Tag Archives: lgbtiq

LGBTIQ

The ACL fail to surprise me

So the ACL put out a press release today claiming that the “gay activists” (yes I know, I’m one too, I want to know who isn’t apart from the ACL), was claiming victory over the (voluntary as far as we know) resignation of Professor Kuruvilla George from the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission.  For those who haven’t been following Australian Politics (and I completely get that), Professor Kuruvilla George co-signed a submission to the Australian Senate Enquiry into equal marriage suggesting that children should be brought up in a heterosexual unit as that was the most appropriate family unit and that no studies have ever found that having same sex parents is good for children.  Yes, I know.

The submission was listed as “Doctors for the Family” and is available here.

The big problem for Professor Kuruvilla George, being his role as a board member for an organisation that promotes equality and acts in cases of discrimination against protected attributes, one of which is sexual orientation.  He is also the Deputy Chief Psychiatrist for Victoria.  According to The Age today, his resignation was voluntary and had nothing to do with his submission to the Senate Enquiry which was done in as a private individual (though signed with: MBBS MPhil FRCPsych FRANZCP after his name – which means he was signing it in a medical capacity at least – as far as I read it).

I was going to talk about the ACL’s press release and their suggestion that all research on queer families was bunk, but the delightful Chrys beat me too it, so I’ll point you at her work here, and another article which debunks the authors that the ACL are relying on here.

Continue reading The ACL fail to surprise me →

Related Posts:

Linkspam

Linkspam April 2012 edition

From Yessenia at Queereka, “Trans Position” describing transphobia in some women’s spaces, in this case polyamorous women’s spaces:

When I first found the MeetUp.com page of a support group for polyamorous relation­ships, it seemed perfect. Not only was it tailored to our style, the description explicitly said that it welcomed all women, in­cluding “self-identified women.” For two trans-identified people, this sounded perfect, even too good to be true.

After sending the orga­nizer pictures she had requested so she could rec­ognize us at the door, we learned my partner’s self-identification as a woman was trumped by her body. Though she had no prob­lem with a transmasculine female-bodied person entering the group, when the organizer saw my partner’s face, she balked and my part­ner was informed that she was not wel­come. “Self-identified woman” turned out to be “post-operative, hormonally modified, culturally-identified women.” In short, she had better pass as a ciswoman. The organizer defend­ed her decision to bar my part­ner from the group by arguing that she was making sure people in the group felt ‘safe.’ The crux of this issue is what it means to be a woman and what women-only spaces look like.

Vivienne Chen at the Huffington Post, writes “Poly-Baiting: Why We Need a More Inclusive LGBT Movement“:

The problem is Santorum is right. Did I just say that? (This is where I say things that not everyone in the LGBTQ community agrees with, so my post should not be used as a monolithic representation of LGBTQ activism.)

He’s right in the sense that once we realize it’s stupid to keep any two loving, consenting adults apart, we may start wondering whether it’s equally stupid to keep three or more loving, consenting adults apart. However, he’s totally wrong in assuming that the latter is necessarily a bad thing, and thus deserves to be booed at any opportunity.

An Anonymous Guest-Post at Warren Ellis’s blog.  This guest post is from a possibly former member of Anonymous:

Now, what I’m going to talk about isn’t really a tale from the front line, as there wasn’t one. Spike, in his foxhole, getting shelled, trying to stave off terror by finding a way to brew up some tea whilst drawing naked ladies on his copy of the standing orders would doubtless have been extremely envious at that way I could get involved from the comforts of home, or my workplace, or out on the streets of London or the idyllic countryside around East Grinstead, even if that bit did involve hiding up trees in the rain, trying not to laugh as serious looking security heavies beat the bushes below and didn’t think to look up. Despite the relative tameness of this tale in comparison to virtually any and all war stories, Spike Milligan’s books are an inspiration in terms of getting down some of the stories of events you (the generic, Royal ‘you’, that is) were involved in, so here’s the tale of how I played a part in changing the way Anonymous interacted with the media, and the ways in which it did make a difference to a couple of individuals, even if the international impact is much, much harder to assess.

