Readers’ Views on Abortion Rights Struggles; Ukraine, Russia and the Left; Marx and Transgender; World Food Crisis; Normalized Domestic Violence, and Ecuador’s Uprising

Readers’ Views on Abortion Rights Struggles; Ukraine, Russia and the Left; Marx and Transgender; World Food Crisis; Normalized Domestic Violence, and Ecuador’s Uprising
Transgender Day of Remembrance 2021 marked the deadliest year for the Transgender and gender nonconforming community. Internationally over 375 Transgender people, 47 in the U.S., were reported murdered. The overwhelming majority of them—as it has so often been—were women of color under 30 years old.
Thailand’s LGBTQ Pride Parade demanded resignation of Prime Minister and limitations on King; Black and Brown Trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people on the South and West Sides of Chicago have a new mutual aid organization; Nigerian Queer rights activist Pamela Adie’s Lesbian love story film “Ife”; and Trans Sistas of Color Project locked out of their venue for their awards brunch.
The new event, Trans Empowerment Month; Trans founded and run dairy farm colony in Manthithoppu, India; and the alarm in the LGBTQ+ community over the nomination of anti-human-rights judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nationwide Black-led revolt and white supremacist backlash, class struggles and the ravages of a pandemic and economic collapse are taking place amid election battles and attacks on democracy.
“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.
Many 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.
A 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.
Women 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 on Women’s Liberation struggle continue and voices from behind bars.
I’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 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: 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.
Round 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.
An 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.
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 on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
Reports by participants of celebrations and protests on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Oakland, Calif., and Detroit, Mich.
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.
The 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.
International 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.
A 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.
Caribbean 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.
North Carolina’s Queer community and their supporters agitate against the state’s anti-Transgender and anti-LGB legislation.
Part 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.
The Transgenerational Theatre Project puts on an evening of skits in New York City making visible the lives of Transgender people in the past and today along with a humorous vision of the future, to their first ever sold-out audience!
A report on several Transgender Day of Remembrance events held in New York City in November 2015.
readers views nov dec 2015 part 1
A roundup of struggle of LGBTQ people including around immigration, prison, sports, as well as examples of forward movement in the fight for equality and freedom.
Readers debate Gay marriage, Queer liberation and Caitlyn Jenner.
Report of a meeting of over 200 Transgender people, their allies and a handful of elected officials who came together at Hostos College in the Bronx in late July for a city- wide conference on the status and situation of Transgender people in New York City.
Black lives as Subject; Russia in crisis; Nothing about us without us; Homelessness in L.A.; Central Canada Alliance; Perspectives and philosophy; Elderly to the streets?; Women and Yemen half-peace; Labor and climate justice; Dialectic and women’s liberation; Voices from behind the bars
A roundup of news on queer rights including: The naming of The Up Stairs Lounge Arson as the 2015 Book of the Year; the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that Turkey cannot force Transgender people to receive any Transgender-related medical treatment; and other actions in North Carolina, Michigan, Vietnam, and Oregon.
Is Caitlyn Jenner who is for taking away access to birth control, locking up our children and friends in prisons, denying full equality and autonomy to other LGBTQ people, supports war, deportation raids and all kinds of other evil stuff somebody who we should support?
Malta protects Intersex infants from “normalizing” surgery; Richard Hedger exhibits National Treasures collection of elderly LGBT people; Russia refused drivers’ licenses to Transgender and Transvestite people; Gay-straight alliance at Andrews University banned from holding a bake sale for homeless LGBT youth.
New York—Police here have been told to halt stop-and-frisk policies because they unfairly target Black and Latino youth. But the Transgender community in Jackson Heights, New York, is undergoing its own particular form of stop and frisk. Trans women, especially Trans women of color, are stopped on a daily basis, told that they have to submit to a search (which they don’t) and if they are found in possession of a condom (which is legal) they are arrested for loitering or prostitution.
Leelah Alcorn’s last words, making her suicide an appeal for Transgender people to be “treated like humans” and to “fix society” if her death is to “mean something,” were stunning.
Justice for Jane; Syrian refugee children in Turkey; Howard University Middle School walkout; University of California Student Association call for divestment
This year is setting a horrible record for the number of Transgender women killed across the U.S.
From the January-February 2015 issue of News & Letters
by Dee Perkins
The late December suicide of 17-year-old Transgender youth Leelah Alcorn has shaken the public with an intimate glimpse into the torment of gender dysphoria in a too frequently uncomprehending world. In the suicide note she posted to Tumblr, the [=>]
In cities across the world, the names of Transgender people who were murdered or committed suicide were read out at rallies on or around Nov. 20, the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Review of the book “Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers” by Anne Balay.
Namibia documentary “It’s All about Love”; sex-reassignment surgery coverage on Medicare; Laverne Cox.
Chicago: pediatric gender-identity clinic; Bisexual men more anxious and depressed; United for Marriage Coalition apologize to Transgender and undocumented immigrant supporters of marriage equality
by Artemis
In May, delegations of Japanese officials came to Palisades Park, N.J., where more than half the community is of Korean descent, to request the removal of a memorial to the Korean “comfort women.” They shockingly claimed that the more than 200 women, who were forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese military [=>]
From the March-April 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Queer Notes
by Elise
A California Girl Scout put out a YouTube video asking the public to boycott Girl Scout cookies because she objects to a troop admitting a Transgender girl. While three Louisiana troops disbanded over the issue, a national Girl Scouts spokeswoman for the 100-year-old organization [=>]
From the September-October 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Readers’ Views
Contents:
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION: ARAB SPRING AS CROSSROADS IN HISTORY
The West supports any revolution where they [=>]
by Suzanne Rose
While returning from a bar last month in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, three men were detained by the police because they thought two of them looked feminine. The three were jailed for a week and two were tortured and abused by the police. One man was released, but the other two were [=>]
Chicago—Editor’s note: News and Letters Committees hosted a forum in our Chicago office on Aug. 8 on the response within the Gay community to the Facebook page Take Back Boystown posting videos of Blacks fighting as a way to demonize “outsiders” coming to Gay institutions and bars. Below is part of the discussion among panelists [=>]
Here are links to some local news coverage of a recent meeting of the Chicago Local of News and Letters Committees:
Windy City Times: Community groups continue to focus on Lakeview
Gay Chicago: Panel addresses Lake View’s summer turmoil
Here’s the flyer for the meeting:
News and Letters Committees invites you to a forum on:
The panel of [=>]