Qween Amor was assaulted in Union Square on May 7th, 2013. The suspect is now in custody. Immediately after this video was taken, her suitcase (pictured, red) was stolen. It contained her amplifier, laptop, and all other possessions.
S/he needs help to purchase a new amplifier/boombox, so that she can continue performing & sending her message of love. Contributions can be made via paypal to: QweenAmor@gmail.com.
Cemia Acoff
Cemia Acoff was murdered in a barbarous way, and now, multiple activists and organizations are working with her family, the funeral home and, yes, the morgue, to bring her home.
They need your help.
They have set up The Cemia Acoff Fund which will, literally, bring Ce Ce home and ensure that she receives a proper send off, full of love and support from the community – and that includes the love and support of her family.
You can donate to The Cemia Acoff Fund here.
The groups involved include:
TransOhio
Shane Morgan, Founder & Chair
Cleveland Trans Community Outreach
Jacob Nash, Chair
Equality Ohio
Elyzabeth Holford, Executive Director
LGBT Center of Cleveland
Phyllis Harris, Executive Director
AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland / Beyond Identities Community Center (BICC)
Tracy Jones, Chief Executive Officer
Miquel Brazil, BICC
As I said on my FB page yesterday: I’m sorry, Ms. Alcoff, that we have not yet made the world a place that is safe enough for your beauty.
Rest in Peace.
(And journalists, and police, get your shit together already. For those who are wondering, she felt forced to admit she was a man, which, if she hadn’t had her ID changed legally, she might have done in order to prevent more complications and charges. Trans women do not “admit” to being men because they “know” they are, but because they know that people are stupid and hateful and shitty to trans people.)
“Every nine seconds in the United States a woman is assaulted or beaten,” Patrick Stewart said. “Every nine seconds.”
As if he weren’t cool enough already, it turns out he served as the host for the launch of “Ring The Bell,” a global campaign calling on one million men to make one million “concrete, actionable promises” to end violence against women.
“Violence against women is the single greatest human rights violation of our generation,” Stewart said.
“I became an expert,” Stewart said. “I knew exactly when to open a door and insert myself between my father’s fist and my mother’s body.”
He said his father was “an angry and unhappy man who was not able to control his emotions—or his hands.”
“The truth is my mother did nothing to deserve the violence she endured,” Stewart added. “She did not provoke my father—and even if she had, responding with violence is not an acceptable way with dealing with conflict.”
To his world where men promise to end violence against women: Make it so.
I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Jennifer Baumgardner’s new documentary It Was Rape. Eight women tell their stories about their experiences with sexual violence.
These experiences are so complicated, and even for these interviews you can hear all the women trying to make it less of a deal than it is and than it was. Why?
It’s entirely worth watching, but make sure you’re in an okay head space if you’re someone who has had this kind of experience – or even if you haven’t.
One of the women is told by one of her friends that “any time anyone has sex out of someone out of fear, it’s rape,” and that’s a good reminder, for everyone. And oh – this isn’t just for women. Men should watch this, too.
It’s been a year since Trayvon Martin was shot and killed for wearing a hoodie and carrying an iced tea and a pack of Skittles. He would have turned 18 this month.
This artwork is by Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski. Go check out more of her stuff.
Via FORGE and Loree Cook-Daniels:
The recently-released National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation, held many surprises, not the least of which was that bisexual men and women are, overall, the most at risk. Here are some of those highlights, ordered to highlight highest rates:
Lifetime prevalence of rape (because of their definition of “rape,”
numbers were too small to report for gay and bi men, although heterosexual men reported a rate of 0.7%):
Bisexual women — 46.1%
Heterosexual women — 17.4%
Lesbian women — 13.1%
Lifetime prevalence of sexual violence other than rape:
Bisexual women — 74.9%
Bisexual men — 47.4%
Lesbians — 46.4%
Heterosexual women — 43.3%
Gay men — 40.2%
Heterosexual men — 20.8%
Lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner:
Bisexual women — 61.1%
Lesbians — 43.8%
Bisexual men — 37.3%
Heterosexual women — 35.0%
Heterosexual men — 29.0%
Gay men — 26.0%
The full report (PDF) is available at
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_SOfindings.pdf
If anyone ever thinks my remains might be in some garbage, please don’t look.
This article is about the most heart-breaking thing I have ever read, and all I could think about was his mom or cousins or whoever it was who loved him reading it. No one should ever have to read anything like this. Ever.
Fuck the haters.
Evon Young, I’m sorry we couldn’t give you a world you were safe in.
The found of the Sylvia River Law Project talks abut his new book, Normal Life. He is, as ever, smart, compassionate, and earnest about providing some answers to how we protect the most vulnerable. Totally worth watching:
He is too cool. Here’s Part 2.