 

Related Posts:

Linkspam

Click on all the links – linkspam

I have my computer back, and I have a hundred thousand links (well not quite), to share with you.  Ones I’ve gathered while at work (where I had a computer) and ones I had ready to go before it took a week for my PC to be fixed. So let us begin, in no particular order…

Leah Moore guest posts on Warren Ellis’s blog on how the comic industry needs to tap more than the male market in “Thank Heaven for Little Girls“:

Girls read comics, not just Manga either. Girls read superhero comics, indie comics, autobiographical comics, historical comics, literary comics, horror comics, romance comics and even just plain terrible comics. Girls are comic fans. They want comics aimed at them, or aimed not at them, or just comics that are good. They want all the same things male comic fans want. They want to be sold to, they want to buy the cold cast porcelain model of Rogue looking badass and put it on their shelf. They want Wonder Woman underwear sets and Wolverine stationery for the new term. Women are just as whimsical, gullible, romantic and fanciful as men. They are capable of grasping the finer points of all the weird freaky made up stuff that we all commonly know to be “ACCEPTED CONTINUITY.”  They will talk about costume changes and characterisation.

Continue reading Click on all the links – linkspam →

Related Posts:

LGBTIQ

Submission to the Senate on marriage equality

1 Comment

I wrote a submission to the Australian Senate on marriage equality (see below).  You too can comment here or follow the steps on this website here.

An individual’s religious beliefs on the morality of a particular practice should in no way prevent someone else from undertaking that practice.  As a pluralistic society we accept differences of belief and activity.  We understand that some people enjoy soccer and others enjoy AFL.  We understand that some religions have dietary restrictions and others don’t.  We understand that some people dress in ways they believe are compatible with their religion, and others dress in ways that they feel comfortable in doing.

In none of these activities does one religion hold sway over other people’s actions and choices, except where it comes to equal marriage.  For some reason, some religious people (thankfully a minority), believe that the strictures in their holy book apply to everyone, regardless of whether or not they are followers of that religion or that particular understanding of that religion.

An individual’s personal beliefs on what is right and wrong should not impact on the full recognition of human rights for others.  A long time ago anyone who was not white was deemed to be sub-human – those views changed, despite some people protesting that it was against their understanding of their religious text.  A long time ago women could not vote, and if working earned less than their male counterparts in many cases.  Those views changed despite some people protesting that it was against their understanding of their religious text.

The world changes and moves, gradually everyone who is missing out on fundamental human rights will either have them granted to them by law, or by societal recognition.

In the end, to refuse a group the right to marriage because it is against some religious texts is not the fairness I expect living in Australia.  If there are no non-religous reasons to allow equal marriage in Australia, we should allow it.  Just as we have allowed changes in the past to things considered “traditional” (equality of women, humanity of non-white people), we can change “traditional” understandings of things now.

We haven’t let the bigots of the past hold back the future, it’s time to recognise that granting equal marriage to those in committed relationships who happen to be same sex is a step forward.  In no country where this has happened has the world ended.  We know it will be only good for equality here.

Related Posts:

LGBTIQ

Biphobia

2 Comments

So, what is biphobia?  This is a question I field fairly often, not that surprising that I’m the current Vice President of the Bi-Alliance Victoria committee, especially when we participate in media outreach, and arguing about the validity of bisexuality on the interwebs.  So definitions, there are some handy ones recently put together by a UK study, and a US study – which has just been approved by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Advisory Committee (LGBTAC), an officially chartered body of the City and County of San Francisco.

This is the first time a governmental body in the United States has approved and released a report of this kind on the indiscernibility of bisexuals and bisexuality in social and civic life. (from here)

Continue reading Biphobia →

Related Posts:

Linkspam

Link Spam – end of February

Closing some tabs I have open of some very interesting articles I’ve found about on the internets recently.

At Charlie’s Diary, “Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed“, an excellent and timely reminder how technology and women’s work aren’t all that great together.

This may sound like bitching, and of course in some sense it is. But it began to occur to me that the tech I was using was incredibly gendered. In the “male” sphere, of professional operations, offices, corporations, pop culture, businesses, the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I’d yet lived. In the “female” sphere, the home, domestic duties, daily chores, cleaning, heating, anything inside the walls of a house, it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar.

At LGBTQNation, “It’s 2012. Do you know where your transgender children are?“:

Something out of the ordinary happens when cisgender adults talk about transgender children. People who wouldn’t normally make a child’s genitals a public issue are suddenly desperate to publicly scrutinize and debate the intimate details of children’s bodies. Some of these bodies belong to kids as young or younger than seven, like Bobby Montoya, the first openly trans Girl Scout.

