Author: PFLAGLI

Taiwan voters reject same-sex marriage

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Taiwan

Taiwan voters rejected same-sex marriage in a referendum Saturday, dealing a blow to the LGBT community and allies who hoped the island would become the first place in Asia to allow same-sex unions.

In Taiwan, three referendum questions initiated by groups that opposed marriage equality passed, while those put forth by same-sex marriage advocates did not.Taiwan
 
For instance, the majority vote was yes on a question that asked, “Do you agree that Civil Code regulations should restrict marriage to being between a man and a woman?”
Voters, meanwhile, rejected a question put forth by LGBT activists that asked if civil code marriage regulations “should be used to guarantee the rights of same-sex couples to get married.”
Amnesty International Taiwan’s Acting Director Annie Huang called the result “a bitter blow and a step backwards for human rights” on the island.
 
“However, despite this setback, we remain confident that love and equality will ultimately prevail,”Huang said in a statement. “The result must not be used as an excuse to further undermine the rights of LGBTI people. The Taiwanese government needs to step up and take all necessary measures to deliver equality and dignity for all, regardless of who people love.”
 
By Hira Humayun and Susannah Cullinane, CNN.com, November 25. 2018
 
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Chinese Scientist Claims to Use Crispr to Make First Genetically Edited Babies

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Crispr

The researcher, He Jiankui, offered no evidence or data to back up his assertions. If true, some fear Crispr could open the door to “designer babies.”

Ever since scientists created the powerful gene editing technique Crispr, they have braced apprehensively for the day when it would be used to create a genetically altered human being. Many nations banned such work, fearing it could be misused to alter everything from eye color to I.Q.Crispr

Now, the moment they feared may have come. On Monday, a scientist in China announced that he had created the world’s first genetically edited babies, twin girls who were born this month.

The researcher, He Jiankui, said that he had altered a gene in the embryos, before having them implanted in the mother’s womb, with the goal of making the babies resistant to infection with H.I.V. He has not published the research in any journal and did not share any evidence or data that definitively proved he had done it.

But his previous work is known to many experts in the field, who said — many with alarm — that it was entirely possible he had.

“It’s scary,” said Dr. Alexander Marson, a gene editing expert at the University of California in San Francisco.

While the United States and many other countries have made it illegal to deliberately alter the genes of human embryos, it is not against the law to do so in China, but the practice is opposed by many researchers there. A group of 122 Chinese scientists issued a statement calling Dr. He’s actions “crazy” and his claims “a huge blow to the global reputation and development of Chinese science.”

If human embryos can be routinely edited, many scientists, ethicists and policymakers fear a slippery slope to a future in which babies are genetically engineered for traits — like athletic or intellectual prowess — that have nothing to do with preventing devastating medical conditions.

While those possibilities might seem far in the future, a different concern is urgent and immediate: safety. The methods used for gene editing can inadvertently alter other genes in unpredictable ways. Dr. He said that did not happen in this case, but it is a worry that looms over the field.

Dr. He made his announcement on the eve of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, saying that he had recruited several couples in which the man had H.I.V. and then used in vitro fertilization to create human embryos that were resistant to the virus that causes AIDS. He said he did it by directing Crispr-Cas9 to deliberately disable a gene, known as CCR₅, that is used to make a protein H.I.V. needs to enter cells.

By Gina Kolata, Sui-Lee Wee and Pam Belluck, NYTimes.com – November 26, 2018

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Dutch Clinics to Start Offering Surrogacy to Gay Couples

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Gay couples who want to have a child through a surrogate mother can do so at Dutch clinics from next year, according to a survey by television program De Monitor. Until now that has been impossible in the Netherlands due to strict regulations, newspaper AD reports.

At least two Dutch clinics will start offering surrogacy to gay couples next year – MC Kinderwens in Leiderdorp and Nij Geertgen clinic in Elsendorp. In Leiderdorp the surrogate mother must also donate the egg. In Elsendorp the surrogate and egg donor may be different people. 