“Never has the dedication of the people who practice the teaching profession been spotlighted in the way it has over the past few days.We were shown, in dramatic terms, to what lengths teachers are willing to go to fulfill the crucial mandate they have been given: the education and welfare of the most precious members of our society. Yet they are so often treated with disdain.” – Chan Lowe
Be sure to read the blog post that goes with this amazing image.
Well, this time it looks like (as in, it is alleged) someone who’s pissed off about Chick-Fil-A and the Family Research Council. Many, MANY, LGBTQ organizations have already condemned the man’s actions.
Don’t do it for me, asshole.
Love to the guard and the family of the guard, and yes, even for the folks whose politics at Family Research Council keep me a second class citizen, no matter what the motivation of the shooter was.
This is chilling. And informative:
It’s for refuge.org.uk.
In New York, there’s NYC’s services, as well as Safe Horizon.
In Wisconsin, here’s a list.
In the Fox cities, there’s Harbor House and the SACC.
Please do donate to any or all of the above, and spread the word.
15 years for a 27 year old man who repeated gang raped an 11 year old with 19 other men: that’s what’s wrong with this country.
You don’t really have to wait even a minute for an example of the kind of victim-blaming that Slutwalk is all about, but this one is particularly horrific, as the young woman died in a fire on Saturday and the coverage of her death appeared in The New York Times. The journalist quotes someone who calls her a “he”, comments on the men she invited to her apartment, and describes her curvaceous body.
As if any of these things had anything to do with her dying in this fire. Pathetic reporting, pathetic culture we live in.
Other folks, including GLAAD, Janet Mock, and Autumn Sandeen are calling out this incredibly offensive and dangerous article as well. You can let the New York Times know you’re sick and tired of their victim blaming and transphobia by writing to them here or tweeting @NYTimes. Update: GLAAD also recommends tweeting @NYTMetro, the paper’s Metro Desk, which might get to the reporters more directly.
Please speak up.
Kym Worthy – that’s a name out of a superhero comic in itself, isn’t it? – is Detroit’s prosecutor and she’s trying to get 11,000 rape kits that have never been processed by the Detroit police into the system in hopes of solving some of these crimes.
Today Worthy is a prosecutor in Detroit, with a much different perspective. Her decision not to report the crime, she says, was “all justification and rationalization.” Now she is on a singular mission: seeking justice for people who do report their rapes. She’s leading a charge to get more than 11,000 police rape kits—which contain swabs of semen, saliva, and other evidence—tested for DNA in her city, and to establish a road map for other U.S. cities to do the same. In Detroit the kits had piled up, ignored for years, in a police storage facility, until one of Worthy’s colleagues discovered them in 2009.
11,000.
And that’s the women who came forward.
Another article discusses how exactly these rape kits work in helping get rapists prosecuted:
While the DNA test results identified assailants in stranger-rape cases, they also created leads in cases that police and prosecutors were not expecting. For example, prosecutors told me of tying the same assailant to multiple acquaintance-rape cases that might otherwise have been difficult to move through the criminal-justice system. Said one, “We had an assailant who raped drug addicts coming to him to buy drugs. These are women who may be particularly vulnerable to rape because of their addictions or their socioeconomic status, but whose cases are hard to get a jury to believe. But when we could connect the same guy to a number of rapes, we could get a conviction.”
One of the reasons they don’t get processed is because so often women know the rapist, and so police have found doing the rape kit redundant – they already know who the suspect is.
A rape arrest rate that hasn’t changed since the late 1970s is a national travesty. Imagine anything else having stayed the same in that 40 years: no cell phones, computers, or cable TV, for starters.
The NYPD has a bad record with its treatment of trans people, so one woman – who was arrested for an illegal subway swipe - is suing them.
A trans woman named was killed in DC this week, and the DC Trans Coalition reports other violence as well.
I am never going to understand this kind of violence.
I will honestly say I’m flabbergasted. There is a local election coming up for the city’s Aldermen, and one of the men running, Tom Van Susteren, posted this on his Facebook page, which is public:
How on earth this could be considered appropriate for any politician’s Facebook page is beyond me. Really, I’m staggered by the bad judgment, the treatment of violence against women as funny, and the violence against a public figure as funny, plus torture as funny.
I understand that someone out there finds this entertaining, which horrifies me even more.
No, really. It’s almost something out of a feminist sci-fi:
Women fearful of being raped can insert the Rape-Axe condom inside themselves like a diaphragm or tampon. If her worst fears come true, and a man attempts to rape her, the Rape-Axe’s inside hooks attach themselves to the penis and don’t come off, instead getting even tighter and stopping the man from being able to urinate. The only way to remove it is by seeing a doctor—which will obviously help with prosecution.
Oddly enough, via Gizmodo.
There is a rapist in my old hood of Park Slope, and the NYPD are completely fucking up the investigation. They’re following women home without identifying themselves and asking them about their clothes. It’s unbelievably obnoxious, staggering in its stupidity.
So sign the petition from change.org to get the Chief of Ds to pay attention. More
