@amnestymidwest-blog / amnestymidwest-blog.tumblr.com
Are you passionate about Human Rights? Are you interested in becoming more involved with Amnesty? Do you enjoy free appetizers and good company? Then come out to Highline Bar next Wednesday, July 8th for our "Young Professionals of Amnesty International" event. See you soon! http://whoozin.com/7AU-AGR-6MDT
Hey FAmnesty! Remember that the Midwest Office is still selling Midwest T-Shirts. All sizes from Small to 2XL still available.
Hey FAMnesty. Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) has organized demonstrations in eight cities across the country this Friday, including Chicago, to raise awareness of the Senate report on CIA torture and inaction by the Department of Justice. The rallies will be held to mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. In Chicago, there will be a rally outside of the Federal Plaza. Join the Chicago office and company as they celebrate recent victories and continue the conversation about torture. The gathering will start at noon. We hope you guys can join the action in Chicago tomorrow!
Hey FAMnesty. Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) has organized demonstrations in eight cities across the country this Friday, including Minneapolis, to raise awareness of the Senate report on CIA torture and inaction by the Department of Justice. The rallies will be held to mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. In Minneapolis, there will be a protest outside of the Minneapolis US Courthouse Building. Join the Minneapolis group as activists will read out the Senate Torture Report and protest the inaction of the Justice Department. The meeting location is at the crossing of 4th Street and 4th Avenue. The gathering will start at 9 a.m. and go on until 3 p.m. We hope you guys can join the action in Minneapolis tomorrow!
Hey FAMnesty. The Midwest Regional Office is selling special T-shirts for the region. You can order yours today. Click the link below and go find your size. It’s a limited time sale so get yours before its too late!
Trans people of color face more discrimination, marginalization and prejudice than trans people who are not of color. They live below standard poverty lines for cisgender (people who do not identify as transgender), are harassed by police more often, are restricted to healthcare access more, and are killed at increasingly high rates.
Trans people of color have to deal with the cross sectional discrimination of sexuality and race in their lives. Some trans people of color also have to deal with oppression due to the intersectionality of their race, sexuality, and poverty.
Read this shocking fact: Thirty five years old is the life expectancy of a Black trans-woman.
Native American and African American transgender individuals are subjected to alarmingly increased rates of homelessness, police brutality and discrimination, violence in the streets, less access to healthcare and problems obtaining jobs.
According to the national report put forth last May by the NCVAP transgender women of color were 67% of all hate motivated murders against LGBT people in 2013. Already there have been at least eight documented cases of trans-women of color killed in the U.S., the latest victim being London Chanel. The police department identified Chanel as man and referred to her as birth name.
Just as in the case of London Chanel when trans people of color are murder victims the police often do not use their chosen pronouns and refer to them as the gender in which they were born with in making reports. The media also makes a habit of doing this and crucifying the victim in the murder instead of bringing awareness to a pressing issue in America.
These individuals are discriminated as well as subjected to violent acts including murder because of their sexual identities. Transgender individuals should not have to live in fear that their human rights will not be afforded to them or in fear of their lives. It is time to end discrimination of trans people of color.
No one knows how many people are killed by police in the US, but estimates range from 400 to 1000 people each year. Yet NOT ONE state in the US complies with international human rights standards on the use of lethal force by police, according to a new Amnesty International report. The US needs to act NOW to review and reform its approach to #deadlyforce!
According to the CDC, LGBT youth have a higher risk of experiencing violence against them, and around 19%-29% of gay and lesbian individuals and 18%-28% of bisexual individuals experience dating violence. And the numbers only increase when talking about sexual assaults. LGBT youth also are twice as likely to have attempted suicide.
What this means is LGBT youth are not in safe, supportive, and accepting environments.
And to counter this, some organizations have started to created safe spaces for LGBT youth.
The Trevor Project is an organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth. It is a confidential, 24/7 lifeline that youth can call if they need a safe, non-judgmental place to talk or if they are thinking about suicide.
However, Russian LGBT youth are not as lucky. For more than a year and a half, Russia has sought to shut down Children 404, an online LGBT youth support group that journalist Elena Klimova founded. This site has been an invaluable source of support for thousands of Russian LGBT teens, allowing them to share personal stories and get advice from peers and health professionals.
Klimova was convicted of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” by a Sverdlovsk court in January. And in March, a St. Petersburg court ruled in favor of blocking Children 404 as part of their campaign against the LGBT community.