At Love Joy Feminism (one of my new favourite blogs), “You can’t pray the gay away, even at BJU” discusses those LGBTIQ individuals who study at Bob Jones University and realise that they’re not straight and that being LBGTIQ is ok (though a long journey to get there for some).

I grew up believing that being gay is a disorder of some sort, likely caused by either sexual abuse or having an absent father or distant mother, and that gay people can be “cured” through prayer and therapy and go on to lead normal lives as straight people. No one from a functional, Christian family should ever end up gay.

But of course, the reality doesn’t work out that way. And it’s that reality that these GLBT Bob Jones alumni want to make known.

s.e. smith writes “Where Are All the Nonbinary Parents? And Children?“:

Don’t mistake me. I know they exist, because I see them. They’re pretty active online, for example, and have lively communities offline as well. I’m talking about where they are in media and pop culture, because right now, it appears to be pretty much nowhere; along with the rest of nonbinary people, of course. There is something particularly sinister about the erasure of nonbinary parents and children when it comes to pop culture and mass media descriptions of families, though.

Margart Cho contributes to the It Gets Better project with a blog post about they bullying she survived at school:

I was bullied pretty badly when I was a kid, the worst period falling between the ages of 10 and 14, I think. People tell me to get over it, and that I am an adult now, privileged and famous and constantly applauded not only in my primary field, stand-up comedy, but also in practically every endeavor I have chosen to devote myself to, from acting to burlesque bump-and-grind to songwriting. I am told I have no right to complain, and that may be true to some extent, the good in my life flowing in from all directions, satisfaction pulsing through me every second of the day, but I will never stop complaining until I am dead in the ground or even afterward, probably, if I can find a way back out of the light to complain about the afterlife. I will never stop complaining. It’s kind of fun to me now, and looking back, I was treated so terribly that I don’t feel I have the capacity to forgive. Fuck forgiveness and all that. I think that even Jesus would say, “Yeah I guess you do have a point…”

A very interesting article at New Matilda, “The War On Birth Control“, detailing issues of the current US Republican Presidential wassname that they have going on currently.  The article, despite my issues with the US democratic system, is a very interesting read:

Obama’s hard-fought health reforms, the Affordable Care Act, include a provision that requires all employee insurance plans to cover contraception — without any religious exemption. In practical terms, this means that the employees of religious-affiliated institutions such as universities and hospitals (but not churches themselves) will have access to birth control as part of their health insurance. Twenty eight states had similar provisions before this announcement and the stated goal is to provide more affordable birth control.

A bill introduced by Republican up-and-comer Mario Rubio attempts to counter the lifting of the religious amendment. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow not only religious-affiliated institutions to opt out of employee health plans which cover contraception, but also those provided by individual employers whose religious beliefs are at odds with contraception.

Related Posts:

Linkspam

Link spam – post birthday edition

1 Comment

Some interesting news on bisexuality which I’ll open with for this collection of Linkspam.

Maria Burnham writes about “What ‘Bisexual’ Means to Me, and Why I Claim the Title“:

Is it simply a matter of liking both sexes? And does “liking” mean sexual attraction, or emotional attraction, or both? Or more? I sent out an inquiry to my queer community and was surprised by the variety of responses. One thing most people agree on is that there is a scale, with gay on one end and straight on the other, and each person falls on a different part of the scale. According to some, “true” bisexuals are at the halfway mark, 50/50, smack dab in the middle. Others believe that falling anywhere other than at the two points on the end grants you the right to claim the bisexual label. And what about pansexuality? Some believe it to be interchangeable with bisexuality, while others say that it is less exclusive than bisexuality, truly open to everyone and not based on a two-gender binary. And if you end up in a monogamous relationship with someone of the same sex, does that mean you’ve graduated to gay status? If I end up marrying a man, does that give my friends the right to say, “I told you you were straight”?

The PinkPaper details a recent report released in the UK on the mental and physical health of sexuality groups.

Attitudes towards bisexual people were found to be more negative than those towards other minority groups, with them often being stereotyped as promiscuous, incapable of monogamy, a threat to relationships and spreaders of disease.

…

Although the attitudes and behaviours of others, and exclusionary structures, cause issues for bisexual people, the report found that there are many positive aspects to bisexual peoples’ experiences – the ability to develop identities and relationships without restrictions, linked to a sense of independence, self-awareness and authenticity.

