Wednesday 11 May 2022

From the link Newsletter

 

Introduction from the Editor

Dear Link Members,
 
It is always a great honour to be able to write to you and today I would like to use this opportunity to dedicate my editorial, and this month’s newsletter to our trans and non-binary members.

As most of you will no doubt have seen and/or heard, over recent years and months there has been a worrying increase in the amount of abuse and negative discourse surrounding the rights of trans and non-binary people in the UK and around the world, with one of the most recent examples being the exclusion of trans and non-binary people from the UK government’s ban on conversion therapy.

Like many of you, I have seen my trans and non-binary friends subject to the most horrific abuse on social media and elsewhere and have been making efforts to become a better ally in order to support them as well as all trans and non-binary people. We are one LGBTQIA+ community, with both shared and individual experiences and we all deserve to be accepted, to be celebrated and to live our lives without fear.

Following publication of our trans statement, in addition, I have found a very informative article on the website of Amnesty International UK, which contains the following advice on how we can all support trans and non-binary people and be a good ally. I wanted to share that with you here:”

Respect people’s names
Use the name and gender a trans person tells you to use. Don’t ask what their ‘real’ name or gender is – this is disrespectful and distressing.
 
Gender identity and gender expression are different
Gender identity is someone’s personal and intimate sense of their own gender. Gender expression is how they choose to reflect their gender identity in their physical appearance. Don’t make assumptions about someone’s gender based on the way they dress – it may not reflect their gender identity or the appearance usually associated with their gender identity.
 
Use correct pronouns
Some people prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as they/their and ze/zir. If you are unsure which pronoun to use, wait for an appropriate moment and ask. Alternatively, indicate the pronouns you use first – this gives people an opportunity to say theirs too.
 
Appreciate gender diversity
All gender identities are valid and should be supported equally. If someone’s gender is outside of the gender binary or they don’t have a gender identity at all, it simply reflects the diversity of people’s identities.
 
Support everyone
Recognise and respect the lives and experiences of all trans and non-binary people, and understand the oppression they face. This includes supporting trans people of colour, sex workers, and people with disabilities.
 
Help your friends
Going to a gendered bathroom or changing room can be difficult for trans people, especially when they are made to feel like they don’t belong.
One practical thing you can do to help your trans friends – if they want you to – is to go inside with them. This ensures they don’t have to face any potential transphobia alone.
 
Call out transphobia
Challenge friends and family members who make transphobic comments. Dealing with toxic, dehumanising attitudes can be extremely draining and distressing for trans people. Support from others can really help.
 
Listen and learn
Learning the appropriate terminology and language can be daunting. If you make a mistake, apologise and learn from the experience.
Honest mistakes – as opposed to intentional attempts to invalidate someone’s identity – don’t make you transphobic.
 
Don’t out anyone
It can be dangerous for trans people to be open about their gender identity. Don’t tell anyone about someone’s gender identity without their consent, even if they have come out to their friends, family or wider society.
 
Educate yourself
It’s important to learn more about trans experiences but remember that trans people are not walking encyclopaedias.  Organisations like StonewallMermaidsGendered Intelligence and GLAAD have lots of resources online.
 
I wish you all a very pleasant and productive May.

Simon Storvik-Green (he/him)

Women Loving Women in the Caribbean

 

A Conversation with Prof. Omise’eke Tinsley
   
Queer History 101
 
 

Women Loving Women in the Caribbean

 

A Conversation with Prof. Omise’eke Tinsley

 
Dr. Eric Cervini
Apr 28
 

Hey class! A couple announcements before our lesson:

  1. We are just a few dozen away from our goal of 10,000 signatures on our petition to ban pro-hate corporations at Pride this year. Will you sign it really quick so we can present it to NYC Pride first thing in May? :)
  2. Shameless plug: is your company planning pride events? I'm working on a speaking event titled "From the Lavender Scare to Don't Say Gay: Legislative Homophobia in Past and Present" and would love to plan one with you! These gigs support this newsletter and help me compensate our guests, so if you're interested, just email me at info@ericcervini.com!

That's all! Enjoy the lesson <3

x Eric

Welcome back to Queer History 101!

Queerness finds a way to survive and thrive wherever it goes, even under colonial oppression. Professor Omise’eke Tinsley, who teaches Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, proves that history of resilience with her research, which focuses on queer and feminist Caribbean and African-American performance and literature. I sat down to chat with her about one of her many books, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature.

Tinsley began her study of Caribbean queerness in literature during her senior year of college. As she was writing her thesis on Caribbean women’s literature, she asked one of her professors about the existence of Caribbean lesbian literature. “I was told by a professor who was from the African continent, that there was not really such a thing,” said Tinsley. “And that was probably because ‘homosexuality’–her word, not mine–didn't exist in Africa, and it was a European thing.”

Tinsley left the idea alone for a while, but it continued to brew in the back of her mind. In graduate school, during a summer in the Netherlands, she found a book by Gloria Wekker about mati work, the tradition of relationships and love between Black women in Suriname. “And so at that point, something clicked in me: these aren't little examples here and there. This is a tradition that has nothing to do with priests, or nuns, or anything but women living together and making community together and loving each other in the ways that support their lives.”

