#Equality Act

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trudy Ring at The Advocate:

J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for his vice-presidential running mate, has been a U.S. senator for just a year and a half, but that’s been long enough for him to compile an extensive anti-LGBTQ+ record.

Vance, from Ohio, was elected to the Senate in 2022 and was sworn in last year. He is best known as the author of the best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of growing up in a Rust Belt town that was made into a Netflix movie. He has been a lawyer and venture capitalist. He was once a fierce critic of Trump, privately likening him to Adolf Hitler, but eventually became an ally. Vance’s record is one of homophobia and transphobia. Here are some of the highlights — or lowlights — compiled with the help of GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and others. Before Vance took office, he said he would have voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which wrote marriage equality into federal law to protect it against future negative Supreme Court decisions. “The religious liberty piece of this is very bad,” he told anti-LGBTQ+ group Mission: America in July 2022, even though the legislation didn’t directly address religion, and no church or clergy member in the U.S. is forced to officiate or recognize a marriage that conflicts with their beliefs. Both houses of Congress passed the bill in 2022, and President Joe Biden signed it into law in December of that year.

In the Senate, Vance introduced a ban on gender-affirming care for minors called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act. “The act includes an array of far-right, anti-transgender buzzwords and ‘bans’ a variety of medical procedures, none of which are a part of transgender healthcare for minors,” GLAAD notes. Violation would be a Class C felony, and conviction would come with a prison term of 3.5 to 15 years. The bill has not passed. He also infamously said Democrats want to bring immigrants into the U.S. to turn them transgender.

In 2022, he tweeted, “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.” He has also “repeated false rhetoric to inaccurately claim that bills censoring classroom conversation about LGBTQ people are about ‘parents’ rights,’” GLAAD reports. He has stated that he does not believe antidiscrimination laws should cover sexual orientation and gender identity. When running for Senate, he criticized his Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, for voting for the Equality Act, a national ban on anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, as a member of the U.S. House. The act has yet to pass into law.

Ohio Senator and Trump VP choice J.D. Vance has a very troubling record on LGBTQ+ issues, such as expressing support for Don't Say Gay or Trans laws, introduced a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for trans youths, libelously called LGBTQ+ community advocates "groomers", and would have opposed the Respect For Marriage Act and the Equality Act.

[coochiequeens]

Tide is turning.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The recent debate on the proposed amendment to the Equality Act 2010 - to change the definition of ‘sex’ to ‘biological sex’ - caused much apprehension in the trans community. This article provides an in-depth analysis of that debate, primarily aimed at interested trans people, their allies, and experts. For many readers, this first section will tell you what you need to know. Although the debate was framed as about ‘clarifying’ the definition of sex under the Equality Act 2010, the reality is that the proposed amendment to the definition of sex would constitute a significant legal change. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 establishes that a trans person with a Gender Recognition Certificate becomes the acquired sex for all legal purposes. The Equality Act 2010 was drafted with that legislation in mind, and the case law has similarly developed along this vein. The proposed amendment to the Equality Act 2010 thus constitutes as significant legal change - not a mere clarification. The content of the debate itself was both toxic and often nonsensical, adopting framing which positioned trans people (and especially trans women) as predatory and violent threats, especially to children. This contained substantial transphobia, misogyny, and transmisogyny. The demonisation frequently relied on provably false or entirely imagined information. This culminated in the mocking of a trans person’s expression of suicidal thoughts. The section ‘A respectful debate?’ continues a detailed breakdown and debunking of much of this framing, and the various anecdotes and examples provided to support it.

[anarchistdragonnerd]

It's not just about trans women, which is what they focus on. Trans men will be forced into 'female sex' spaces, and there is no consideration to this. yes the equality act could use work, and i think biological sex should be a defined group, but so should your legal sex and gender. multiple groups can exist at once.

Kemi, please try to be compassionate.

[wakewithgiggli]

If you're in the UK, please sign this position. It's in favour of Trans Rights.

[serene-sun]

Montanan just passed a law to legalize bullying trans kids. Florida is voting on the legalization of kidnapping trans kids. 30 states have banned healthcare for trans people. THIS is happening, America is becoming a communist country. If your a mother, father, sister, brother, sibling, aunt, uncle, anyone who cares and wants their children and friends to live SAFE, then please sign this. We HAVE to get this equality bill passed.

[diddyface29]

Friendly reminder that the Equality Act still hasn’t passed through Senate in the US and this petition Taylor Swift started during Lover era still hasn’t reached a million signatures.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

The Christian group Liberty Counsel, an SPLC-designated hate group, is using the 2016 shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, to promote conversion therapy, calling the shooting the “Great Redemption.” The 2016 shooting in the LGBTQ+ nightclub left 49 people dead. In a blog post published earlier this week, the organization describes the experiences of Pulse survivor Angel Colon, where they claim “our beautiful Savior both rescued and redeemed Angel that night.” “Angel has a ministry helping lead people out of the LGBTQ lifestyle. But that ministry is now at risk, thanks to city and state bans on Christian change counseling, as well as federal legislation that seeks to ban this lifesaving practice and ministries like Angel’s permanently” This refers to the group Fearless Identity, founded alongside fellow survivor Luis Javier Ruiz. It seeks to promote LGBTQ+ individuals embracing conversion therapy and leaving the community behind.