As a result, AIUSA is urging St. Petersburg and Sverdlovsk prosecutors to give Elina Klimova a retrial and also to repeal the decision to block Children 404.
All LGBT youth should feel save in their home countries, and more importantly, they should have access to safe, non-judgmental services and spaces to talk freely about their sexuality.
According to the UN’s Free & Equal campaign fact sheet, there are at least 76 countries that have laws criminalizing same-sex relationships. In at least 10 of those countries, individuals who are arrested can face the death penalty. These countries include Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Qatar, and parts of Nigeria and Somalia.
The criminalization of people based on their sexual orientation is a clear violation of an individual’s human rights as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). And the consequence of criminalization legitimizes prejudice and exposes people to hate crimes, torture, and family violence.
This is why we need to stop countries that are starting to enact anti-gay laws. One such country is Kazakhstan. AIUSA recently launched an action to the LGBTI propaganda legislation in Kazakhstan.
The main piece is the “Law on Protection of Children from Information Harming their Health and Development.”
News sources make it clear that if this is signed into law, it would violate Kazakhstan’s internal obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil the right to freedom of expression, and to prevent any discrimination on the basis of sex and other related bases, including real or perceived sexual orientation.
In other words, the LGBT community in Kazakhstan would have their rights stripped from them and would be open to discrimination.
We are urging President Nursultan Nazarbayev to reject this legislation and its amendments, as well as any further draft legislations that criminalize “non-traditional” sexual orientations.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights is an AIUSA issue because Amnesty believes that all people regardless of their sexual orientation or fender identification should be able to enjoy the full range of human rights with no exceptions. The LGBT community faces gross marginalization, discrimination, prejudice, punishment, and even death in some countries around the world simply for their sexual orientation and/or sexual identity.
Using correct pronouns is also important in identification issues involving those who belong to the LGBT community. One should always ask someone the pronouns that they preferred to use are before referring to an individual. Pronouns include “he”, “she”, “hers”, “his”, “him”, “her”, “them”, “they”, and “theirs”. You do not know what someone identifies themselves as without asking them and some people do not identify as a gender.
Lastly, an ally by definition means a “person who associates or cooperates with another; supporter.” To be ally for the LGBT community means to associate one’s self with their goals and support the achievement of those goals set forth. While allies may contribute to the cause, allies should fully support the group in which needs the help. It is nice to have your own opinions and sentiments, but if the goal is to help the LGBT community an ally should be echoing the sentiments of that community.
Amnesty interviewed Shira Glassman (http://shiraglassman.tumblr.com/), a bi-sexual author, to speak about the LGBT community and about being an ally.
When asked about using proper pronouns she explained that as a cisgender, a person whose self-identity aligns with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex, she is not the most appropriate source for information on pronoun justice. “Trans voices are what matter here. But as far as using people's proper pronouns, it's a sign of respect and of recognition of that person's humanity, and one can't always assume pronouns from perceived gender presentation.”
“The most important thing allies can do for us is to listen to us. If you're straight and cisgender and you have LGBTQ+ people in your life, listen to what we say we need and then choose your moves from there. If we say we need emotional support and just want to complain about injustice, let us complain to you without arguing that we're making a big deal out of nothing or telling us about people who had it worse.” Glassman explained, “Let us tell you which LGBTQ+-related legislative or social issues are the most pressing to us personally. If we're using specific words to refer to ourselves -- a friend you thought was female telling you he's a man, your sister referring to the woman you keep calling her partner as "her wife" -- use the word we're using.”
“Another important role for allies is to fight non-allies for us when we're too exhausted to do battle ourselves. I can't tell you how much it meant to me when two friends blurted out "WIFE" really loudly when someone used the word girlfriend a week after our wedding. It meant not only that I wasn't in this alone and didn't have to do it all myself, but that if I did advocate for myself, my friends wouldn't be distancing themselves from me for the perceived social crime of speaking up,” she added.
Glassman also talked about her path as an author and how she was inspired to write books about same sex couples.
