Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling against Peruvian government in favor of Trans woman Azul Rojas Marin; LGBTQ Asians fighting hate crimes; and a coalition of LGBTQ people demanding California enact the Emergency Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund.
Transgender non-conforming and non-binary people
Canada on trial: War on Wet’suwet’en nation
April 29, 2020With work stoppages and shutting down rail service, the Indigenous Wet’suwet’en people resist construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en First Nation territory despite the COVID-19 crisis in Canada.
Queer notes, March-April 2020
March 17, 2020Queer notes on youth in Vietnam; anti-LGBTQ actions at the University of Louisville; and the firing of two teachers at John F. Kennedy High School after announcing their engagements to same-sex partners.
Queer notes, January-February 2020
January 22, 2020The death of Charlot Jeudy, president of Haiti Queer rights group Kouraj; anti-LGBTQ+ norms in Turkey; anti-Trans laws in India; and the largest-ever art exhibit about Southeast Asian LGBTQ+ people in Bangkok.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2020, Part One
Readers’ Views on Capitalism and climate; Mideast upheaval; Trump the Mullah?; war crime hero; Trump’s judges; detransition debate; and women’s liberation.
Queer Notes, November-December 2019
November 17, 2019Stabbing of a Palestinian Transgender teenager; vandalization of the Women and Children First bookstore in Chicago; a Shoreline, Wash. Christian school’s new policy stating the Bible is inerrant, and rainbow crosswalks in Ames, Iowa.
Stonewall at 50
September 1, 2019On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, Elise reflects on the situation of LGBTQ rights today.
Queer Notes: July-August 2019
June 26, 2019Murders of two Trans women in Dallas; Transgender woman Layleen Polanco dies in a Rikers Island prison cell; and a boycott against Goldfinger, Tokyo’s largest annual party for Japanese women that discriminated against Transgender woman.
Queer Notes: May-June 2019
May 6, 2019International Transgender Day of Visibility; Puerto Rico bans gay reparative conversion therapy administered to minors; a Catholic hospital’s discrimination against Oliver Knight; and Chuck Kramer’s exhibit, “Faces Out & Proud.”
Readers’ Views: March-April 2019, Part 1
March 11, 2019Readers’ Views on: workers strike back, genocide and Facebook, Mauritius victory, Syrian Revolution under fire, “55 Steps,” debating yellow vests, women’s struggles, and why read News & Letters.
Queer Notes: March-April 2019
March 10, 2019Queer Notes on the Auckland Pride Festival; Denise Ho Wan-sze; two newly-elected Democratic governors making strides for Queer rights; and a history of Compton’s Transgender Cultural District in San Francisco.
Queer Notes: January-February 2019
January 26, 2019Protests in Tunisia against non-implementation of Transgender human rights bill; Brazil’s new president threatens crackdown on homosexuality and same-sex marriage; new Tunisian documentary “Subutext” about homosexuality, poverty, illness and drugs in Tunisia’s slums; and a Chicago protest against Antwan Haywood being thrown out of the Powerhouse International Ministries supposedly over the way he was dressed.
Woman as Reason, November-December 2018: Solidarity with Trans
December 11, 2018The Trump administration’s latest outrage is its attempt to erase Transgender people. Its tactic this time is to declare that Trans people do not exist, subverting the spirit of Title IX, enacted in 1972.
Queer Notes: November-December 2018
December 2, 2018“The Orlando Traveling Memorial” commemorates those murdered and those who aided the victims of the 2016 Orlando Pulse shooting; Transgender woman Aimee Stephens’ successful employment discrimination lawsuit; protesters decry Trump administration proposal to define gender as fixed at birth; Romania’s referendum defining a family as composed on one man and one woman fails.
Solidarity with Trans people under attack by Trumpism
October 28, 2018News and Letters Committees statement on Donald Trump’s latest attack on Trans people by trying to claim that the word “sex” in Title IX does not include them. Trump has chosen to dehumanize a group of people whose whole lives have often been fraught with brutal violence and discrimination, those who are Transgender.
Women demand: ‘End money bail!’
July 23, 2018For Mothers’ Day 2018, Essie Justice Group; Young Women’s Freedom Center; Transgender, Gender-variant, Intersex Justice Project; and other mostly Black women demonstrated in front of the Oakland courthouse demanding an end to money bail. .
