No Worries About Westboro

This amazing group has already been invited and will be doing the work of keeping Phelps and his gang away from the service.

What a relief, and the perfect response for Appleton.

The LGBTQ community can stay home.

Seeking Trans+ activists for coalitions in CO, IA, MA, ME

From the always-amazing Michael Munson of FORGE:

FORGE is looking to identify trans-savvy individuals in Boulder, CO; Iowa City / Cedar Rapids / Johnson County, IA; Boston, MA; and the state of Maine who are interested in working in coalition with professionals from agencies serving sexual assault survivors to ensure these services are culturally competent about and accessible to transgender survivors.

Multiple studies have found that over 50 percent of transgender people have experienced sexual assault at some point in their lives. Many transgender survivors live with the long-lasting effects of trauma. Yet few transgender people access sexual assault healing services.

Supported by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime, FORGE will help form coalitions in these four jurisdictions (Boulder, CO; Iowa City, IA; Boston, MA; and the state of Maine) to identify their own community/state barriers and develop and implement a work plan to reduce or eliminate those barriers. Work will include disseminating surveys, participating in at least one full-day in-person meeting, and carrying out follow-up work as the coalition determines. The timeline is roughly October 2011 through summer 2012.

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Slutwalk Critique

An Open Letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk, it’s titled, but it should be called how to dismantle white privilege in feminist movements, or something similar.

Black women in the U.S. have worked tirelessly since the 19th century colored women’s clubs to rid society of the sexist/racist vernacular of slut, jezebel, hottentot, mammy, mule, sapphire; to build our sense of selves and redefine what women who look like us represent. Although we vehemently support a woman’s right to wear whatever she wants anytime, anywhere, within the context of a “SlutWalk” we don’t have the privilege to walk through the streets of New York City, Detroit, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, L.A. etc., either half-naked or fully clothed self-identifying as “sluts” and think that this will make women safer in our communities an hour later, a month later, or a year later. Moreover, we are careful not to set a precedent for our young girls by giving them the message that we can self-identify as “sluts” when we’re still working to annihilate the word “ho”, which deriving from the word “hooker” or “whore”, as in “Jezebel whore” was meant to dehumanize. Lastly, we do not want to encourage our young men, our Black fathers, sons and brothers to reinforce Black women’s identities as “sluts” by normalizing the term on t-shirts, buttons, flyers and pamphlets.

The personal is political. For us, the problem of trivialized rape and the absence of justice are intertwined with race, gender, sexuality, poverty, immigration and community. As Black women in America, we are careful not to forget this or we may compromise more than we are able to recover. Even if only in name, we cannot afford to label ourselves, to claim identity, to chant dehumanizing rhetoric against ourselves in any movement. We can learn from successful movements like the Civil Rights movement, from Women’s Suffrage, the Black Nationalist and Black Feminist movements that we can make change without resorting to the taking-back of words that were never ours to begin with, but in fact heaved upon us in a process of dehumanization and devaluation.

Great stuff. Go ahead & read the whole thing, especially if you’re a white feminist who is excited about SlutWalk. It won’t ruin it for you – it’ll just give you some context and maybe a little humility.

Caputo’s “Monsters”

Keith Mina Caputo of Life of Agony is transitioning, and she just released this difficult, amazing song. It may be triggery for just hard to watch for some, as a few people on our message boards have pointed out.

Compelling, I think.

Appleton Domestic Partner Benefits

I just got this note from Katie Belander of FAIR WI. As you all know, I was one of the “local LGBT leaders” who spoke at this Appleton Common Council meeting in favor of the city granting domestic partner benefits.

Earlier this month, I was proud to stand with local LGBT and allied leaders when the Appleton Common Council granted health care and related benefits to the registered domestic partners of city employees by a vote of 10 to 6.  This is a major step forward for Appleton, the Fox Valley and Wisconsin.

But anti-fairness forces are already gearing up to try to undo the progress we have made together.

Saturday morning, the Appleton Post Crescent ran a citizen’s letter calling domestic partner benefits a “cancer [that] must be killed before it spreads” by overturning “this immoral and fiscally imprudent policy through direct legislation by referendum.”

As we learned with the state domestic partnership registry, no victory will go unchallenged. And at Fair Wisconsin, no victory will go undefended.

If you can, please make a donation to FAIR WI so we’ve got the resources to fight this one.