From the November-December 2018 issue of News & Letters

by Elise

Photo by Elise for News & Letters

“The Orlando Traveling Memorial, to Remember the 49 and Those Left Behind” by artist Colleen Ardman has begun touring the U.S., beginning in Chicago. Over 1,000 people helped build the mural, which is composed of hundreds of handprints of first responders, medical personnel, local citizens, officials and groups who aided the victims. Portraits of the 49 killed in the Orlando Pulse 2016 shooting were created by each victim’s family and are mounted on the mural.

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After working for almost 30 years handling funerals for R.G.&G.R. Funeral Homes, Transgender woman Aimee Stephens was fired because of who she is, a few weeks after Stephens outed herself to her boss. Stephens and the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued R.G.&G.R. The federal appeals court agreed that she was illegally fired. Her case now heads to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Transgender people and their supporters across the U.S. protested a Trump-supported proposal by the Health and Human Services Department that defines gender as fixed and determined by a person’s genitalia at birth. Hundreds of biologists and geneticists and four Nobel Prize winners signed a letter calling the proposal pseudoscience. The proposal would make Transgender and Gender Nonconforming people invisible, nullifying their human rights. The consequences for Intersex persons are undetermined. The #WeWontBeErased movement is well underway.

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Romanians either voted against or boycotted the vote on a government-backed referendum that would have constitutionally defined a family as based on marriage of one man and one woman. Millions of dollars were spent on the failed referendum, created by the Orthodox Romanian church as an attempt to ban same-sex marriage from ever becoming legal in Romania.