“I think it’s too crazy for words that gay couples, but also women with oncological complaints for example, have to go abroad to fulfill their desire to have children”, Nij Geertgen director Marc Scheijven said to De Monitor. “While we have all medical and technical experience in house.”

By Janene Pieters on November 13, 2018 nltimes.nl

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Can a Fired Transgender Worker Sue for Job Discrimination?

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In 2013, a funeral director who had been known as Anthony Stephens wrote to colleagues at a Michigan funeral home, asking for patience and support.

“What I must tell you is very difficult for me and is taking all the courage I can muster,” the letter said. “I have felt imprisoned in a body that does not match my mind, and this has caused me great despair and loneliness.”

“I will return to work as my true self, Aimee Australia Stephens, in appropriate business attire,” she wrote. “I hope we can continue my work at R. G. and G. R. Harris Funeral Homes doing what I always have, which is my best!”

Ms. Stephens had worked there for six years. Her colleagues testified that she was able and compassionate.

“He was a very good embalmer,” one said. “He was very, very thorough. Had obviously had a lot of practice prior to coming to the Harris Funeral Home. Families seemed very pleased with his work. He did a good job.”

Two weeks after receiving the letter, though, the home’s owner, Thomas Rost, fired Ms. Stephens. Asked for the “specific reason that you terminated Stephens,” Mr. Rost said: “Well, because he was no longer going to represent himself as a man. He wanted to dress as a woman.”

Mr. Rost also said he did not want to address Ms. Stephens as Aimee. “I’m uncomfortable with the name,” Mr. Rost said, “because he’s a man.”

The case went to court, and Ms. Stephens won in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati. Discrimination against transgender people, the court ruled, was barred by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of sex.

“It is analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex,” the court said. “Discrimination ‘because of sex’ inherently includes discrimination against employees because of a change in their sex.”

by Adam Liptak, NYTimes.com, November 12, 2018

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In Scottish schools, students will be required to learn about LGBTI history

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Scottish

Just 18 years ago, it was still illegal in Scotland to “intentionally promote homosexuality” in schools.

Now, the Scottish government will mandate all state schools introduce a curriculum that explains the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) activism. Schools will also educate students on the use of LGBTI terminology and discuss ways to address homophobia.Scottish

“Our education system must support everyone to reach their full potential,” Scottish Deputy First Minister John Swinney said Thursday. “The recommendations I have accepted will not only improve the learning experience of our LGBTI young people, they will also support all learners to celebrate their differences, promote understanding and encourage inclusion.”

The move came after a campaign called Time for Inclusive Education presented a series of suggestions to the Scottish government. According to a 2016 research report on the Scottish LGBTI community published by the group, “90% of LGBT people have experienced homophobia, biphobia or transphobia at school.” The same research found that 27 percent of LGBTI people had attempted suicide — some more than once.

Scottish ministers adopted all of the recommendations from the campaign’s working group. The Guardian reported there will not be options to opt out of the curriculum, which will be interspersed throughout various subjects.

Swinney said this makes Scotland “the first country in the world to have LGBTI-inclusive education embedded within the curriculum.”

In recent years, Scotland has reckoned with its legacy of discrimination against the LGBTI community.

In a unanimous vote in June, Scottish lawmakers chose to pardon men who were previously charged with participating in homosexual acts. The BBC reported at the time that sexual relations between two men was decriminalized in Scotland in 1981. Some of the acts that were previously considered illegal and for which gay men are now being pardoned included consensual sex in private, or even acts such as kissing in public. In some cases, men perceived as flirting with another man could also have been charged.

Thousands of men were to be pardoned after the law was passed in June. But when it comes to the LGBTI community, there are still divisions within Scottish society, especially among religious leaders.