“Growing up, little kids are fed a diet of fiction that includes cis man + cis woman romance as a key element of happy endings. In the 80's and 90's growing up, if you notice romance between women (or between men) at all, it was talked about in subtext or treated either tragically or like some shortcut to depicting decadence. Just think about which queer movies hit the mainstream -- Boys Don't Cry, Philadelphia, Brokeback Mountain -- those narratives don't exactly make you feel like your Princess Charming or Plucky Brave Little Milkmaid are coming up around the corner ready to hold your hand and skip through the daisies.
I wanted those fairy tales. I wanted pretty romance, I wanted sweet romance. I wanted a Jane Austen movie with two girls, I wanted a Disney princess who was like me. I wanted emotion to be validated. I just wanted to show that our romances have beauty, too, and aren't based entirely on sexual attraction the way straight people sometimes assume they are.”
Artwork by Cashewdee
Artwork by Rebecca Schauer
It’s time for LGBTQ+ rights to become a world issue.
Every four years, each one of the 134 member countries in the United Nations gets a human rights review. The U.S. just had its turn.
At a hearing held May 11, 2015, 117 of the member nations spoke up. Each representative got only 65 seconds to speak, but it still added up to about three and a half hours of statements.
The United States did not get a glowing review.
Nations repeatedly called out the U.S. for police violence and especially systemic racial discrimination by the police. Many of them also identified the continued use of the death penalty as a human rights concern as well as the ongoing operations at Guantánamo Bay. (In its previous review in 2010, the U.S. committed to “find a solution for all persons detained at Guantánamo Bay" — yet as of January 2015, 122 men are still kept at the facility.)
TW transphobia, transantagonism, misgendering
GIRL SCOUTS NOW ALLOWING TRANSGENDER SCOUTS!!!
Before we begin, a quick note to Google. Hey Google - when I search for a story about the Girl Scouts allowing transgender scouts, can you show me THE ACTUAL STORY (the third result) as the featured result instead of A PURPOSEFULLY MISGENDERING HEADLINE by right wing hatemongers? Get it together!
This happens all the time when I do feminist news searches - anti-fem sites show up on the top - but this is just outrageous. Google calculates THOUSANDS of factors in their ranking algorithm, can’t they add a basic filter for “this site is opposed to the rights of the community that the searcher is trying to learn about, and is therefore not useful in learning about that community?” It’s poor search quality, and Google made their riches on search result quality.
It’s like searching for abortion rights and getting an anti-choice site on top.
Let’s go straight to the source, this is great news!
Q: What is Girl Scouts’ position on serving transgender youth?
A: Girl Scouts is proud to be the premiere leadership organization for girls in the country. Placement of transgender youth is handled on a case-by-case basis, with the welfare and best interests of the child and the members of the troop/group in question a top priority. That said, if the child is recognized by the family and school/community as a girl and lives culturally as a girl, then Girl Scouts is an organization that can serve her in a setting that is both emotionally and physically safe.
Q: How does Girl Scouts’ position on serving transgender youth apply to situations involving camping or volunteers?
A: These situations are rare and are considered individually with the best interests of all families in mind. Should any girl requiring special accommodations wish to camp, GSUSA recommends that the local council makes similar accommodation that schools across the country follow in regard to changing, sleeping arrangements, and other travel-related activities. With respect to volunteers, Girl Scouts welcomes both male and female adult volunteers and has developed appropriate safeguards regarding roles and responsibilities to ensure that girls receive the proper supervision and support.
From the Girl Scouts FAQ
Jail and prison staff throughout the United States have used unnecessary, excessive, and even malicious force against prisoners with mental disabilities. In a new 127-page report, “Callous and Cruel: Use of Force against Inmates with Mental Disabilities in US Jails and Prisons,” details incidents in which correctional staff have deluged prisoners with painful chemical sprays, shocked them with powerful electric stun weapons, and strapped them for days in restraining chairs or beds. Staff have broken prisoners’ jaws, noses, ribs; left them with lacerations requiring stitches, second-degree burns, deep bruises, and damaged internal organs. In some cases, the force used has led to their death.
Real Life. Real Fight. Real Change. Go watch mtv‘s #RebelMusic: Turkey now and learn about these fearless rebels standing up for their beliefs.
It’s up to all of us to work towards women’s rights and ending gender inequality.
How can we prevent another American Torture Story, if the Department of Justice hasn’t even read the report?
Our solution? Let’s read it to them.
We challenge all of YOU to pick an excerpt from the report and film yourself reading it. Post it up on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, everywhere! And tag #AmericanTortureStory & @TheJusticeDept!