This book, and the love songs documented in it, sparked her interest in hunting down more queer Caribbean literature and poetry. “I have these vivid memories of these poems from the 1930s, finding them in the library in Berkeley and crying,” remembered Tinsley. “Like, ‘I knew this was here somewhere, I just didn't know where.’”

Tinsley’s book collects many of these literary works and ties them together with the concept of “thiefing sugar.” Borrowed from Canadian-Trinidadian author Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, the phrase describes the reclamation of the history of love between women in the Caribbean. The Caribbean region is shaped by the sugar industry, which relied upon enslaved people from the coast of Africa. Sugar was “a really, really valuable commodity,” said Tinsley. “In some places, it was punishable by death to eat sugar while growing it, and sometimes people had muzzles on so that they couldn't eat the cane."

“And so you know, 'thiefing sugar,' the metaphor, is thinking about reclaiming that which is ours, but that has been taken from us,” she continued. “The idea that desire between women was once as common as cane growing, but also regulated and prohibited in these ways. And that to ‘thief sugar’ is to take back some of the sweetness that we create for our own use. So it's a metaphor that combines the colonial history, but also the history of sweetness and eroticism in women's history and queer history wherever we find ourselves.”

Those histories are older than we might think: the names that women have for their women lovers “are tied into West African-based spiritual systems,” explained Tinsley. “There's a whole cosmology in which somebody who's assigned female at birth loving somebody else who's assigned female at birth, or somebody who lives their lives as a woman, makes sense.” And while the colonizers thought it was a “dirty practice” and recorded it as such, for most people, “it was just part of the possibilities of life,” she said. “It was something that was understood as part of the universe and a part of a larger system, of how human beings interact with the divine and with each other.”

Tinsley’s evidence for these traditions stems from “luck and chance,” she said. She explored “literary histories where people were talking in a way that was strange. They were talking about people as ‘feminists, or as having ‘close relationships with other women.’ So I was reading against the grain, and then I would try and track these texts down.”

The texts she found didn’t necessarily spell out queerness, and most of their authors weren’t openly queer. “Following your gut and reading creatively was necessary to do this work,” Tinsley said. And while some scholars didn’t agree with these strategies, she pressed on because she had a choice. She could "continue to be silent about these love poems that are dedicated to women,” continuing the historical erasure of these relationships.

“Or, we can work with what's here. Because I'm always working with histories of the present. I'm interested in stories of the past that help us create space for ourselves in the present. And if that's what's there to work with, I think working with it creatively is a queer way to do literature.”

These queer literary works hold in themselves possibilities of decolonization and liberation. Thiefing Sugar focuses on the “really, really old” tradition of writing about beloved women as landscapes, a motif common across cultures and throughout history. But, said Tinsley, “I was interested in how Caribbean women imagine their women lovers in the same terms as flowers and fruit, but imagining that these natural sweetnesses could be reclaimed for their own use.”

That imagination is itself liberatory. “Black women having full use of our bodies and their possibilities is a decolonial project,” she said. “Without imagining that women have a right to use our bodies for whatever–they're not there to be in service of men or children–as long as Black women's bodies are imagined as in service to someone else, the colonial project is still going on.”

The colonial project continues through not only gender, but also through sexuality. While laws against sex between women in the Caribbean are few and fairly recent, the laws against sex between men “were copied straight from British law–a direct colonial import.” Combating homophobia, then, is a radical and decolonizing act.

“Oftentimes, I feel like young Caribbean American folks, but also young African-American folks, have this idea that Black people are extra special homophobic, or that homophobia is a big problem in the Black community,” said Tinsley. “And part of what I wanted to do with this book, and what I still want to do is to communicate to people, ‘That's actually not our history. That's not our tradition.’”

In fact, she argued, “This is part of what our ancestors fought to make possible for us: for us to love who we want. A lot of histories are being cut out right now; they've been cut out to discourage us from living our lives.”

We need those histories, and we need to pass them on–not only because it’s important that we know our past, but also because they teach us about what to do now. “I was living in Texas in 2016 when Trump was elected,” she explained. “There were stories about how to survive the segregated south that my grandparents hadn't passed on, because they thought I wasn't going to need them. And at that moment, I needed them. How can you protest conditions while also staying safe?”

“We're in that moment again with Black histories and with queer histories,” concluded Tinsley. “We need to have these stories from the past so that we know how to survive our present and fight for our future.”

For more of Tinsley’s brilliant work, check out:

And don't forget to subscribe to Queer History 101 for more amazing lessons like these. See you in the next class!

Intersex in Early America

 

A Conversation with Professor Elizabeth Reis
   
Queer History 101
 
 

Intersex in Early America

 

A Conversation with Professor Elizabeth Reis

 
Dr. Eric Cervini
Apr 12
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Welcome back to Queer History 101!

What separates womanhood from manhood? This question has transfixed the medical community in America since its founding. But the need to enforce a binary gender––male or female––tells a darker history about the struggle for acceptance of people born with intersex traits. Elizabeth Reis, a professor at the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York and author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex, has dedicated her research to bringing awareness to intersex history, specifically the medical management of people born with atypical sex development.

As we began our conversation, Reis took me back to the mid-18th century. “Doctors were trying to figure out: When is somebody a woman? When is somebody a man? What bodily characteristics were required?” Before medicine was capable of studying hormones, chromosomes, and gonads (ovaries and testes), doctors only had genitals (and a person’s social presentation) to help provide answers. “That idea of determining a person's ‘true sex’ permeated all of intersex history.” And this is where intersex history merges with the history of homosexual oppression.

“Physicians were determined to figure out a person’s sex if it wasn’t immediately clear because they wanted to promote heterosexuality and eliminate homosexuality,” Reis told me. “The doctors of the late-18th and the 19th centuries thought that if a person wasn't sure if they were male or female, that might then lead them to become attracted to a same-sex person.” Cue the fear of homosexuality.

In early America, so-called corrective surgeries on people's genitals were, of course, not medically possible. The techniques and medicine had not been invented yet. “But what the doctors did want,” said Reis, “was for the person to choose their gender and stick with it.” For some people, choosing a stable gender identity proved difficult.

Reis found evidence of a person with intersex traits in a two-page document from a Virginia court in 1629. The person at the center of the case sometimes went by the name of Thomasine Hall and at other times lived as Thomas Hall. “One of the things that struck me in this case was the nosy townspeople,” said Reis. “They stormed into Hall’s room at night, ripped off his clothes, and tried to examine his body.” Hall, who at the moment of intrusion was presenting as a man, described his anatomy on record by saying, “I have a piece of both.” The court sentenced Hall to an unusual punishment: to wear half women’s clothing, half men’s clothing. As Reis described it, “It was a sanction that marked Hall as somebody whose gender fraud (from the court’s perspective) would no longer be able to deceive others.”

Reis found other people who may have had intersex traits by examining divorce proceedings. Divorce was rare, even throughout the 19th century, but it was grantable for specific reasons, one of them being if the marriage was never consummated. As Reis outlined for me, “A person would have testified that the marriage remained unconsummated. Then the court would have had a doctor examine the person’s genitals. And based on those findings, the court could rule, ‘Because this person is a perfect male, no, your divorce is not granted.’” Enforcing the binary maintained social relations, including heterosexual marriage, as they were then understood.

As Reis’s research entered the late-19th century, when physicians began to professionalize, she found evidence of intersex management in their medical journals. “The first surgery that I found was in 1849,” Reis told me. “That was a four-year-old girl who had internal testes. And this is where you can see how much people cared about homosexuality even from this early case.” The doctor, worried that internal testes might “inspire” sexual desires toward women, opted for surgery. He even claimed that the girl would be “reviled by all humans” if he didn’t operate. The doctor reported the surgery a medical success, but ethically, Reis argues, it was a nightmare.

“None of these surgeries were medically necessary,” said Reis. “And that is a key point with intersex politics today: such surgeries have been driven by what doctors (and some parents) have seen as a social necessity.” And it's this conversation, one of ethics and necessity, that would guide Reis’s research into the 20th century and today.

In the 1950s, a Johns Hopkins psychologist, John Money, believed intersex cases should be handled at infancy. He reasoned that because a baby’s gender identity is malleable for the first 18 months of life, surgery would be an easy solution to “correct” intersex conditions. “Money wrote hundreds of articles with his team, and many doctors were happy with his strategy,” Reis told me. With a few exceptions, the medical community eagerly welcomed his idea for infantile surgery, and unfortunately, the idea continues to be welcomed today.

But intersex advocates have pushed back. Reis explained: “This is what intersex advocates are against. They're against surgery on non-consenting infants. The parents are consenting, but the parents aren't the patients. It is a human rights violation to tamper surgically with somebody's genitals and prevent that person from developing their own sexual self-authorship in terms of their gender, their reproductive possibilities, and their sexuality.”

In a potential move toward change, one major hospital, the Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago, announced in July 2020 that it would stop cosmetic infant surgeries. It stated: “We empathize with intersex individuals who are harmed by the treatment that they received, according to the historic standard of care, and we apologize and are truly sorry. The medical field has failed these children.”

“We're in a different era now, where people are more comfortable with difference,” concluded Reis. Thanks to disability politics, as well as transgender and queer visibility, society has worked toward becoming more aware. And though the fight for acceptance continues, especially in Republican-controlled states like Texas and Florida, Reis still sees hope: “The silver lining of this terrible climate is that it's brought trans and intersex activists together. All people deserve to make their own decisions about how their bodies look and function.”

To read more of Reis’s phenomenal work, see:

I would love to hear your thoughts! Hit "Join the discussion" at the bottom of this email to leave a comment on this newsletter.

And don't forget to subscribe to get more amazing queer content in your inbox every week! See you in the next class!

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The UN Shield talk by David Selves


In April, we enjoyed an interesting and information evening with David Selves who is a great speaker and  thrilled The Network with the story of “UN Shield – the Elimination of War between Sovereign States”, it has long been spoken about and it is high time to implement it in view of the current situation in Ukraine!" 

Check about the UN Shield on:

https://www.selvesgroup.co.uk/un-shield.html