Intersectionality and discrimination

Intersectionality. The main impression this inelegant heptasyllabic word has made on me over the years is the almost automatic way in which any analysis focusing on it tends to indulge in spatial metaphor.

No wonder, as the notion of intersectionality is itself a spatial metaphor struggling to
upgrade itself (or reduce itself, depending on one’s perspective) to a technical legal and/or social science term. This issue of the Equal Rights Review is an ample case in point, as well as, hopefully, a snapshot capturing the current state of understanding among the experts.

Different people mean different things when they talk about intersectionality. That which intersects can relate to identities, prohibited grounds of discrimination, human rights, human rights violations, disadvantages, inequalities, systems of oppression, and so on; and intersectionality itself is referred to variously as a theory, a framework (another spatial metaphor), a method, a practice… The reader will find all of these usages, and more, in this issue alone. 

 Read more via Equal Rights Review

US: After notorious faked study, new work finds that one conversation can curb transphobia

Volunteer door-to-door canvassers who engaged in a 10-minute conversation were able to reduce some voters’ negative feelings about trans people for up to three months, a new study suggests. This decrease in prejudice was greater, the researchers say, than the change in Americans’ feelings toward gay people from 1998 to 2012.

The study, published today in the journal Science, may have strong implications for changing voter attitudes during a time when many cities and states — including Houston, Tennessee, Mississippi, and most recently, North Carolina — are introducing legislation to ban transgender people from certain restrooms, among other things, based on harmful stereotypes about transgender women being sex predators.

The results come nearly a year after the now-notorious study by then-UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour that Broockman and co-author Joshua Kalla exposed as fraudulent.  Advocates are relieved that the new study found that those experiences were, in fact, legitimate.  Read more via Buzzfeed

Australia: LGBTI Victorians speak out about the issues they want addressed by local and federal government

The Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby recently surveyed LGBTI Victorians about issues they were most important and should be addressed on both a local and federal level. 

On a federal level, 88 per cent of respondents said they wanted to see greater legal protections from discrimination, while 85 per cent said they would like to see violence and public harassment addressed. On a local level, 83 per cent of respondents said they wanted to see their local government focus on LGBTI-inclusive health and community services. Read more via Star Observer

Brazil: How to fight transphobic violence

Imagine if one transgender person was murdered every 21 hours in the United States. In Brazil, we don't have to imagine this horrific, overwhelming epidemic of fatal violence against transgender individuals. One transgender person truly is killed every 21 hours, according to a statement from Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring Project emailed to my colleague Eduarda Alice Santos. She is a correspondent for Planet Transgender, an English-language hub for international transgender concerns, who also provided the image above from a "die-in" protest in Rio de Janeiro this year.

Brazil has the world’s highest rate of fatal violence against transgender people. In fact, the South American nation's trans murder rate is 16.4 times higher than anywhere else on the planet. If the world overall experienced Brazil’s transgender murder rate, there would be 1,260 homicides in approximately 70 days worldwide. In a year, we would lose an estimated 6,588 transgender people to homicide. Read more via the Advocate

India: Old custom, new couples

It’s a custom for which India is well known: arranged marriages, when parents pick appropriate spouses for their children based on caste, class, education and looks. By some counts, as many as three in four Indians still prefer to find a partner this way. “Matrimonial” ads — personal ads seeking brides and grooms — have been common in Indian newspapers for decades, and in the Internet age apps and websites have proliferated around the demand.

Now, an Indian-American is bringing these convenient matchmaking tools to gay men and women around the world — even if India won’t recognize their marriages yet.

“The big step for us was when the United States made gay marriage legal,” said Joshua Samson, the CEO of Arranged Gay Marriage. “We knew there is a huge underground gay and lesbian community in India, and we thought why not spread some light out there, help people who feel like they can never be helped?” Read more via PRI

Middle East, op-ed: The myth of the queer Arab life

For most people in the West life in the Arab world for gay people is hard to fathom. It is, like many other parts of life in this region, complicated. 

One of my favorite television shows growing up was a Ramadan special featuring an Egyptian performer called Sherihan. One year she had a Ramadan special called ‘Sherihan Around the World’, a twenty-minute singing and dancing extravaganza, which had her dressing in exquisite costumes from around the world and performing elaborate song and dance routines. Sherihan was a woman, but she was the best drag queen I had ever seen: camp, self-aware, and fabulous. She had planted in me, without my knowledge, the first seeds of my own gay identity.

Twelve years later, when I was living in Amman, my boyfriend broke up with me. I was becoming too open with my sexuality, he said. I had confided in too many people. Being with me was becoming dangerous. I told him that no one would kill us, let alone threaten us. The Jordanian police don’t have a history of targeting gay men, I reasoned, especially those of our social class. But that wasn’t the danger, he explained. The danger was that being seen with me was making people think he was ‘gay’. And he did not want to be seen as ‘gay’. Read more via Daily Beast

International Day of Trans Visibility – a statement by GATE

On March 31st, Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE) calls for collective and critical reflection as we honor the International Day of Trans Visibility.

