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There’s a post on SexIs today from Roland Hulme, in which he shows that he almost gets how his privilege works. In his piece, he discusses the responses to a previous post of his, in which he wrote that (at the time), he was of the opinion that transgender people shouldn’t be able to change the designated sex on their birth certificates. And as he wrote:
It drew a lot of comments — many of them angry and frustrated — and opened my eyes to a lot of different perspectives on the issue. Ultimately, the debate revealed that something I thought was cut-and-dried turned out to be a lot more complex than I’d imagined. My opinion was challenged and my attitudes changed by the
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Continue reading When Straight, White, Cisgender Men Don’t Get It
Is anyone really surprised by the news that LGB youth are about 40% more likely to be punished by school authorities, police and the courts than heterosexual kids who do the same things? Just as driving while Black or flying while Muslim result in people being targeted for more intense scrutiny and harassment, people who don’t fit neatly into the stereotypical gender norms (which require heterosexuality) find themselves being bullied by peers and punished by those who have control over them.
Kathryn E. W. Himmelstein and Hannah Brückner’s study, Criminal-Justice and School Sanctions Against Nonheterosexual Youth: A National Longitudinal Study looked at the data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which followed a nationally representative sample of adolescents who were in grades …
Continue reading Bullies Aren’t Just Other Kids: LGB Teens Get Harsher Treatment
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
What is it with schools not letting teens bring dates to the prom?
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Hannah Williams wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom and the folks in charge at Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School in Melbourne (an all-girls school) wouldn’t let her.
Their justifications are really interesting. Hannah’s father says that ”[t]he school kept saying because it is an all-girls school we want to make an event where they can meet boys in a social scenario.” Of course, not all girls want to meet boys in a social scenario, for any of a number of reasons. So then the principal took …
Continue reading Australian Teen Can’t Take Her Girlfriend to the Prom
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
According to the Helsinki Times and Huffington Post, over 30,000 people have left the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church, the national church of Finland. The reason? They held a debate on LBGT rights and comments made by various folks on the anti side were deemed too homophobic to tolerate.
In general, about 800 people leave the church each week, so this is a major spike. And with 4.3 million members, that’s one out of every 14 members leaving. If one out of every 14 people in the US stood up to homophobia, we might not need the It Gets Better Project.
Just saying.…
Continue reading Homophobia in Church? Finns Say “No Way!”
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
For years, safer sex advocates have been saying that self-esteem has a huge effect on how much people engage in risk-reduction and harm-reduction behaviors. That’s why many of the most effective intervention programs & organizations, whether online like Scarleteen.com or in-person like the StopAIDS Project, offer counseling and support, in addition to information.
So I was really interested to read this post on ScienceDaily.com about research showing that among the 1,000 HIV-positive and negative gay and bisexual men surveyed:
Almost 10 percent of the participants reported that they had been victims of childhood sexual abuse and nearly 30 percent had experienced gay-related victimization between the ages of 12 and 14, including verbal insults, bullying,
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Continue reading Shame as a Public Health Issue
I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised that Eugene Delgaudio, the District Supervisor in Sterling, Virginia, is trying to stir up campaign contributions with a homophobic moral panic. Moral panics have always been a great way to scare people (usually with something imaginary) in order to distract them from what’s really going and get them to fall in line. But this one is so bizarre that I just had to share it. Here’s Delgaudi’s fundraising letter, in its entirety:
Dear fellow American,
The Radical Homosexuals claim you and other pro-family Americans actually now support same-sex marriage, special job preferences for homosexuals and promotion of the homosexual lifestyle in schools.
Is it true? What do you say?
But first I want to make
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Continue reading Lies, Damn Lies, and Homophobic Fundraising Letters
via Carnal Nation
Does it seem to you that the anti-gay marriage folks are getting a little desperate to come up with a logical, reasonable explanation for why they don’t want gays to marry (besides their homophobia, I mean)? You’ll love this one, then.
GOP Chairman Michael Steele has proposed that if gays are allowed to marry, that will hurt businesses by adding to their health benefits costs. Here’s what he said:
“Now all of a sudden I’ve got someone who wasn’t a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for,” Steele told Republicans at the state convention in traditionally conservative Georgia. “So how do I pay for that? Who
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Continue reading GOP Chairman Michael Steele: “gay marriage is bad for business”
I know that I’ve been writing a lot about Proposition 8 lately, but I keep having new thoughts come up.
Anyway, it seems to me that the folks who pushed for prop 8 were doing their best to instill a moral panic. Moral panics occur when a large group of people see a group, event or condition as a threat to the social order. They are sometimes based on a certain amount of truth, while at other times, they can be entirely imaginary. But because they tap into a fear response, they can be quite tenacious and some of them linger for years or reemerge every now and then.
The more I read about the actions of the people behind prop 8, the more …
Continue reading more thoughts on prop 8
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