens, anticipates each step of the procedure, and affirms the patient’s control over the exam. For example, giving women the option of self-inserting the speculum has been shown to lower patients’ anxiety and pain.
Clinicians should use the following patient-centered techniques to lower patients’ anxiety:
Establish rapport before the exam. In some cases, this means doing the exam at a separate visit.
Invite the patient to suggest measures that will make her more comfortable with the exam.
Allow a support person to accompany the patient during the exam.
Allow the patient to choose a female examiner if she prefers this.
Before starting, inform the patient that the exam will stop if she feels uncomfortable. Assure her that she has control over the pace.
Tell the patient about each step of the exam right before it happens.
Keep the patient’s body covered, exposing only the areas being examined.
Encourage the patient to breathe abdominally in order to relax her pelvic floor muscles.
Rest the unopened speculum against the patient’s vagina so that she can get used to the sensation before the speculum is inserted and opened.
Use the smallest possible speculum.
Use lubricant.
Offer self-insertion of the speculum.
Offer frog-leg positioning without stirrups. Call stirrups “foot rests.”
If the patient does not want to continue the exam, the clinician should stop, inquire about the patient’s needs, and proceed only when the patient is ready.
This is how all exams should be performed - we never know who has experienced trauma.
“There’s some truth” to claims that people of color are suspicious of clinical studies, this epidemiologist, who is Latino, said, “because there’s discordance in who gets studied and who’s doing the studying.”
This has enormous implications for the applicability of health research.
Becoming disabled demands learning how to live effectively as a person with disabilities, not just living as a disabled person trying to become nondisabled. It also demands the awareness and cooperation of others who don’t experience these challenges. Becoming disabled means moving from isolation to community, from ignorance to knowledge about who we are, from exclusion to access, and from shame to pride.
Disability studies should be required for the health professions.
Dismantling antisemitism is necessary work for antioccupation movements. Zionist sentiment surges in the aftermath of violent antisemitism - genocide in Europe, expulsions in SWANA, et al. - and European support for the creation of Israel was rooted in their unwillingness to allow Jewish communities to exist within their borders without killing them. No, antisemitism does not provide a defense for the occupation nor does it recuse its supporters of accountability, but Israel did not happen in a vacuum; rather, it happened in the context of anti-Jewish hatred, a Jewish refugee crisis that Europe’s antisemitism was responsible for and ignored, and a white supremacist system that disregarded the lives of both Jews and Palestinians. Jewish and Palestinian liberation is inextricable.
According to many this week, it seems that I, as an American Jew, apparently have a personal role in controlling American, European, and Middle Eastern geopolitics. Yet, I still cannot convince cisgender-heterosexual men to use my pronouns (they/them) correctly. What gives?