Liberty Counsel does not mention how Colon admitted already being conflicted about his identity before the shooting. The post describes the shooting from Colon’s perspective in great detail, saying shooter Omar Mateen “proceeded [to hunt] down bar patrons like ducks in a pen.” It then quotes an interview with Colon where he says, “I was petrified knowing I was next. I heard the shooter behind me, gauging his next move. That’s when I asked the Lord for forgiveness, to forgive me for failing Him, for turning my back on Him. I wanted to be at peace with God, but at that moment, my prayer changed to prophecy.” He continued, “I promised Him I would worship Him for the rest of my days. The very moment I said, ‘amen,’ I felt the bullet. Heat swelled through my abdomen, and I was certain I was dead. But when I opened my eyes, I knew the Lord spared me.”

[...] While the city was still mourning the victims of the attack, Colon and Ruiz set up a “Freedom March” five minutes away from the nightclub to encourage people to “overcome” being gay and trans. They wanted to “bring hope of deliverance to the LGBTQ community and point them toward Christ,” as Colon said to PinkNews. Ruiz and Colon claim that neither of them support conversion therapy and that they’re simply supporting people in their individual decisions to seek change. “We are not at all advocates for conversion therapy or shock therapy,” Ruiz said to NBC News. “We stand with the gay community, and our main message is about falling in love with Jesus, but if an LGBTQ person wanted to talk to a pastor or counselor, that’s a whole different story.”

Anti-LGBTQ+ extremist hate group Liberty Counsel has called the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting the “Great Redemption” in a blog post detailing Pulse survivor Angel Colon’s turn towards ex-gay advocacy by founding pro-conversion therapy group Fearless Identity with fellow ex-gay Pulse survivor Luis Javier Ruiz.

The post decried the Equality Act and bans on the medically unsound practice of “ex-gay” conversion therapy, and used the homophobic dogwhistle term “homosexual lifestyle” to describe Colon and Ruiz’s experiences.

See Also:

The Advocate: Two Pulse survivors are now 'ex-gays' running a conversion therapy organization

PinkNews: Christian group uses Pulse shooting anniversary to promote conversion therapy

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

He’s a treasure.

Comrade DeVito

[tofueatingwokerati]

TRIGGER WARNING ⚠️ sensitive topics covered as well as references to self harm.

I was moved to my present address for my safety after being stalked, harassed and assaulted by a council tenant.

The police did nothing after I reported him beyond a virtual slap on the wrist by a PCSO (and people wonder why women don’t report these crimes) and the council did equally nothing to safeguard me.

It took two years to get me moved and only after I went to the government ombudsman, and revealed to my housing officer I was a rape survivor, was anything finally done.

A council manger, Paul Hadley (since retired I’ve been informed) said to me that it was my fault, that I must have been doing something to encourage him and in front of an antisocial behaviour officer present that the council were “not responsible for their tenants behaviour” and proceeded to deny me any safeguarding.

More complaints and ombudsman interventions would follow. Battle for equality rights never ends if you’re a women and happen to also have disabilities.

In the two years it took to get me moved I’d been in A&E as a suicide risk and was regularly self harming. My disabilities worsened and I ended up needing crutches as the pain intensified. My hips now “pop” regularly and I have permanent back pain after living through that ordeal.

After the ombudsman intervention I was given priority status to move. That came with more hurdles and barriers. Paul Hadley, again said I would get this property over his dead body. Somerset Council were consistently unprofessional, in breach of their duty of care and left me at risk consistently.

The housing officer I’d shared my rape experience with got me this home but they placed their own employment at risk to do it and said she would be paying for it for the rest of her time there. Being close to retirement I don’t think she cared what they thought of her any longer, she was an exceptional exception to an otherwise toxic council mentality towards tenants.

It shouldn’t need an employee to put their job in jeopardy to do what the law already specifies is their duty and role as a public service.

When I viewed my current home it was in awful condition and wasn’t accessible. I asked what work was being done to address this prior to my moving here and was advised nothing beyond pre-scheduled works example updating the boiler (which turned out to be faulty from day one). Beyond a decorating kit which I couldn’t safely use I was told repeatedly I could “always self fund” despite this being a provision under law and they had specific disability grants available for the works I was asking for, they refused me all accessibility and refused me an occupational assessment.

Whilst I was safe from one danger by moving here, the stalker, I was thrown into a new set of dangers to my health and safety.