Washington Post, by Siobhan O’Grady – Nomvemb er 9, 2018

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A Democratic House, Nation’s First Gay Governor

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Control of Congress now split; LGBTQ community makes impressive strides

On a night when the Democratic Party achieved a net gain of somewhere between 30 and 35 seats in the US House of Representatives, wresting control from the Republicans and finally putting some check on President Donald Trump, the LGBTQ community enjoyed key victories, including the election of the nation’s first out gay governor and the defeat of an anti-transgender ballot initiative in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts referendum resulted from the efforts of anti-trans activists to repeal a 2016 law that guaranteed equal access to public accommodations regardless of gender identity. A yes vote upheld that law and garnered roughly 70 percent of the vote, after a hard-fought campaign.

In a written statement, Carol Rose, the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts said voters “reaffirmed our Commonwealth as a place that fiercely defends our basic values of dignity and respect for everyone. At a time when transgender rights are being threatened nationally, we absolutely must preserve the rights we have secured at the state level.”

In Colorado, Jared Polis, an out gay Democrat elected to Congress in 2008, was elected governor with a margin of about seven percentage points. Polis succeeds two-term Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper.

“Every Coloradan wants good schools, healthy communities, and more opportunity for the next generation,” Polis said in a written statement. “So the time is now to unite in our common purpose, rooted in our shared love for our home of Colorado, and move forward together, confident that what makes us unique isn’t just the boldness of our ideas — it’s the resilience and the spirit of Coloradans, who make change happen, who bring these bold ideas to life.”

In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown, an out bisexual Democrat who took office in 2015 after her predecessor resigned and won a special election the following year, held on to her office, with a five percent margin over her Republican opponent.

In Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema, an out bisexual member of Congress first elected in 2012, trails her Republican opponent, Martha McSally, who was elected to the House two years later, by about 16,000 votes. According to CBS News, however, there are more than one million early ballot votes that have not yet been tallied, so it will be at least several days until that race is called.

The Democrats’ sweep of the House saw the election of at least four new LGBTQ representatives: Christopher Pappas, who will be New Hampshire’s first LGBTQ member of Congress; Angie Craig, Minnesota’s first out lesbian or gay person elected to the House after defeating Jason Lewis, an outspokenly anti-gay Republican representing suburban Minneapolis; Katie Hill, who defeated anti-gay California Republican Steve Knight; and Sharice Davids, who will be Kansas’ first out lesbian or gay member of Congress and the first Native American woman to serve there. (Gina Ortiz Jones trails Texas Republican incumbent Will Hurd by about 1,200 votes in unofficial returns, but that race has not yet been called.)

Gay City News, by Paul Schindler, November 8, 2018

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Single Gay Fathers, Going It Alone

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As the traditional concept of family continues to evolve, single gay fathering having children through surrogacy are beginning to emerge.

Julius Ybañez Towers was taking a walk around the Harlem Meer in Central Park with his twin 10-month-old sons and two dogs. A woman stopped to compliment him for giving his wife a break.single gay fathers

“There’s no wife,” he told the woman. “I’m a single gay dad from surrogacy.” He smiled at the confused look on her face.

Mr. Towers, 40, is still rare, but he is part of a growing movement. Surrogacy agencies across the country report a surge of interest from single gay men in the last few years.

Shelly Marsh, a spokeswoman for Men Having Babies, a nonprofit that helps gay men navigate the surrogacy process, said that the increase in interest from single men is part of a broader surge in gay families.

“Our volume has increased substantially over the last few years,” Ms. Marsh said. “But more so, single men are learning that they do not need to wait to find someone to fulfill the dream of having a biological child.”

Most single gay men pursue what is known as gestational surrogacy: the surrogate is implanted with a fertilized embryo taken from a separate egg donor. The surrogate is not genetically related to the child. She also has no maternal rights, so intended parents are legally protected from her keeping the baby.

For that legal protection however, the birth must happen in a state where it’s legal to pay a surrogate and that recognizes the contract. New Jersey recently approved compensation for surrogates; Washington State’s announced it would do so in January. New York, along with Michigan and Louisiana, are the only states where it remains illegal to pay a woman to be a surrogate mother.

Where it is legal, the total cost of the procedure — from paying the agencies, the donor, the doctors, the surrogate and the birth — can be anywhere from $80,000 to $200,000. None of this is covered by insurance.

