A Trump-loving Californian visiting Anchorage for a MAGA rally last month showed local police a novelty “white privilege card” after she was pulled over for swerving in her lane.
But instead of citing or ticketing the woman for failing to show her driver’s license, cellphone video taken by the motorist shows officers had a laugh, took a selfie with the woman, and let her go.
“You like my white privilege card?” the woman, Mimi Israelah, asked Officer Nicholas Bowe, while holding the card that reads “White Privilege Card Trumps Everything.” “That’s hilarious,” Bowe responds as his partner, Charles Worland, smiles next to him.
In a message posted to the Anchorage Police Department’s website, Chief Michael Kerle said he wanted, “to personally address the community to provide some clarity regarding [their] internal standards of conduct.”
“I know we are all human,” he said in the statement. “But we belong to a profession that does not tolerate, practice, condone, facilitate, or collaborate with any form of discrimination.” Deputy Chief Sean Case said some who saw the post had negative reactions and believed it was inappropriate. “We recognize that,” he said.
Worland and Bowe were placed on administrative during the 11-day investigation, Case said. Police would not provide additional information about the investigation, including which policies were violated and what, if any, repercussions the officers faced.
Two Anchorage police officers violated department policy when they did not ticket a woman who showed them a “white privilege card” instead of a driver’s license, Alaska newspaper reports. https://t.co/lO6TL0fRhD
The authoritarian fascist right wing government is moving forward with returning the country to a time when they did not think that the LGBTQ+ did not exist or at least were visible in the public. Anyone who thinks they are exempt from what is coming is wrong. Let the destroying of abortion rights be an example of how extreme these people will be. Now it is any book that has LGBTQ+ content or characters, but how soon will it be any book that has content that the maga crowd don’t support? How about the drive to not teach the real racist history of the US? Will those books be banned? What about books that are against religion? Will those books be banned? You fill in the blanks and ask if those books will be banned. This is the US Taliban people! Hugs
Residents of Jamestown, Michigan, voted this week to shut down town’s library rather than tolerate certain LGBTQ books
Controversy has swirled around the Patmos Library since patrons began protesting some books with LGBT themes written for young adults. Photograph: Ron French/Bridge Michigan
A small-town library is at risk of shutting down after residents of Jamestown, Michigan, voted to defund it rather than tolerate certain LGBTQ+-themed books.
Residents voted on Tuesday to block a renewal of funds tied to property taxes, Bridge Michigan reported.
The vote leaves the library with funds through the first quarter of next year. Once a reserve fund is used up, it would be forced to close, Larry Walton, the library board’s president, told Bridge Michigan – harming not just readers but the community at large. Beyond books, residents visit the library for its wifi, he said, and it houses the very room where the vote took place.
“Our libraries are places to read, places to gather, places to socialize, places to study, places to learn. I mean, they’re the heart of every community,” Deborah Mikula, executive director of the Michigan Library Association, told the Guardian. “So how can you lose that?”
“We are champions of access,” she added, including materials that might appeal to some in the community and not others. “We want to make sure that libraries protect the right to read.”
An anonymous letter Lawrence said was sent to homes in Jamestown. Photograph: Courtesy Matt Lawrence
The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a nonbinary writer, but it soon spiraled into a campaign against Patmos Library itself. After a parent complained about Gender Queer: a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as nonbinary, dozens showed up at library board meetings, demanding the institution drop the book. (The book, which includes depictions of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began to target other books with LGBTQ+ themes.
One library director resigned, telling Bridge she had been harassed and accused of indoctrinating kids; her successor, Matt Lawrence, also left the job. Though the library put Kobabe’s book behind the counter rather than on the shelves, the volumes remained available.
“We, the board, will not ban the books,” Walton told Associated Press on Thursday.
A few months later, in March, an anonymous letter went to homes in the area. It criticized the “pornographic” memoir and the addition of “transgender” and “gay” books to the library, according to Lawrence. “That fired a lot of people up and got them to start coming to our board meetings to complain,” he said. “The concern from the public was that it’s going to confuse children.”
The library’s refusal to submit to the demands led to a campaign urging residents to vote against renewed funding for the library. A group calling itself Jamestown Conservatives handed out flyers condemning Gender Queer for showing “extremely graphic sexual illustrations of two people of the same gender”, criticizing a library director who “promoted the LGBTQ ideology” and calling for making the library “a safe and neutral place for our kids”. On Facebook, the group says it exists to “keep our children safe, and protect their purity, as well as to keep the nuclear family intact as God designed”.
A flyer distributed at the town’s Memorial Day events. Photograph: Courtesy Matt Lawrence
Residents ultimately voted 62% to 37% against a measure that would have raised property taxes by roughly $24 in order to fund the library, even as they approved similar measures to fund the fire department and road work. The library was one of just a few in the state to suffer such a loss, Mikula said: “Most passed with flying colors, sometimes up to 80%.”
The vote came as a “shock” to Lawrence, who left his job in part because of town officials’ criticism of the Patmos library and libraries across the US.
“I knew that there were people that were upset about material in the library, but I figured that enough people would realize that what they’re trying to do with the removal of these books is antithetical to our constitution, particularly the first amendment,” he said.
