LGBTQ+

The Idaho House voted to advance a new flag bill on Thursday, sending a bill to the Senate that serves as a revised effort from the legislature to bar the Pride flag from being flown in Boise.

House Bill 561, sponsored by Rep. Ted Hill, R-Eagle, expands upon House Bill 96, which was signed by Gov. Brad Little last April. That law prohibits government entities, including universities and public schools, from displaying flags other than the United States flag, the official flag of a governmental entity, the official flags of any states in the U.S., the official flags of any military branches, the POW/MIA flag, or the official flags of Indian tribes.

The bill considered on the House Floor on Thursday is an amended version of legislation Hill introduced to the House State Affairs Committee in February to tighten restrictions on which flags local governments could fly. Concerns raised by individuals who testified and by House members at the hearing led to the addition of several exceptions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/39660311

title of this one is Saw

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/39623964

Ahead of International Women's Day, several WeChat public accounts advocating for women's and minority rights were shut down

Ahead of International Women's Day, multiple WeChat public accounts advocating for women's and minority rights were shut down. According to incomplete statistics, the banned accounts include: "Xiaowusheng Psychology," an organization focusing on mental health for sexual minorities; "Dongxia Primavera," which addresses feminist and leftist youth issues; "Letters from Two Strangers," a Gen Z feminist account; "HerStoryNow" run by grassroots feminist groups, "自由娜拉NORA" (Freedom NORA), an independent media outlet focusing on human trafficking and the rights of people with mental disabilities, "Belonging Space," a team dedicated to the mental health of women and sexual minorities, "流放地" (Place of Exile) advocating for sexual minority rights, and "艾大荀," an account operated by female public welfare activists.

Such mass bans seem to occur annually, like some kind of sacrificial ritual. My recollection is that the first instance happened during IDAHOTB in 2021. Back then, on WeChat's interface, banned public accounts would display as "Untitled Public Account（未命名公众号）." In response, some members of the LGBTQ+ community added the prefix "Untitled（未命名）" to their online aliases as a form of protest. Yet now people have even grown accustomed to it.

Organisers have been given the go ahead to create the Byun Huisu Foundation, a non-profit which will work to protect trans South Koreans from political and societal transphobia.

What was originally supposed to be a 20-day deliberation turned into a two-year debacle after an application to create the foundation was submitted in May 2024.

The decision was repeatedly delayed over opposition from a conservative member of South Korea’s human rights regulator, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRCK), who routinely voted against fellow members of the watchdog’s standing commissioners.

She spent a year in U.S. detention before being shipped to Cameroon.

The letters threaten prison time if trans people don't get new driver's licenses with no notice.

A recent article from Jesse Singal in the New York Times seemed to indicate the organization might be quietly retreating from supporting trans youth care.

“No, APA’s position has not changed,” says a representative speaking for the APA, attaching a link to their 2024 policy statement which provided broad support for gender-affirming care. “APA continues to support unobstructed access to evidence-based care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals of all ages.”

For generations, queer people have fled their rural hometowns in search of community, belonging and glamour in the big city. So the idea of any gay, non-binary or trans person choosing to work on a farm may seem counterintuitive. But according to almost a dozen queer and trans farmers, the face of farming is changing. And as a result, farming itself is being transformed, with queer growers favouring small-scale, community-supported, environmentally-sustainable practices.

Women-run to queer-run

Rake and Radish sprouted beside a pocket of small farms on Vancouver Island that’s home to a long line of queer growers. The now-inactive LGBTQ2S+ farmer group Rainbow Chard Collective made its debut in 2009 at Victoria Pride. “All the clean gays with tight bodies and corporate floats were about to get a taste of filthy, dirty working queers of all shapes and genders,” wrote Larkin Schmiedl, a founder of the collective, in This Magazine in 2014. He wore a shirt printed with “gender modified, not genetically modified” as the group trundled a wheelbarrow through the parade.

Mel Sylvestre, who now runs the farm Grounded Acres with their partner on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, was another one of Rainbow Chard Collective’s founding members. “I came out, got my first girlfriend and started a job on the farm all at the same time,” Sylvestre says, sounding almost surprised at their luck. “I think it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud.”

Their first fateful job in B.C. was on a Vancouver Island co-op farm run by three straight women. “But there was definitely a trend of seeing women and, almost by default, queer people being attracted to small-scale, by hand, organic, ecological farming,” Sylvestre explains.