By Avichai Scher, New York Times, October 25, 2018

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Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence

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trans trump

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.trans trump

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

By Erica L. Green, Katie Benner and Robert Pear, New York Times, October 21, 2018

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Trans Folks Want Babies Too

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trans parents

Parenting isn’t only meant for cisgender people.

Being a transgender parent isn’t always as complicated in real life as the media portrays it. While the nuances are rarely covered in magazines, shows like Amazon’s Transparent, which is heading into a fifth and final season, highlight what the trans experience is like long after the children are born. But today’s science is more sophisticated than in decades past, which has opened up the opportunity for trans folks to conceive children even after they’ve transitioned.trans parents

“Trans people having children is not a new thing at all,” affirms Trystan Reese, director of family formation at the Family Equality Council (FamilyEquality.org). “It’s newer in terms of how much other people may know about it but it’s been happening for a couple of decades or so.”

Reese is a trans man who gave birth to a baby boy named Leo in 2017. Leo is the first biological baby for Reese and his husband, Biff Chaplow, but he’s their third child (they had previously adopted Chaplow’s niece and nephew).

The Oregon couple admit that trans people giving birth has been relatively under the radar. Being an out trans person can be dangerous in many parts of the country, where education about the trans experience is limited. Despite these difficulties, Reese continues to promote fertility rights for transgender people. His efforts included hosting the council’s recent Seahorses & Unicorns event, which helped share as much information about transgender fertility options as possible with the community.

As more trans people look into birthing children, doctors have begun updating their language. Many now refer to egg freezing and sperm freezing as simply gamete freezing, dropping the gender identity of the process. Whether freezing eggs, sperm, or embryos for future assisted pregnancies, gamete freezing is gaining traction among trans people before transitioning lessens their reproductive ablities or they change their gender identity with medical assistance like hormones and surgery.

Aadvocate.com,  by NAYIRAH MUHAMMAD, October 2, 2018

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They were a gay, interracial couple in an age of relentless bigotry. The two Harolds didn’t flinch.

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Harolds

Estate agent Verna Clayborne takes a seat in the dining room of an expansive 16th Street Heights home and sighs.

The two Harolds have tired her out.

It’s Clayborne’s job to get rid of the stuff of the deceased. The couple who lived in the house for more than half a century — Harold Herman, a white man who died in 2016 at 87, and Harold Mays, a black man who died almost exactly a year later at 81 — had a lot of it.Harold

These aren’t your typical finds in the home of retirees. Clayborne is sitting amid a pile of antiques and memorabilia — paintings, LPs, books, coins, stamps, personal correspondence — worth, she estimates, $500,000. These objects, curated lovingly by two collectors in love for over five decades, offer glimpses of what it was like to be black and gay in America when it was dangerous to be either.

“They knew how to live and lived well,” she said of the Harolds.

The Harolds met in New England before moving in together in post-integration, pre-riot Washington in 1965. One was a black Army veteran from St. Louis, the other a white college professor from Pennsylvania. Though family and acquaintances say they were a private couple, they could not help being pioneers.

They later ran Two Harolds Antiques in Alexandria for more than a decade and owned a collection of thousands of signed first editions so extensive that they kept an in-house card catalogue. The books are varied — works by gay raconteur Quentin Crisp amid Janet Evanovich thrillers.

Much of what’s left in the Harolds’ home doesn’t explicitly bear their mark. There’s large black-and-white prints of the last century’s black royalty: Harry Belafonte, Jesse Jackson, Lou Rawls, Cicely Tyson. Another photo includes two faces lesser known outside the Beltway in the 1960s and 1970s, but inescapable within it: Marion Barry and his first wife, Blantie Evans, on a beach.

But every collection reveals the collector, and in other ephemera the Harolds left behind, they come into sharper focus. One snapshot shows Mays shaking Belafonte’s hand at a Politics and Prose. Another shows their modest wedding, held in 2013 at what looks like a courthouse following the legalization of same-sex marriage — after they had already been a couple for almost 50 years.

By Justin Wm. Moyer, Washington Post, October 16, 2018

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