As a vulnerable disabled person I was subject to bullying and harassment from neighbours very early on as they felt I was too young to be living in a bungalow without ever knowing, or caring about the context of my disabilities and what I was moved from.

One case of neighbour harassment became so extreme it ended in a protection order on their visitor.

The property, as already stated was in a terrible state. I photographed it all and sent it to legal counsel. They advised me not to move in (too late by this point) because it was not fit for human habitation and not up to council relet standards.

It took seven years to get the kitchen accessible and it’s still not 100% with faults from installation causing me undue resistance on my joints and risk of injury. I continue to battle that out with the council. It took going to the ombudsman again and the then CEO of the council to even get the kitchen adjusted under equality law.

The boiler has been faulty from day one. It has always done this thing where the pressure builds up and it eventually “burbs”. It’s so bad it sounds like it’s going to blow the cupboard door off. Eventually it started failing and I repeatedly needed to get out of hours engineers from the council to patch it up.

One year it was failing daily and I kept reporting it. The engineers kept having issue scanning the gas meter to log the call. They had a new system and it was having teething issues. This meant that every engineer would not have record of the previous days call out and openly treated me as a liar. Thankfully I had all the email communication to the gas repairs department and was able to prove this was a persistent problem.

During this time I was loosing mobility and dexterity in my joints, notably my hands and fingers. This meant I couldn’t keep myself safe. I was paying extra home help just to be safe, prep more meals and washing up as I couldn’t do anything myself (the kettle had to be repeatedly boiled as I had no hot water during all this).

I was huddled up in my bedroom trying to keep warm. As has been consistent with this council there was no safeguarding and no assistance. After almost a week of this and getting more & more unwell, I filed a formal complaint. I was given a tiny little heater and eventually compensated for the additional electric I was using as well as hourly cost of extra home help.

Since then it has failed again and again. In fact I dread every winter knowing it is going to fail.

Each and every time my mobility is materially impacted, because it usually fails overnight, meaning it’s had 8 hours for the temperature to plummet then hours more before an engineer can come out to patch it up.

In that time I loose mobility and dexterity. It happened again recently (dropping to 14°C by the time I woke to discover the boiler fault) and despite using electric heaters I simply could not warm up. Electric heaters are no substitute for central heating. It left me unable to make a meal and I was unable to get emergency home help to plug the care gap.

One engineer advised me that as long as they have parts they will patch it up indefinitely until it fails permanently. This is without any risk assessment to someone like myself materially impacted by temperature.

I filed another complaint upon many complaints at this point, with the council and they are refusing me a boiler update.

They’re refusing me a risk assessment and refusing me an occupational assessment whilst being fully informed this is having a detrimental impact on my health and safety.

It got so bad that I started to have intrusive thoughts and ended up on the phone to crisis. After an hour with them they were able to stabilise me. I then sought legal advise and as will come as no surprise was informed yes the council are in breach of equalities law but also they’re discriminating me on disabilities ground by refusing a risk assessment of my needs. The council have openly stated that I am getting “special treatment” any time works are carried out even though it ALWAYS falls under equalities/reasonable adjustments.

I even wrote to Duncan Sharkey, the CEO of Somerset Council. I got a short response from a different department repeating the deadlock to upgrading the boiler, refusing me equal access to refuse & recycling collection (thats a whole other story of discrimination over almost a decade) and telling me to take it up with the ombudsman.

So here we go again, I now need to go back to the ombudsman but this time I am looking at legal options (I even took out extra home insurance knowing this would happen) as well as taking this to the national press is my next step. Enough is enough!

Ultimately this goes beyond a boiler, beyond me as one person. This is about an institutional failing towards disabled people and a toxic mentality of blaming tenants when the council don’t want to spend money to carry out their legal duty. They hide behind policy and procedure to deny you equal access and place wilful barriers to health & safety by denying risk assessments.

I once had a council surveyor blame the damp in my previous home on my cats “heavy breathing”, telling me to get rid of the cats and in his report blamed me for not using the extractor fan. There was no extractor fan. Can you guess, yes the council had refused me an extractor fan in that property, but still the council blame the tenant for their failures. As an aside the damp was so severe along the entire block that the wall was collapsing in one property and they had to be relocated for their safety.

But yeah, blame the tenant, it’s Somerset Councils continued consistency, blame the tenant and discriminate, all to save a few pennies whilst taking rent money from us all.

Rouge landlords are not consigned to the private sector!

[timetofindtheacorn]

god I hope the Equality Act gets fucking passed because I'm tired of waiting

[a-continuous-cutting-motion]

[selkies-world]

126k signatures & counting. Please, please, please sign this, then share it so more people can sign it. It isn't just trans people who will be impacted if this is passed; cis people of all sexualities will be harmed by this. Please sign & share. Please.