SF walk against rape
May 5, 2018Many survivors of rape, and their supporters including youth from City College of San Francisco, and Transgender people took part in the 13th annual San Francisco A Walk Against Rape.
Queer Notes: May-June 2018
May 3, 2018A roundup of GLBTQT news including: Trinity College Dublin students march for quality healthcare for Transgender people; study reveals that Bisexual female youth are more subject to depression and suicide than straight women and Lesbians; Lesbian refugees living in an East African refugee camp will soon have a chicken farm; Queer people and their supporters in Bermuda want tourists to support their businesses, rather than boycotting them.
Queer Notes: March-April 2018
March 11, 2018Queer Notes takes up the launch of The Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project; the Grupo Gay da Bahia, the oldest LGBT rights group in Brazil; and the out LGBT athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
#MeToo, Women’s Marches show the resistance deepens
March 8, 2018Women have changed the world through an incredible and sustained activism based on a humanism that runs like a revolutionary red thread through an amazing array of actions, demonstrations and statements. This development is based on over 50 years of a movement that the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, characterized as “Woman as Revolutionary Force and Reason.” .
Readers’ Views: January-February 2018, Part II
February 1, 2018Readers’ Views on Women’s Liberation struggle continue and voices from behind bars.
Queer Notes, Jan.-Feb. 2018
January 31, 2018Queer notes on pastor Judy Peterson suspension; nonessential travel banned to Mississippi over anti-LGBTQ law, and Women of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association in Hampstead Heath, Britain, welcoming Trans women.
Women Worldwide, November-December 2017
November 15, 2017Women Worldwide Column on: the Black Women’s March on Washington; Meltem Cumbul in Turkey refusing to shake the hand of a director who supported right-wing President Erdogan; and a class-action lawsuit against coerced sterilization procedures in Canada against indigenous women.
Wisconsin Transgender prisoner traumatized
November 14, 2017I’m a Transgender person at Waupun Correctional Institution, who has been sexually degraded and humiliated for speaking out about being raped, for being Transsexual, who refused to call herself a male and for being a “problem inmate.”
Readers’ Views: November-December 2017, Part 1
November 12, 2017Readers’ Views on: Puerto Rico:Trump’s Katrina; LGBTQ in Australia; Transgender in Texas; Women’s Liberation; Racism in Canada; Detroit and “Detroit”; Labor and Robots; Haitian Revolt; Why Read N&L?; and a Correction.
Readers’ Views: September-October 2017, Part 1
September 5, 2017Readers’ Views: facing far right’s threat; don’t scapegoat; Canadian strike; Transgender troops; women’s liberation; homeless in Los Angeles; defend dissidents; why read N&L.
Queer Notes, September-October 2017
September 3, 2017Round up of news about LGBTQ people including: Transgender people rally against Texas discriminatory bathroom bill; International Non-Binary Day celebrations; World Pride 2017 was celebrated in Spain; and Illinois becomes the second state in the U.S. to pass legislation banning so-called Gay and Transgender panic defense.
Queer Notes, July-August 2017
June 30, 2017Queer notes on rejection of the Darlington Statement in Australia; first Pride celebration in Beirut, Lebanon, and one year mark of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Fla.
Readers’ Views: May-June 2017
May 1, 2017Reader’s Views on Women vs. Reaction; Women and Philosophy; Syria and Humanity; Support Trans Children!; Animals and Us; Repression vs. Justice; Why Read “N&L”; Voices from Behind the Bars
Chicago, NYC rally for Transgender students
March 17, 2017Reports on rallies at New York’s Stonewall Inn and in Chicago to denounce the Trump administration’s decision to cease to protect and defend the rights of Transgender students in U.S. schools.
Prisoners: ‘Shout Their Names’
Families of two prisoners at the California Institution for Women whose deaths were declared suicides testify.
Women take the lead against world retrogression
March 8, 2017An in-depth Marxist-Humanist view of the state of the women’s movement in the U.S. and worldwide as it responds to the rising fascism of U.S. President Trump and other world leaders.
Transgender Day of Remembrance
February 3, 2017A report of the 18th International Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), observed in November, which commemorated Transgender and gender-nonconforming people who were murdered over the last 12 months just for being brave enough to be themselves.