Undoubtedly, individual and community visibility has been a key strategy to build trans* social and political movements. Visibility has played a central historical role in the ongoing work to transform our material and symbolic conditions of existence in the pursuit of social justice. In fact, the very recognition of our existence and affirmation of our full selves demands visibility every day. Nevertheless, trans visibility does not happen without risk: those who are visible are also exposed to the very dynamics they are challenging – discrimination, oppression, and violence. Read more via RHM Journal  

Balkans: The LGBT community is invisible

The young gay activist slowly stirs sugar into his coffee as he says he’s never had a boyfriend who would hold his hand in public.

“Most people from my generation are too scared to come out,” says 22-year-old Liridon Veliou, who works with the LGBT rights group QESh. Behind him, is a cafe scene from any European city – smartphones and MacBook computers illuminating the faces of young men and women against a backdrop of bookshelves stacked with 60s American novels.

But beyond the cafe’s terrace and its young, open-minded clientele, lies a country where 81% of the LGBT community has suffered threats or insults because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. This is the highest rate of discrimination in the western Balkans, according to a 2015 poll by the National Democracy Institute. The statistics are a sharp reminder that, despite appearances, this isn’t London or Rome – this is Pristina, capital of Kosovo.

On paper, Kosovo looks modern and inclusive – its progressive constitution written in the aftermath of the 1998-99 war includes a ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation. But LGBT groups say this image contradicts reality. 

 Read more via the Guardian

Malaysia: Transgender activist wins US government award for courage

Malaysian transgender activist Nisha Ayub, once jailed for cross-dressing and sexually assaulted in prison, is the first trans woman to win the US Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award.

Nisha ― who co-founded two transgender rights NGOs, the SEED Foundation and Justice for Sisters ― was one of 14 women around the world who received the 2016 award yesterday. Read more via Malay Mail Online

Africa, Op-ed The challenge of secularism and human rights in Africa

African countries have been facing various challenges since independence and one of these major dilemmas is defining the relationship between religion and politics. At independence, African countries inherited multiple faiths, political religions that seek to control state formation and structure.

This challenge is evident in the controversies that have trailed the introduction and implementation of sharia law in places like Nigeria and Somalia, the violent reactions to religious differences in Sudan and Central African Republic, the ongoing campaign against islamic extremism in Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, Cameroon and in the North of Africa, the heated debates and fierce opposition to the enactment of legislations and policies that protect the human rights of persons particularly those human rights mechanisms that are deemed by some segments of the religious establishment as violations of the dictates and dogmas of their faiths.

Drawing from my experiences growing up in Nigeria and years of keenly following the use of religion for political ends or the use of politics religious ends in countries across the region, this piece highlights how mixing of religion and politics undermines secularism and the realization of Freedom of Religion and Belief (FORB) and human rights broadly. I propose models, not a model of secularism because the situation of religion and politics in Africa is not homogenous and often differs from country to country, sometimes within countries to warrant recommending just a model of secularism that may apply to over 52 countries in the region.  Read more via IEET

West Africa: Mapping of LGBTQ organizations

Commissioned by a group of donors and activists, We exist: Mapping of LGBTQ organizations in West Africa is in an explanatory and participatory process to initiate the creation of a new funding mechanism led by LGBTQ activists West Africa. A group of funders and activists came together in 2013 to propose the creation of a bilingual fund managed and led by West African LGBTQ activists. The creation of such a fund would not only provide emerging leaders with the tools and spaces they need to build a more effective, inclusive movement for LGBTQ rights in West Africa, but also serve as a much-needed activist-owned platform for social change.

It would provide international donors with a safe and trusted mechanism to invest strategically in the region and to ensure their resources were reaching the grassroots with accountability. It would introduce a mechanism through which local strategies could be shared and regional strategies developed collectively, both proactively and in response to crises. Finally, it would provide a point of coordination in a region of Africa where both organizing and donor engagement on LGBTQ rights remains uncoordinated, uneven, and linguistically divided.

The work of setting up such a fund requires a deeper understanding of LGBTQ activism in this vast and diverse region, as well as of the past and current funding landscape and the additional support available for the emerging movement, especially in Francophone countries, where organizing is still largely underground. Therefore, an exploratory and participatory process was undertaken to enable activists, funders, and allies to map the state of LGBTQ organizing in West Africa and gather data to help determine the appropriate initial structure and priorities of the fund.   Read more via Qayn

Read the full report

Cameroon: It’s time to repeal our anti-gay law

The repeal of Cameroon’s anti-LGBT law is long overdue, says a member of the Human Rights Commission of the Cameroon Bar Association. In fact, says barrister Walter Atoh, “It is absolutely sickening and ridiculous that in the 21st century a homosexual act gets a person in Cameroon six months to five years imprisonment.”

Atoh Walter M. Tchemi made his appeal for reform last month during a workshop on human rights in Douala, Cameroon, that was organized by Cameroon’s Association for the Defense of the Rights of Homosexuals. In connection with that workshop, Atoh wrote an open letter to Cameroon President Paul Biya in which he argued that the country’s anti-gay law, Article 347 bis of the Cameroon Penal Code, violates the nation’s international treaty obligations.

Atoh noted that in 2013, when Cameroon’s human rights record was last reviewed by other nations at the U.N. Human Rights Council, 15 nations urged  Cameroon to improve its treatment of LGBTI people. Atoh suggested that it’s currently a good time for Biya to act to repeal Article 347 bis, at a moment when many people are urging him to run for re-election in 2018. Read more via 76 Crimes