Where there are women-led farms—still a minority, but a growing phenomenon—queer-run farms seem to follow soon after. Although there are no federal statistics on LGBTQ2S+ farmers in Canada, according to the latest numbers available in the 2021 Census of Agriculture, Canada’s female farm operators make up a little more than a third of the country’s total, with B.C. commanding the highest share of this demographic. And women are more likely than men to work on small farms that report less than $50,000 in revenue. In a 2022 Globe and Mail article on celebrating pride in agriculture, a queer farmer in Vermont, U.S., explains “there’s definitely this unspoken understanding that [it’s] going to be a much more compassionate and inclusive environment when it’s women-owned.” The farmers Xtra interviewed agreed with that sentiment, crediting female farm operators for paving the way for queer, trans and non-binary workers in the industry.

CW: Contains some mentions of pornography, BDSM and child sexual abuse.

"Genevieve Gluck" is a name you're probably (or probably not) familiar with.

She is a gender critical feminist, journalist and the main founder of the independent radical feminist news outlet Reduxx. However, almost everything about her is bullshit.

"Genevieve Gluck" is not her real name. Her real name is Myra J. Pearson, a poet.

Myra is originally from Blacksburg, Virginia, but moved to South Korea several years ago to teach English at an all-women's university called Duksung Women's University. After that, she moved to and currently lives in Kyoto, Japan with her partner Mark Lentz (also known as "Henry Demos").

Mark Lentz is an analog photographer and musician who is part of the small two-person indie band "Nice Legs". He is also the head PR of the indie game studio Chuhai Labs, founded in 2020 by industry and Nintendo veteran Giles Goddard. A photo that is still up on their website shows her posing with the peace sign along with all the other members if you scroll a little.

Myra's poetry work was featured in the Boston Poetry Magazine and Chiron Review, and was a 2015 Pushcart nominee. She took the surname "Gluck" from Louise Glück, famed feminist poet and one of her inspirations. Myra claims to have delved herself into trans issues in 2015, but from archived copies of her old Twitter account, there was not a single tweet from 2017 and '18 where she talked about it. She has also made zero tweets about trans issues in her other old account, "MyraJPearson" (it was also known as "MyraJPoetry").

Before Reduxx, Myra Pearson was the founder of the now-defunct feminist art webzine Period(dot)ink, where its official Twitter account has a profile picture of a painting of a woman punching a man in a boxing match.

But, wait! I thought you were against men in women's sports? So you're telling me that it's OK to put men in women's sports as long as the women are the ones that win?

In her current identity as "Genevieve Gluck" she has multiple times defended Germaine Greer's book about youthful young men and boys as an "art history book", while ignoring that the book at one point had a cover photo of a shirtless, teenaged Björn Andrésen, who rightfully took offense to the cover and had it removed. I don't know if I can buy into that "art history book" stuff, because if a man wrote a book about like this about youthful young women and called it "The Beautiful Girl", there would be rioting in the streets.

Myra also recently tried to defend a mother who according to her son sexually abused him in the past before he killed her. While I do not condone what he did and was mortified by the way he brutalised her (strangling her to death and then raping her corpse), what if he wasn't lying? What if he was telling the truth? Would she say the same thing?

Myra is not a journalist, either. She never studied journalism in university or college, and does not have a degree in journalism.

Despite hating pornography and wanting it banned, she seems to not stop talking about it. She once said that neopronouns were utilised in BDSM porn stories on Usenet (where they supposedly come from) as a way for readers to identify with characters in them with no evidence to back these claims up.

She hates all trans people regardless of their viewpoints and views all of them as dangerous fetishists (especially MtF), including transsexualism. She has a black-and-white view that consists of "all the men dangerous, all the women vulnerable".

Disturbingly, Myra is insistent on downplaying recorded or photographed child sexual abuse by referring to it by its outdated term "child pornography", arguing that pornography is sexually abusive by default, seen from a past tweet of hers, despite having used the former wording before.

Myra is actively erasing the past and pretending it never existed. That's why a lot of her old profiles as Myra Pearson are deleted or shut down. She even took her current Twitter username "WomenReadWomen" from an account ran by Joanna Walsh called "Read_Women". She took down her other old Twitter account, "MyraJPearson", when her "WomenReadWomen" account was soaring in popularity in 2020.

Porn, along with trans issues, has rotted her brain to the point where she has become a shadow of a person.

TL;DR: Popular GC radfem and fraudulent "journalist" is a former poet who hasn't lived in the US for years and currently lives in East Asia with her partner who is a musician for a small band, photographer, and the member of an indie game studio founded by a Nintendo alumnus. Also has some questionable views on men and female creeps.

EDIT: Updated this post with sources, and removed some more inflammatory remarks. I was a bit livid at the time of first writing this.

EDIT 2: More info.