The full report is available here.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports on Utah’s Immigration Law HB497 and the impact that law has on Utah’s LGBTIQ community, especially since same-sex marriage is not recognised in Utah.

HB497 would force couples like these to choose between love and the law, resulting in a life of immobility and fear. Nearly 260 binational families composed of lesbian and gay U.S. citizens with noncitizen partners live in Utah. HB497 contains a harboring clause that unfairly and unconstitutionally forces binational couples to choose between breaking the law, or turning in his or her noncitizen spouse or partner to immigration officials to be deported.

Annie Murphy Paul in an opinion piece in the New York Times, writes about the upsides of dyslexia:

Dyslexia is a complex disorder, and there is much that is still not understood about it. But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin, cognitive scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used a mechanical shutter, called a tachistoscope, to briefly flash a row of letters extending from the center of a subject’s field of vision out to its perimeter. Typical readers identified the letters in the middle of the row with greater accuracy. Those with dyslexia triumphed, however, when asked to identify letters located in the row’s outer reaches.

N K Jemisin writes, “Dreaming Awake”

I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there.

I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.

These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.

 

Related Posts:

LGBTIQ

The Australian Family Association are bi/homophobic

2 Comments

This probably doesn’t come as a surprise, after all they are a religious (though ecumenical) organisation dedicated to “the family” whatever that means to them.  That in itself is an interesting thing, family is really quite a nebulous term, and I am not convinced that narrowing the definition to the current idea of a nuclear family does anyone any good.  Surely families are more than two opposite sex individuals and their 2.4 children living in suburban Australia.  Surely family includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, your best friends, siblings, your best friend’s kids (if they have any), your neighbour, nephews, nieces, and anyone else that you consider part of your family.

But anyway, the Australian Family Association is all about the rigidly defined nuclear family.  One woman, one man, and any children that they may have during that relationship.  They appear to be a bit fuzzy on children that aren’t from that relationship, and that’s one of the points which will I’ll use to nail them in their “Arguments defending children’s rights over same-sex couples’ rights” (yes that’s right.  And the only reason I’m linking to it is to prove that I’m not making it up).

Continue reading The Australian Family Association are bi/homophobic →

Related Posts:

Guest Post

Guest post: No special rights for lifestyle choices

This is a guest post from James Dominguez.

—

Right now in this country, and around the world, huge numbers of wicked, self-entitled people are demanding that the government grant them special rights based on their lifestyle. That’s right! We’re not talking about in-born traits here (no matter what these sickos claim) but a conscious lifestyle choice.

For some reason, these people think they can demand special treatment from government, special exceptions from our traditional laws, and special human rights that aren’t granted to anyone else outside of their sordid little club. How on earth could this be constitutional?

People can’t help who they are, or where they were born, or the circumstances of their birth. Disallowing discrimination based on these inherent traits, such as race or disability, makes sense of course. The problem is that these shrill, demanding people want us to believe that even though they have chosen this deviant lifestyle long after birth (some of them not even acting on these impulses until very late in life!) they are entitled to all kinds of legal protections and special rights.

No reasonable person could possibly agree with this. If you make a choice to join a minority group based on weird behaviours, then you know that you are buying into any negative consequences that go along with that. Don’t want people to treat you badly? Don’t choose to join in with this destructive lifestyle! It’s so simple!

Hopefully I’ve convinced you by now that these people should be denied any kind of special rights and protections. Please join me in spreading the word about this widespread injustice:

People who choose to join religious groups should not be granted any legal protection against discrimination.

I mean honestly, it’s not like it’s something they’re BORN with, like sexual orientation!

—

Disclaimer: No, I don’t really think religious groups deserve no protections: everyone should have the legal right to live their lives in peace. But seriously, why is the religious right still using such an easily reversed argument?

Oh, and thanks for letting me guest-post, Rebecca! 🙂

 – James “DexX” Dominguez

Related Posts:

LGBTIQ

Umbrella phrases

2 Comments

Last weekend I went to Melbourne’s Midsumma Carnival to volunteer at my work’s stand for a couple of hours.  The weather was lovely, the people were fantastic and I had a really great time.  Just one thing bothered me, and it’s the thing that always bothers me, because language is a powerful thing.  Let me be very clear

Gay and Lesbian do not equal LGBTIQ.  Gay does not equal LGBTIQ.  Lesbian does not equal LGBTIQ.

Continue reading Umbrella phrases →

Related Posts: