From the November-December 2017 issue of News & Letters

By Elise Barclay

Beijing high school students made the film Escape, a fictional tale of Transgender youth Zhang Wang’an in China. Director Hu Ranran’s aim is to educate Chinese people about Transgender youth, a group she correctly cites as being disadvantaged in China, where Queer people do not have any legal protections. While local authorities pressured the Guangzhou Transgender Center into not showing Escape, the Beijing LGBT Center and  screened it—and People’s Daily reviewed it, positively. Director Hu plans to post an English version of Escape on YouTube.

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Over 100 people in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood held a sign distribution rally at Waters Elementary School in September to support two neighborhood LGBT families whose pro-human rights/anti-hate signs had been vandalized. Neighbors carried signs reading “Hate Has No Home Here,” “Love Is Love,” and “Black Lives Matter.” People committed to distributing signs to their neighbors to talk about fighting hate with love. Speaker Uge Okere, of Fuerza Del Sol, pointed out that all human rights causes are connected.

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Russia’s anti-LGBT laws are so repressive that many LGBT Russians are closeted or underground, yet 100 LGBT people and their supporters marched in Russia’s largest Pride Parade in St. Petersburg. Three Russians who participated in Kirekenes, Norway’s, Pride march, were detained before re-entering Russia by persons who showed no ID, but claimed to be with the FSB. Kirekenes’s Mayor Rune Rafaelsen publicly decried the FSB treatment of the Russian Pride participants.

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Representative Pete Olson, Texas Republican, is sponsoring a bill to invalidate executive orders that included Trans people as a protected class under Title VII. Olson’s Act would bar Transgender people from healthcare under the Affordable Care Act specific to their needs, such as gender-affirming hormone treatments,.