#It does seem disproportionately transgender — I expected more gay men

[analyticrambles]

Hmm, there is an LGBT board on 4chan (!), and it's surprisingly not totally overrun with anti-LGBT folks. It's 4chan obviously so not a fun place to be, but better than I expected.

[wp-yahoo-style-1042-yahoopa-blog]

Transgender women of color are pioneers of the LGBTQ-rights movement. Why are they still fighting for their lives?

Transgender rights activists protest the recent killings of three transgender women, Muhlaysia Booker, Claire Legato, and Michelle Washington, during a rally at Washington Square Park in New York, U.S., May 24, 2019. (Photo: Reuters/Yahoo Lifestyle)

The start of LGBTQ Pride Month came with an exciting announcement in New York City: Two pioneering transgender activists, vanguards of the gay-liberation movement, would be getting statues in Greenwich Village, immortalizing their vital roles in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion — which has its 50th anniversary this year and is widely considered to be the official start of the movement.

“The LGBTQ movement was portrayed very much as a white, gay male movement,” Chirlane McCray, first lady of New York City, said at the official announcement. “This monument counters that trend of whitewashing the history.”

News of the statues, the first in the U.S. to commemorate transgender individuals, was celebrated on social media, where Raquel Willis tweeted, “Monuments don’t make up for the mayhem, but this is beautiful.” Many others, including Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and Queer Eye costar Karamo Brown, weighed in with praise and shout-outs to the activists.

#HeyFriends... here’s some education on #Pride! Because I’m tired of this month passing year after year without acknowledging #MarshaPJohnson & the reason “Pride” began. pic.twitter.com/pFHWAmr1Ik

— Karamo Brown (@Karamo) June 3, 2019

Thanks to leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and Harvey Milk, I have faith in the possibility of change and growth in this country. There is still more work to do, but let us take a moment and celebrate the gains we've made this #PrideMonth.

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) June 2, 2019

There would be no Pride Month without sharing our deep gratitude and respect for the transgender women of color who started it all, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Happy Pride Month! #StoneWall50 #PrideWasARiot pic.twitter.com/6SkdUgn3Ln

— سارة جهاد (@spoiledsoymilk_) June 1, 2019

We stand on the shoulders of giants. I am so happy to see New York City immortalizing Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. They gave so much to this world and community, we should all continue the work that would make them proud. https://t.co/DHo15fdrim

— Chasten Buttigieg (@Chas10Buttigieg) May 30, 2019

Still, there was a lot that the valiant effort could not make up for, and many wounds it doesn’t seem likely to heal — especially for people like Sharron Cooks, a transgender activist in Philadelphia.

Cooks spent June 1 eulogizing and then burying her dear friend, Michelle “Tameka” Washington, who was one of four black transgender women murdered, in cities across the country, within just 12 days of each other.

“On the first day of Pride Month, we laid our sister to rest,” Cooks posted on Facebook. “Pride Month will never be the same for me.”

Along with Washington, who was remembered by loved ones that day as “beautiful,” “outspoken” and “a mother figure,” the recent spate of murders has claimed the lives of Muhlaysia Booker in Dallas, Claire Legato in Cleveland and an as-of-yet unidentified trans woman in Detroit, all of whom were gunned down. A fifth transgender woman, Amber Nicole of Denver, was brutally beaten by two men outside a nightclub, leaving her with facial nerve damage and a broken jaw. And most recently, on June 3, the body of Chynal Lindsey, 26, was pulled out of a Dallas lake by police, showing “obvious signs of homicidal violence.”

The anti-trans violence has sparked a flurry of national media coverage, plus vigils and rallies across the country.

“We will not be erased!” yelled a fired-up speaker into a megaphone at one such demo — Keep Your Hands Off Trans Bodies in New York City, held on the Friday before Memorial Day. A crowd of nearly 300 had gathered beneath the stately arch of Washington Square Park, forming a thick ring around each speaker who spoke or screamed from the heart — “Stigma is weaponizing murderers!” and “Black trans lives matter!”

Some, like Olympia Perez of Black Trans Media, could not contain their fury. “Black trans people have been here forever — and on their backs, you guys stand!” She directed her rage at the many white and non-trans people who took up space at the front of the crowd, referencing the legacies of activists such as Johnson, who worked tirelessly for LGBTQ rights only to be found dead in the Hudson River, after a suspected but never-solved homicide, in 1992.

“Marsha!” Perez screamed in anguish, smacking the ground with an open palm, “Stand the f*ck up and show them!”

Four days later, hundreds of mourners filed into the Cathedral of Hope church in Dallas, where the funeral of 23-year-old Muhlaysia Booker received a crush of media attention (and even a subsequent social media post by none other than Prince Harry and Meghan Markle).

People protest the killings of transgender women this year during a rally at Washington Square Park in New York, U.S., May 24, 2019. (Photo: Reuters)

“She would always say, ‘Mama, I’m willing to die for my transition, my respect and what I believe in,” Booker’s mother, Stephanie Houston, told the crowd, which included lots of local and national press — interest likely piqued by the fact that Booker had been viciously attacked in a parking lot in broad daylight, in a video snippet that had gone viral just a month before she was killed.

Those recent scenes — of funerals and rageful rallies — have stood in stark contrast to the excitement oozing through many queer-activist circles, where preparations have been underway for a particularly auspicious Gay Pride Month: This year marks not only the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, which started when patrons of the Stonewall Inn bar pushed back against an anti-gay police raid, but of the arrival in NYC of the annual international WorldPride festival, from InterPride, after past stops in Rome, London, Tel Aviv and Madrid.

The entire month, and especially the last weekend in June, when the annual NYC Pride March takes place, will be a lavish display of dance parties, celebrity appearances, parades, film screenings, concerts, drag performances, rallies and, of course, marketing opportunities.

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It’s pretty safe to say, then, that the commemoration of those so-called “riots” of 1969 is now more a riot of rainbows and glitter. And many transgender people, believing they’ve been left behind by the larger LGBT movement, are not feeling it.

“World Pride should be about re-shifting resources to those who need it the most,” New York Transgender Advocacy Group executive director Kiara St. James, organizer of Keep Your Hands Off Trans Bodies, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “While cis[gender] queers will converge on NYC to celebrate Pride, the reason for having it was Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transwomen of color. Their ‘children’ are still dealing with lack of housing and healthcare and employment opportunities. So, celebrate Pride. But know that the community does not have equity.”

Elle Hearns, a social-justice organizer and founding director of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, launching June 21, adds: “We all want to celebrate. I would love to get on a float and just really be happy going to Pride. But I also understand who's not there.”

TOO MANY MISSING

Media interest in anti-trans violence may be at an all-time high. But, says Hearns, “One of the biggest points is that this is actually been happening for decades.”

It’s only recently that statistics on transgender killings, believed to be widely underreported, have been more reflective of the reality. Since 2015, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an average of 24 transgender individuals have been murdered each year, and disproportionate numbers of the victims have been trans women of color. The deadliest year on record since then was 2017, during which activists tracked at least 29 such deaths, with killings by acquaintances, partners and strangers, some never identified. In 2018, there were 26 such recorded murders, and in 2019, so far, there have been seven.

From left, Michelle "Tameka" Washington, Claire Legato and Muhlaysia Booker, all murdered within days of each other. (Photo: Facebook)

(And anti-transgender violence is, of course, not limited to the United States. A 2016 Transgender Europe report found that over 2,000 trans people had been killed since 2008, with Central and South America accounting for nearly 75 percent of those total trans killings; just last month, the body of a trans woman from Veracruz, Mexico, was reportedly discovered by police, beheaded.)

Further, the results of a 2015 survey (the most recent available) by the National Center for Transgender Equality found the following: that 20 percent of black transgender individuals were unemployed (twice that of the cisgender black population); 38 percent were living in poverty (compared to 24 percent of non-trans people of color); 42 percent had experienced homelessness; 53 percent had been sexually assaulted; and 6.7 percent were living with HIV — more than 20 times the rate of .3 percent in the general U.S. population.

There is also this shocking statistic, cited often by the country’s largest LGBTQ non-profits (though the exact source is not apparent): that the average life expectancy of transgender women of color is just 35 years old.

“One of the biggest problems that trans people face — more specifically, black trans women — is the lack of access to healthcare, employment, housing, social support and everything that can help an individual thrive,” transgender-rights activist and media personality Ashlee Marie Preston, who marked her 34th birthday last year by launching the hashtag “Thrive Over 35” to raise awareness of the short life expectancy, tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

Marsha P. Johnson. (Photo: Netflix)

“And what happens is, when you don't have access to housing, healthcare and employment or social support,” she continues, “you get caught up in the growth of the prison industrial complex. You have to engage in street economy, which adds an additional layer of risk to your life. And that cuts into your life expectancy.” Plus, Preston explains, “the fact that some people say ‘I experienced racism’ or ‘I experienced sexism’ or ‘I experienced a transphobia,’ many people aren't able to imagine experiencing all of those simultaneously.”

Sometimes, in fact, even with all that’s been gained since Stonewall — marriage equality, parenting rights, and various protections in employment, housing and healthcare — it can feel to some, especially transgender women of color, like not much has changed at all, particularly when one looks at the current administration’s anti-trans policies, which take away rights in areas of military service, healthcare and housing.

“For what good it did my trans girls, it might as well have not happened,” Miss Major, a longtime transgender activist and veteran of the Stonewall rebellion, told HuffPost in 2018 of the legendary uprising.

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF

That feeling — that the “T” of LGBT is oft forgotten by the larger movement, and even more so for trans individuals who are not white — hits home especially hard if you watch the iconic, heartbreaking clip of Sylvia Rivera getting booed as she addressed the largely white, cisgender crowd at the 1973 Gay Pride rally in New York City.

“Y’all better quiet down!” Rivera screamed from the stage, accusing those rallying of belonging “to a white, middle-class white club.” She had joined forces with Marsha P. Johnson to form STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a queer-youth advocacy group, but had to struggle with Pride organizers to get any time to speak at all. “I have been to jail! I have been raped!” she finally yelled into the mic, her voice raw with emotion. “I have been beaten! I have had my nose broken! I have been thrown in jail! I have lost my job I have lost my apartment for gay liberation — and you treat me this way? What the f*ck’s wrong with you all? I believe in gay power! Revolution now! Gay power!”

Sylvia Rivera onstage at NYC Pride in 1973. (GIF: Netflix)

In a later interview about that moment — footage that’s included in the 2017 David France documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson — Rivera says that she went home from that rally and attempted suicide, and survived only because Johnson found her in time. “I was hurt, and I felt that the movement had completely betrayed the drag queens and the street people,” she says. “And I felt that the years I had already given them had been a waste.”

Decades later, many trans activists feel similarly frustrated and forgotten.

“It's very disrespectful to the legacy of the queer liberation movement when the LGBTQ community at large refuses to prioritize the wellbeing and survival of trans women of color — given that Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera quite literally built the movement on their backs,” Preston says. “They started a nonprofit where they were just renting hotel rooms and apartments from the money they were making from sex work, so that they could take young LGBT kids off the streets who were kicked out by their families for being who they are.”

Sylvia Rivera in 1994. (Photo: AP Images)

Although Johnson and Rivera (who died of liver cancer in 2002) are often credited with actually sparking the Stonewall uprising — or throwing the first brick or Molotov cocktail, as the legends go — both denied having done so. They were certainly key players on the scene, though, and their years of advocacy both before and after are undeniable, hence the plans for NYC monuments.

But whether or not that sort of public acknowledgment or visibility translates into actual change is yet to be seen.

Some give big props to the strides made regarding transgender visibility in pop culture, most recently with the FX series Pose, kicking off its second season on June 11. The show, produced by Ryan Murphy and Steven Canals and written and directed by transgender pioneer Janet Mock, broke ground by casting actual transgender actors to play transgender characters, and tells the story of New York City’s 1980s drag ball culture — first told to a larger audience through Jennie Livington’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, and thrust into the mainstream spotlight with Madonna’s “Vogue” that same year.

Mock spoke about the potential power of such representation on Pose on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah in 2018. “We have five women with different dreams, who have love, desire, who want to be desired, who are funny, who are villains,” she said, which educates viewers in many ways. “You show people that, number one, it’s not scary, that they’re not horrible people, that they’re not freak shows — that instead they’re humans that you care about… They’re invested, and I hope that it doesn’t just entertain and inspire, but that it also moves people to care and hopefully do something.”

Preston also sees Pose’s potential to change hearts and minds. “I think it underscores the level of humanity that is universal that anybody can connect to,” she says. “We all know what it feels like to be thrown away. We all know what it feels like to be discarded. We all know what it feels like to not know if you're going to survive or not. We all know what it feels like to want to be held and like want to have purpose and want to be seen.”

Still others are skeptical, including transgender artist and activist Reina Gosset, aka Tourmaline, who was speaking in general about visibility when she told Teen Vogue in 2017, “While trans visibility is at an all-time high, with trans people increasingly represented in popular culture, violence against us has also never been higher. The push for visibility, without it being tied to a demand for our basic needs being met, often leaves us without material resources or tangible support, and exposed to more violence and isolation.”

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And Hearns believes that the power of Pose may be overstated.“I think Pose is necessary, but I also see that organizing is necessary and [that it] doesn't change the conditions for everybody because there are five trans women who are stars on a show,” she says. “What's happening in the White House, Pose is not shifting.”

WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE

Preston — who first gained wide recognition when she called out Caitlyn Jenner for being a “fraud” for her support of Trump in a 2017 video that went viral — does not mince words about who she believes is to blame for trans women of color being left behind by the LGBT movement.

“Every time that I hear another black trans woman was murdered, there’s this flame of rage that ignites in the pit of my belly, because I want to hold the other communities accountable for not showing up for us the way that we show up for every other community at the intersections of our identity,” Preston says. “I want to ask the LGBTQ community why they aren't prioritizing black trans lives. I want to ask the black community why we aren’t prioritizing black trans women. I want to ask women why we're still not considering trans women as women and as part of the larger national conversation around intimate partner violence, which is an extension of some of these deaths.”

“The truth,” she continues, “is that many gay white men use their sexuality as a shield to absolve them of the responsibility of dismantling sexist, racist and transphobic mechanisms within our community systems of oppression.” Instead, Preston says, some of these men believe “‘if I lean into my own oppression, then I don't have to do the work to liberate other people’… I'm not saying that [no] gay white man knows struggle. What I'm saying is that your race and your gender aren’t contributing factors to your struggle.”

Activists Ashlee Marie Preston, left, and Elle Hearns. (Photo: Getty Images; Elle Hearns/Instagram)

Cooks, in the wake of her friend Tameka’s murder, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that she believes the answer is complex and nuanced, and that it partly lies within the trans community itself. “I think, ultimately, there is a lot of internal work that the trans community needs to do and that needs to be addressed,” she says, noting that, too often, trans women are killed by people they know. “Trans women have to do a better job at building our self-esteem and our self-worth, and not settling for less than we deserve.”

She also points a finger at various LGBTQ nonprofits, however, for not putting trans women of color into positions of power. “How many trans women do we have in the nonprofit world? How many are sitting on boards? A lot of the gay and lesbian and bisexual orgs aren’t really offering the economic opportunities.” (At the Human Rights Campaign, the “largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer civil rights organization,” the executive staff and other higher-ups is largely white and cisgender, similar to the makeup at other national organizations, including the Family Equality Council, Lambda Legal and GLAAD.)

“A lot of these nonprofit organizations claim they are about the advancement of all LGBTQ people,” Preston also notes. “The reality is, they have a propensity to screen ‘black trans trauma porn’ to rake in donor dollars. But when it's actually time to benefit from those dollars, trans women of color are always at the back of the line.”

The scope of the problem is huge, Hearns, notes, because the LGBTQ movement, as she sees it, is not reflective of the communities it purports to represent. “My hope that the Marsha P. Johnson Institute will restore our belief that all of our people are worthy of everything — and in order to believe that, you really have to start with the people who have nothing. That is my take on Pride.”

That’s why Hearns is launching the Institute in the middle of June, she explains, “because we recognize how quickly the celebration will overtake what we understand about the history. Stonewall was a radical protest. It was a radical demonstration. It was a radical movement. And so, over the last 50 years, that movement has become not only sanitized, but it has stopped making radical demands, because of the desire to be seen as ‘normal.’”

It's why Pride, for Hearns and many other activists, such as the organizers of the Reclaim Pride Coalition in NYC and similar efforts across the country, are pushing back against mainstream festivities this year. “We are celebrating from very ahistorical perspective, and it's painful to just see the celebration and the corporations who have really embraced Pride — without actually embracing what they need to do to alleviate the reasons why Pride exists in the first place,” she says. “You cannot shake hands with the police and then use trans people in a campaign with rainbows on. That’s just not what this is about.��

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Photo of Sikh man’s ‘fantastic’ rainbow turban for gay pride goes viral: ‘Awesome message’

Man’s plan to hold Straight Pride Parade in Boston faces backlash, mockery: ‘This is tragically sad’

Trans teen Jazz Jennings makes inspiring valedictorian speech: ‘Follow your dreams’

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

[rightsinexile]

What does a genuine lesbian/gay relationship look like in the eyes of asylum decision makers?

Nina Held works as a post-doctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum (SOGICA, 2016-2020), based at the University of Sussex, where she is also a teaching fellow. Nina did her PhD on Racialised Lesbian Spaces (2011) in Women’s Studies at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster University. Before joining Sussex, Nina worked in different voluntary organisations such as Trafford Rape Crisis, Freedom from Torture and the Lesbian Immigration Support Group. This piece was originally published on 2 May 2017 by Discover Society, a not-for-profit collaboration between sociology and social policy academics and publishers at Policy Press to promote the publication of social research, commentary and policy analysis. The piece is reprinted here with permission.

How do you know that they are not just friends, not just two women who know each other well, have worked and lived together and have therefore established a certain closeness between them?

You described how they were dancing and kissing, could they not just be friends who had a bit fun with each other on a night out?

A few weeks ago, as part of my ongoing involvement with the Lesbian Immigration SupportGroup (LISG), a voluntary-led support group for bisexual and lesbian asylum seekers and refugees in Manchester, I was a witness in an asylum tribunal for a lesbian couple from Pakistan. The couple, Mariam and Zainab, seek protection in the UK on grounds of their sexual orientation. As I often did, I felt strongly about the case and about the fact that they had been refused. I was outraged by the Home Office’s Reasons for Refusal Letter (RFRL) outlining that they were not believed to be a lesbian couple because of a small number of inconsistencies in their narratives. I was sure that the judge, hearing the case, could not come to the same conclusion as the Home Office. Although I had been a volunteer for LISG for more than seven years and had written numerous support letters during that time, this was the first time that I agreed to be a witness in court. Sitting in the waiting area before I was called in, I was nervous – not surprisingly considering what was at stake. I felt vulnerable being asked questions by the Home Office representing officer, which questioned my reliability as a witness and the authenticity of my knowledge. I answered her questions relating to Mariam and Zainab’s ‘relationship status’ as best as I could. But how do you explain the difference between a friendship and a relationship? How do you explain the blatantly obvious to someone who is seeking to disprove the ‘evidence’ before them, often it seems in a seemingly instrumental way – to keep immigration numbers down?

In the UK justice system, the burden of proof lies with the claimant to show that s/he is a refugee, i.e. s/he needs to provide the evidence for her/his claim. Although the standard of proof is ‘a reasonable degree of likelihood’, claims are often refused because of minor discrepancies. In my work with LISG, I have seen many cases where women were not believed to be genuine lesbians (see Held 2016). Given that the inclusion of ‘lesbian sex’ remains ever-elusive in UK sexuality and marriage laws, it remains extremely difficult for women to establish that their relationships are genuine, even in long-term partnerships. In this era of precarity, when citizenship rights and refugee status are at stake, it is perhaps timely to revisit the slippery question and ask: What does a genuine lesbian/gay relationship look like, and how can this be proven in the eyes of asylum decision-makers?

After having seen many injustices asylum seekers and refugees face in the UK through my work with LISG and Freedom from Torture, I recently decided to return to academia (after six years’ post-doctoral work in the voluntary sector). My position has thus shifted from the frontline to research, but in both cases my aim has been to better understand the experience of sexuality and immigration and in doing so make a difference to people’s lives.

Together with two other researchers and the project leader, I am now working on the project SOGICA – Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). This project is investigating how asylum claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) are treated in the UK, Germany and Italy, and aims to develop recommendations on decision-making processes in these European asylum systems so that claims by individuals and couples like Mariam and Zainab can be treated more fairly.

The number of SOGI asylum claims and acceptance rates in Europe is unknown, as most EU member states do not record the grounds for claiming asylum. In the UK, the Home Office has started recording numbers on SOGI claims, but these numbers have not yet been published. The European study Fleeing Homophobia, published in 2011, indicated that there is no consistency in how the EU member states treat SOGI claims. Asylum seekers who seek international protection on the basis of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity need to show that they have a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of […] membership of a particular social group’ (1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). This means that claimants need to prove that they belong to the particular social groups of lesbian/bisexual/gay/transgender/intersex.

There are currently 73 countries (and 5 entities) in the world (40% of all countries) with legislation in place that criminalises same-sex consensual acts between adults. Many of the laws in these countries were imposed during British colonial rule (such as Pakistan, where Mariam and Zainab are from). However, Italy is the only country in the EU where the existence of such laws is sufficient for the proof of fear of persecution.

In the UK, since 1999, asylum claims based on SOGI have been recognised as grounds to claim asylum. Since then it has been accepted that women and lesbians and gay men can form a ‘particular social group’ (Shah and Islam v Secretary of State for the Home Department, House of Lords, 2 A.C. 629, 1999). Failing the Grade, a report by the London-based UK Lesbian and Immigration Support Group (UKLGIG) published in 2010, found that asylum claims based on SOGI were disproportionately refused. From the cases they looked at 98-99% of LGBT asylum seekers had been refused in the first instance in contrast to 73% of all initial asylum claims. This low percentage suggests that finding proof for the claimant’s SOGI and his/her fear of persecution is difficult. The high refusal rate impacts on SOGI asylum claimants’ lives: not being believed causes distress; it increases the length of the asylum process and the accompanying uncertainties; and often involves experiences of detention and destitution. Many SOGI claimants live a life in limbo for many years.

Before a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court (HJ and HT) in July 2010, the Home Office (and courts) found it easy to argue that SOGI claimants can go back to their country of origin, maybe relocate, and live their lives ‘discreetly’ in order to not fear persecution, in fact suggesting that claimants go back into the closet. The UKLGIG (2010) found that while before 2010 the Home Office refused the majority of SOGI claims on grounds of such arguments, in the majority of negative decisions made between 2010 and 2013 the claimants’ SOGI was not believed. At LISG we also witnessed this shift in argumentation in HO RFRLs now focusing the burden of proof on providing evidence for the claimant’s SOGI. However, what counts as evidence is contested.

Over the last years, the ‘threshold’ for proving SOGI has risen. SOGI claimants are now expected to collect evidence in the form of support letters from individuals and LGBT organisations (who must explain why they think that the person is lesbian or gay and/or that two people are in a relationship); photos of nights out in lesbian and gay venues and participation in Gay Pride events. Out of desperation, claimants sometimes submit intimate photographs and videos of themselves with their partners, and in one case the Home Office interviewer directly asked a claimant to submit photos of a sexual nature (although the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2013 that such types of evidence violate human dignity).

The evidence gathered here conforms to a particular Western model of sexuality, one that is ‘out and proud’ and which presumes that sexual identity and sexual conduct are interchangeable. Decision-making by the Home Office (and the courts) is often based on certain LGBT stereotypes and inappropriate questioning – for instance asking whether the claimant has read Oscar Wilde? What LGBT means? Details about sexual practices? In my volunteering work for LISG I have seen many refusals on grounds of credibility, where a delay in disclosure of sexual orientation, previous heterosexual relationships, having children, religious beliefs, and even older age have been used to undermine the women’s claims. Decision-makers rarely consider how sexuality intersects with gender, ‘race’, religion, age, and class for SOGI asylum claimants in ways that may differ from white, middle-class gay men, for instance.

In asylum decisions, assumptions about human behaviour are often based on Western understandings, as was also the case in the decision made on Mariam and Zainab’s appeal. Contrary to my expectations, the judge did not believe that the two women are lesbians in an intimate relationship. In a move that I had seen many times before in decisions by the Home Office and the courts, she did not put any weight on my evidence. She failed to consider cultural differences and how trauma impacts on memory in asylum and had already decided that the two women lacked credibility, and thus were not a genuine lesbian couple because of apparent inconsistencies, contradictions, and implausibility in their accounts.

Whilst the UK praises itself for being progressive in terms of LGBT rights, not everyone is listened to equally; the justice system draws clear boundaries of who belongs and who does not belong to the group of LGBT people. The impact of such injustices can be life shattering. When Mariam and Zainab received the decision, they both experienced adverse mental health. Fearing for their lives and the threat of being deported led Zainab to attempt suicide. Mariam had suffered from severe depression for the last one and a half years with her condition worsening day-by-day and she is now in the care of a Crisis Team. Her mental health has deteriorated to such an extent since their refusal; this has now put an enormous strain on their previously happy relationship.

Mariam and Zainab’s solicitor has submitted an appeal against the decision on the basis that the judge who heard the initial case made errors of law. The underlying Western stereotypical assumptions however persist; what constitutes a genuine lesbian relationship and the burden of proof remains an elusive and sometimes brutalising process.

___

Reference:

Held, Nina (2016) “What does a ‘genuine lesbian’ look like? Intersections of sexuality and ‘race’ in Manchester’s Gay Village and in the UK asylum system.” In: Stella, Francesca, Taylor, Yvette, Reynolds, Tracey and Rogers, Antoine (eds.) Sexuality, citizenship and belonging: trans-national and intersectional perspectives. Routledge: London, pp. 131-148.

[racingtoaredlight]

Opening Bell: August 25, 2017

Tropical Storm Harvey was updated to Hurricane status yesterday afternoon as it churned its ways through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico towards the south Texas coastline. The slow-moving storm continues to grow in strength as it moves inexorably towards landfall, something which is expected to take place late Friday night or early Saturday morning, likely as a Category 3 hurricane. Some forecasts project that Harvey will drop as much as 25 or even 30 inches of rain on the Texas coastal plan. The U.S. evacuated two naval air stations that are directly in the path of the storm. Harvey is expected to be the first storm of such size and strength to hit the continental United States since 2005. For some perspective, in 2005 neither Twitter, nor Snapchat, nor Instagram existed. YouTube was in its infancy and Facebook had only gone live two years earlier. Those of us that have lived for any length of time near the Gulf or Atlantic coasts know that the U.S. government operates so-called “hurricane hunter” aircraft through NOAA and the U.S. Air Force. These specially equipped aircraft fly directly into the storms in order to gain valuable data about their size and strength. In 1954, Edward R. Murrow flew on such a mission aboard a converted B-29 bomber as it gathered data on Hurricane Edna off the Eastern Seaboard. The next day, he filed an account of his flight. So said Murrow of his experience: “The eye of a hurricane is an excellent place to reflect upon the puniness of man and his work. If an adequate definition of humility is ever written, it's likely to be done in the eye of a hurricane.”

On Monday, the guided missile destroyer U.S.S. John S. McCain collided with a 50,000 ton oil tanker off the coast of Singapore as the McCain attempted a port call. Five sailors were injured and ten were reported missing. After the McCain docked in Singapore, Navy divers discovered the remains of one missing crewman in a flooded compartment; the other nine remain missing. Yesterday, after 80 hours of searching thousands of square miles of the approaches to Singapore at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the Navy announced that it was switching from rescue to a mission of recovery. At the same time, the names of the nine missing and one dead sailor were released to the public. By coincidence, the Navy also announced yesterday where the U.S.S. Fitzgerald, McCain’s sister ship which was in a similar collision off the coast of Japan in June, will be repaired. The Fitzgerald will be carried by a heavy lift vessel across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, to the Huntington Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Huntington Ingalls, along with Bath Iron Works in Maine, have built—and overhauled—every single one of the 66 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers currently in commission in the U.S. Navy.

One month after abruptly announcing that transgender individuals would be prevented from serving in the U.S. military, the White House is in the final stages of preparing a memo for the Pentagon directing when such a ban will begin, what it will entail, and who it will affect. This marks a sharp swerve in policy from that of the Obama administration which not only presided over the end of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gay men and women in the armed forces, but had begun to provide assistance to those members of the military who identified as transgender and wished to undertake a gender transition. The memo will apparently give Defense Secretary Jim Mattis discretion to decide on a case-by-case situation whether those currently in the armed forces should be separated.