Youth in Action, January-February 2017
Student journalists at the University of Kentucky targeted for publicizing a professor’s sexual misconduct towards a student; protests against racism at Cornell University; Maryland middle school students’ creative protest against sexist dress codes; Fees Must Fall Movement in South Africa continues shutting down Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2017, Part I
January 31, 2017Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
Chelsea Manning is not yet free
January 29, 2017Chelsea Manning received a Presidential commutation but deserves much more. She is owed a pardon, compensation and an apology
Handicap This!: January-February 2017
India: fight for institutionalized women with disabilities; England: cuts to the personal budgets of disabled people; U.S.: standard of education for many disabled children could be raised if Supreme Court rules that they should receive “meaningful benefit” in education; and Transgender African-American woman Kayla Moore, who had schizophrenia, is killed by police.
Oakland, Detroit march on Martin Luther King Day
January 26, 2017Reports by participants of celebrations and protests on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Oakland, Calif., and Detroit, Mich.
The Ghost Ship fire
A view of the fire at the Ghost Ship that takes into account the capitalist nature of rents, evictions, land use, and how youth, by the way the live their lives, are fighting back.
Inauguration of neo-fascism faces widespread revolt
January 23, 2017The lightning move by Republicans in Congress to prepare to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare—before Donald Trump even took office, with only the vaguest idea of what is to replace it, and with full knowledge that a large majority of Americans oppose the repeal of its most important provisions—gave a sign of how far the new single-party government intends to roll the clock back, with dizzying speed.
Youth in Action: November-December 2016
November 30, 2016International look at youth activism including the Fees Must Fall movement in South Africa; students at Boston College rallying against an anti-gay atmosphere; the CDC leaving out Transgender students in a survey on suicide; and Native American youth protesting polluted water in the Klamath Strait Drain in Oregon.
Queer Notes: November-December 2016
November 26, 2016A worldwide view of Queer news including vigils for murdered Transgender woman T.T. Saffore; problems some in Japan have with LGBTQ youth; an investigation in Pakistan against a Transgender woman; and a kiss-in organized in response to a complaint against two men holding hands in public in England.
Queer Notes: September-October 2016
September 14, 2016Queer rights supporters at a Pride beauty pageant in Uganda are victims of police brutality; protests break out in Turkey in outrage over murder of Transgender woman, sex worker and LGBT rights activist Hande Kader; LGBT rights activists protest continued discrimination and brutality by Nepalese citizens which is in violation of Nepal’s outlawing of same based on sexual orientation and gender identity; the Court of Arbitration for Sport sets aside the International Association of Athletics Foundation’s limit on naturally occurring testosterone for athletes to compete in women’s events.
Turkey’s Erdoğan – the pious dictator
September 7, 2016A view of what the failed coup in Turkey has wrought, including mass arrests of teachers, trade unionists, doctors, medical personnel, and others as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, makes a grab for total power.
Anger & tears in NYC
July 7, 2016In light of the Orlando massacre, LGBTQ people and supporters in New York City spontaneously demonstrate against Queerphobia, on and then one day after the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots which started the modern Queer liberation movement.
Queer Notes: July-August 2016
July 6, 2016Caribbean Transgender and Queer rights groups work for Transgender people to have human rights; Transgender teen girl Corey Maison is telling her story of overcoming bullying via The Bully Project; University of North Carolina’s students to use the restrooms and changing rooms that are in accordance with their gender identities despite anti-Transgender bathroom law HB2; and Oregon State University students provide safety to their Transgender classmates by participating in the “I’ll Go With You” movement.
End solitary confinement at Rikers Island
May 18, 2016A Transgender woman former prisoner exposes what life is like in solitary confinement at Rikers Island and argues for its abolition.
Readers’ Views, May-June 2016
May 17, 2016Readers’ Views on Women as Reason; Harriet Tubman; Racism and Internationalism; Bisexual Health; Trans Liberation and Feminism; Chinese State vs. Workers; Nuclear Arms Threaten All; Ireland’s Red Banner; Remembering Olga Domanski; Haggard but Not Tired; Voices from Behind the Bars.
North Carolinians protest anti-LGBTQ law
May 7, 2016North Carolina’s Queer community and their supporters agitate against the state’s anti-Transgender and anti-LGB legislation.
I. Discontent, revolt and reaction in the U.S.
May 6, 2016Part I of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Discontent is seething in the U.S. among workers, youth, Blacks, women, LGBTQ, including elements of the new society. Fear of revolution is powering neo-fascism opposing the revolt.