I feel like this is the best / biggest gay TV show since Heartstopper

this show is definitely more erotic and sex is integral to the plot, so NSFW warning - but it's a lot more than just sex

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54426119

A broad coalition of 47 anti-LGBTQ+ organizations announced this week the launch of a campaign to end marriage equality in the U.S.

As People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch reports, the coalition announced their explicitly anti-equality “Greater Than” campaign on Wednesday via the Heritage Foundation’s The Daily Signal.

The campaign’s core principle is that the sole purpose of marriage is to raise children and that the constitutional right of same-sex couples to legally marry in the U.S., as established by the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, violates children’s rights.

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/38838877

Republican lawmakers in Kansas are trying to ram through an anti-trans bathroom ban by including it in a bill that previously only related to whether trans people could change their gender markers on their driver’s licenses.

As the Kansas Reflector reports, Republicans on the state’s House Judiciary Committee voted earlier this week to approve an amendment to House Bill 2426 introduced by Rep. Bob Lewis (R). In its original form, H.B. 2426 would have required Kansas driver’s licenses and birth certificates to indicate a person’s sex assigned at birth, regardless of their gender identity. That version of the bill was opposed by more than 200 people who showed up to a House Judiciary Committee meeting earlier this month, even though the bill only appeared on the committee’s agenda 24 hours before.

But prior to Monday night’s hearing, the committee gave no public notice that it would be taking action on the bill or that it would consider the bathroom ban, according to the Reflector.

Being a pitmaster came to Kaleb Blain almost by accident, while he was working at Guess Barbecue in Waco's food truck. Each day, when he'd walk through the back, he'd be entranced by the smell of smoking meat and the blaze of the fire.

"There was always something that grabbed at me about it," Blain said. "Every single time I'd walk through that pit house back there, I just wanted to be there."

Barbecue felt like a calling for Blain, but it was hard to break in. Blain, a transgender man, didn't feel welcome in the traditional barbecue space, one that conjures to mind images of grizzled men smoking impossible amounts of meat in huge smokers. It's a quintessentially Texan image, one that doesn't always feel open to people like Blain.

But it's also a space that, like Texas itself, is constantly changing. Scan the pages of Texas Monthly, where a coveted spot on its annual Top 50 BBQ joints list means you've made it, to see for yourself. Women have broken in, opening spots like the much-lauded, woman-led Barbs B Q in Lockhart, and our state's diverse immigrant community has brought their own unique flavors to Texas classics at joints like the Egyptian-infused KG BBQ in Austin. So why not trans people?

As he ventures out on his own with Blain's BBQ, a small-scale enterprise in Waco, Blain is acutely aware of the gap he's stepping into.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/53266613

The Austrian Constitutional Court has strengthened the rights of nonbinary people—and at the same time given politicians a rebuke. Nonbinary individuals have, according to this ruling, the right to an adequate designation of their gender in the civil status register and to the complete deletion of the gender entry, the LGBTI organization Rechtskomitee Lambda reported over the weekend.

The Washington, D.C.-based couple’s lives were torn apart on December 10 when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Perez-Zuazo during what was expected to be a routine annual check-in at an ICE facility in Chantilly, Virginia.

While Blanco Gallegos is a U.S. citizen, Perez-Zuazo is undocumented. Originally from Panama, Perez-Zuazo entered the U.S. at the Texas/Mexico border in November 2021. After being processed by authorities, Perez-Zuazo was released and allowed to live with a sponsor in Washington D.C. There, he met Blanco Gallegos, and the two married in February 2024. Since then, they have pursued a Green Card for Perez-Zuazo. His I-130 petition — the first step for a U.S. citizen like Blanco Gallegos to sponsor a spouse for a Green Card — was approved.

That process came to an abrupt halt in December however, when Perez-Zuazo reported for his annual check-in with ICE. As The New York Times reported this week, under the Trump administration, federal agents have arrested thousands of people showing up for such routine immigration appointments and court hearings. Immigrant rights advocates say the tactic has effectively turned a mandatory part of the legal immigration process into a trap.

Over more than three hours of oral arguments on Tuesday, justices grappled with questions about sex and gender as the Supreme Court heard cases on whether bans in Idaho and West Virginia are violating transgender athletes’ rights to compete in organized sports.

Attorneys for Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union argued the states violated the constitutional rights of Becky Pepper-Jackson, 15, and Lindsay Hecox, 25, when they barred them from competing. Attorneys for Idaho and West Virginia claimed it was impossible for states to sort through which trans people should and should not qualify for athletics and therefore that the states needed a blanket ban against all transgender women.

The cases, Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J could have big implications for transgender athletes and trans people more broadly — but rulings could just as likely be limited to the two athletes who defy conservative stereotypes about transgender athletes.