For the second time this month, a federal district court in Texas struck down a law which affected how Texas residents vote in federal and state elections. While the first ruling assailed the validity of a congressional redistricting map, finding that two districts had been redrawn in order to marginalize voters in more liberal sections of the state, the ruling Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos rejected an amended voter ID law which Governor Greg Abbott signed into law earlier this year. In her opinion, Ramos wrote that the law was fundamentally unfair because it allowed the use of forms of ID which were disproportionately used by Anglo-voters, and disallowed forms of ID more likely to be used by non-Anglo voters. Attorney General Ken Paxton promised to appeal and there is a real possibility that this decision could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court at some point.

After a four month long review by the Interior Department, Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended to President Donald Trump this week that three national monuments—one designated by Barack Obama, one by Bill Clinton, and one by Clinton which was then expanded by Obama—be reduced in size. This is the first time in four decades that a national monument, which the president is authorized to create under the Antiquities Act, will be reduced. Conservationists, environmental groups, and travel agencies promote the existence of these national monuments, saying they preserve important parts of America’s unique landscapes while also bringing in tourist dollars to the local economy. Ranchers, fisherman, logging companies, and local residents generally oppose the creation, at least on such a large scale, of these monuments because they represent a power grab by the federal government which prevents industries and individuals from using the land as they see fit.

In another wide ranging report from another cabinet department, the Energy Department delivered to Secretary Rick Perry a 187-page review of the nation’s electric grid, focusing in particular on methods of power generation. While the report did negate claims that the increased costs of environmental regulations are the cause of coal plant shut downs—instead the report noted that it was the economic impacts of cheap, abundant natural gas which undermines fossil fuel plants—the rest of the report was widely welcomed by the coal industry, the nuclear power industry, and others. In order to meet greater energy demands, the report nonetheless called for a reduction in environmental regulations on fossil fuel power plants and for more rapid permitting processes by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The report does not have force of law or policy, but it represents a clear statement of where the Trump administration’s energy policy priorities lay.

The New York Times reported this week that research by the Woods Hole Research Center shows that Alaska’s permafrost—the permanently frozen ground that is dozens, or even thousands of feet below the surface—appears to be slowly melting. The wide-ranging effects of the loss of Alaska’s permafrost, which scientists concede will take thousands of years at current rates, are only beginning to be understood, and the partial loss of it is already contributing to higher average annual temperatures in the surrounding lands. There are also practical concerns in the near term; the melting permafrost undermines the group above it, which in turn causes building foundations, highways, and airport runways to shift.

Foreign Policy details how Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and the U.S. government as a whole, has consistently and almost systemically adopted a far more conciliatory approach to China than any previous administration and how these actions and words undermine America’s posture towards China as it continues to shoehorn itself into the South China Sea.

Qantas, Australia’s flagship airline, announced this week that it was planning what will become the world’s longest regularly scheduled commercial flight; Sydney to London, non-stop. The approximately 20 hour flight may go into service as soon as 2022, by which time Qantas may have acquired airliners with the capacity to actually fly such a distance. Currently no such airliner exists, though ultra-long range models by Boeing and Airbus are in development. Both manufacturers continue to woo Qantas and other ultra-long haul airlines as they design and build passenger airplanes which can fly increasingly longer distances with more efficiency.

DACA, or Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals, was created via a 2012 executive order by President Barack Obama. It was controversial from the beginning, with some in the GOP calling it the equivalent of amnesty for illegal immigrants. For all his disdain for many of Obama’s legacy programs, President Donald Trump has been reluctant to rescind DACA in full, despite facing pressure from within his party to do so. The Brookings Institution looks at how the uncertainty surrounding DACA affects those who benefitted from it as they seek to enter higher education.

Finally, yesterday the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics released its updated Senate map for the 2018 midterm election. Geoffrey Skelley analyzes how the high number of seats that must be defended by Democrats is affected by the low popularity of President Trump and the historic fact that the president’s party almost always loses seats in Congress during midterm elections; factors which seem to all collide directly with one another. Meanwhile, Decision Desk HQ, whose work I intend to include more of in the future, released their first 2018 House forecast map, analyzing every single district as well as how generic ballot tests may predict the 2018 result. As of this week, Decision Desk HQ gives Democrats a slightly better than 30% chance of retaking the House next year. For those who like statistical analysis, there is reams of it in both of these links. Enjoy.

Welcome to the weekend.