It’s not too late to whip up some mouth-watering game day grub!
More things you wrote that I thought were great.
I write about LGBTQ issues for a living, but going in front of a committee of House members and a crowd half-full of people who have taken time out of their lives specifically to argue why I don’t deserve human rights is a completely different monster. Bringing my own personal testimony before the committee left my hands shaking and my stomach sitting down in my feet all morning. After hearing claims that there are no cases of trans people facing workplace or housing discrimination, I cited some statistics from The National Center for Transgender Equality and Injustice at Every Turn proving otherwise before going deeper into my personal story.
In a practical sense, this move will have a real impact in making sure that the many LGBTQ Idahoans will be legally assured a fair chance at the same quality of life that other Idahoans have. But it’s more than that, it’s also a symbolic move that will show LGBTQ Idahoans that our state sees us as being equal to everyone else from our state.
It’s hard to not have your humanity recognized by your own home, by your fellow Idahoans. And really, that’s all we want. We’re asking for so little, just the acknowledgement that we are human beings and that we deserve the same basic rights as everyone else.
The knowledge that my state, that my government, refused to protect me, or really, even acknowledge my basic humanity, was one of the things that kept me in the closet for so long. I was so afraid that as soon as I came out I would lose my job and not be able to get a new one, that I would try to find a place to live and be refused, that I would try to live a normal life and I would be denied that I started to lose all hope. Staying in the closet caused me to fall into a deep depression that peaked with me standing in front of my bathroom mirror holding a handful of pills ready to kill myself.
I was lucky, I’m still here and I was able to see a glimmer of hope for a better future for a trans woman like me. Many LGBTQ people don’t see that better future. We can look to examples like the seventeen year old trans girl Leelah Alcorn in Ohio. When she looked around at society and thought about her future, she didn’t see any way that she could be happy or successful. And so she took her own life.
It’s our job to make our world, our country and our state a better place for all the other Leelah Alcorns out there. We need to ensure that people like her, and people like me, and people like all those you see here testifying in favor of adding the words to the Human Rights Act, have a bright and safe future here in Idaho. A future that offers security, opportunities and a fair chance at a good life. We already have so much going against us, we don’t need our own home state to be against us too.
Because business takes up so much more of my time than writing these days and I miss you people, I’ve committed to finding a way to write and publish at least one thing every day (except Saturday!) indefinitely. This sometimes means digging through old drafts that never saw the light of day or trying out ideas that might not always land. Here’s one that’s been waiting in drafts with a [DECIDING IF THIS IS FUNNY OR NOT] in the status bar for two years! I guess you’ll have to let me know how you feel about it or if I should get back to accounting.
Riese, publish all the things. (via fuckyeahautostraddle)
The Autostraddle Insider: Issue Seven, January 2015
- Brittani: What if we just did a post celebrating gal pals
- and it’s just women making out
- like women that are out and have posted pictures themselves on their instagrams
- Rachel: Screenshots of queer fisting porn with the genitals blurred out
- Brittani: Explicitly sexual things people purposely have put on the internet for people to find
- and we just insist that they are best friends
- Rachel: Speculate about which man they might be discussing
- Laneia: “Gal pals looking for bits of peat moss on each other’s labia. Friends looking out for friends!”
- Stef: Autostraddle: Gal-On-Pal Culture
- Brittani: A picture of a woman with her ex-gal pal and their children who don’t call each other “brother and sister,” just “friends”
- Rachel: A picture of two gal pals who are trying on matching wedding dresses together, in a church, how cute, maybe they’re each other’s maids of honor
- Brittani: A gal pal giving birth while her gal pal holds her hand. the baby even has both of their last names so everyone knows they’re legally friends!
- Uh-oh! Little Katie she just got kicked out of her house for telling her family she wants to be BFFs with her gal pal forever
- Rachel: Really inspiring that that gal pal has stayed by her gal pal’s side while she deals with late stages of a terminal illness, even going so far as to file a power of attorney for her gal pal
- Brittani: Yeah I want them to just get darker and darker as the post goes on.
- Rachel: Gal Pals Hitting Rock Bottom.
Selfridges will be hosting a six week, non-gender specific shopping experience starting March 12 featuring designs from Nicolai Formeccetti, Gareth Pugh, Nicopanda, Body Map, Rad Hourani and Ann Demeulemeester. Learn more about it here.
It was 1995, you see, and my image of the modern lesbian was pretty stereotypical — dumpy, unstylish, short-haired. It’s a “type” I embrace these days (literally and metaphorically). But back then, as an awkward gawky teenager struggling to fit in, that image was downright petrifying and bore no resemblance to my own aspirational existence. The only famous lesbians I knew of were The Indigo Girls. So I was pretty vulnerable, you could say, to suggestion.
Being underestimated — by men, by women, by themselves — is something most women have in common. We have to work harder from the outset to resist being dismissed, to attain equal footing, and then to maintain it. It’s endless, repetitive work, cut across and intensified by yet other assumptions based on accent, skin color, class, education, dress. And it’s a powerful thing, the learnt reflex to look at a woman and see someone who is by definition unaccomplished, a novice; someone’s disciple, companion, muse; someone with no power or expertise of her own. I’m not immune to it — I’ve caught myself in the act of underestimating women, of having assumed that the woman in the room isn’t the expert in the room. It’s a reflex so disturbing to notice that it’s tempting to pass over it in silence. But it’s a reflex enabled by the shocking paucity of women of authority and expertise across all media — a paucity not easily registered, so used are we to it.
Jessie’s death is tragic, especially since she was so young and her friends had to witness her being killed. Was it really necessary to shoot and kill a teenage girl? The problem is the ones to evaluate that question work under a system that is unjust to people of color. Jessie didn’t deserve to die, even if she indeed used a stolen car as a weapon. Her life was taken because it was deemed unimportant and disposable because an officer decided his sense of safety was worth more than her life.
Yvonne via Jessie Hernandez Didn’t Deserve to Die
L7 is reuiniting and making all your dreams come true. But you have to help them out first! Find out how in this week’s AAA.