The vote comes as libraries across the US face a surge in demands to ban books. The American Library Association identified 729 challenges to “library, school and university materials and services” last year, which led to about 1,600 challenges or removals of individual books. That was up from 273 books the year before and represents “the highest number of attempted book bans since we began compiling these lists 20 years ago”, the ALA president, Patricia Wong, said in a press release.
“We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books dealing with LGBTQIA themes and books dealing with racism,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, head of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom, told the Guardian last year. Celebrated books by Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel and Ibram X Kendi are among those facing bans.
“I’m not quite sure what instigated the culture wars that we’re seeing, but libraries are certainly at the front end,” Mikula said. Indeed, as states across the US move to deny LGBTQ+ rights, the ALA’s No 1 “most challenged” book last year was Gender Queer.
“When you remove those books from the shelf or you challenge them publicly in a community, what you’re saying to any young person who identified with that narrative is, ‘We don’t want your story here,’” Kobabe told the New York Times in May.
Each library chooses its own collection, Mikula noted, an intensive process that involves staying abreast of what’s new, listening to what’s being requested, and “weeding out” selections that are rarely on loan.
“Our librarians are qualified. They have advanced degrees,” she said. “We want to make sure that the people who have been hired to do this work are trusted and credible, and that they’re making sure that the full community is represented within their library. And that means having LGBTQ books.”
If community members oppose the inclusion of certain books, there are formal means of requesting their removal, involving a review committee and ascertainment that the person making the appeal has actually read the book in question. But recently, she said, people have been “going to board meetings, whether it’s a library board meeting or a school board meeting and saying, ‘Here’s a list of 300 books. We want them all to be removed from your library.’ And that’s not the proper channel, but they’re loud and their voices carry.”
Let’s face it, Republicans would defund every library on the planet if they had the opportunity, them saying it’s LGBTQ+ related is just trying to score extra points with their knuckle dragging constituency.
This entire clip is projection. He is railing against ‘book burners’ and ‘cancel culture’ when he comes from a state where the GOP governor is banning books and firing attorneys who don’t fall into line. https://t.co/c1pZ0wizop
They want books censored. Books that come with no pictures and require an imagination to illustrate. The books that almost no one reads.
Meanwhile, on the internet you can find videos of the kinkiest sex acts with even the most simple searches. They all carry the internet in their pocket 24/7.
If I had the money I would fully fund the library and turn it in to an LGBTQ resource center and history museum just to explode the heads of these small minded freaks.
Of course the fascists hate the library. Free books and media? People can watch movies, read books and magazines and listen to music without paying anything other than taxes? That’s communism!
MAGAts don’t read anyway, so for them it’s no big loss to close a library.
“Make America Great Again” means keep kids ignorant about human sexuality, like many were in the 1950s, when they were taught that girls could be impregnated by kissing boys and that gay sex was only practiced by devil worshipping atheists and godless commies.
Keeping kids away from science or knowledge was a thing when people sought books on evolution and slavery because white Christianity was the only acceptable belief system, except where Jews were tolerated.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I recall, reading any particular library book is optional. Nobody is going to get held back a grade for not reading the books. Oh, I forgot, conservative dictionaries don’t have the word “choice” in them.
And followed immediate by an article about Senator Rick Scott screeching against Democrats allegedly trying to cancel culture and burn books. Republicans are constitutionally incapable of recognizing hypocrisy.
In a recent comment Tildeb championed an interim report of an inquiry on the best way to serve the needs of trans children in the UK. Almost everything I read said the report only got one thing correct in that much more needed to be done to open more treatment facilities for trans people and that the national health system needed to do more. Then because it seems the thing the report wanted to push was anti-trans propaganda the report tried to say the best treatment would be to deny that kids are trans and would grow out of it and should be treated with affirmative therapy which is another way of saying conversion therapy. Affirmative therapy is saying kids should be treated and forced to see that they are in the right body to match their gender and to accept that is who / what they are. Forget that trans nonsense, just like being gay is a fad, it is just rebelling against your parents and kids will grow out of it. All kids experiment and then they grow up, no one is gay because god did not make mistakes. It is all the same thing of denying it and forcing kids to never admit it. It is something most of the modern world has grown beyond and only the traditionalists refusing to admit times have changed in a way they dislike still cling to. For those wanting to know how bias and slanted the report was here is a breakdown of it. Hugs
This morning people who care about trans kids were reacting in utter dismay to hearing the Secretary of State for Health use the Cass interim review to justify the need to exclude trans people from a ban on conversion therapy.
I’ll link the lovely Olly Alexander linking to a clip of our Health Secretary using Cass to call for conversion therapy for trans kids – see here
Despite evidence that conversion therapy on trans children is particularly harmful, with research showing “For transgender adults who recalled gender identity conversion efforts before age 10 years, exposure was significantly associated with an increase in the lifetime odds of suicide attempts”.
For days now, MPs and commentators have cited the Cass review, in justification of the need for conversion therapy specifically for trans kids.
Of course they do not say conversion therapy for trans kids. They talk of ‘children suffering from gender confusion or gender distress’, they talk of ‘exploratory therapy. They talk of ‘unintended consequences, by which some clearly mean, they fear the law would stop them conducting conversion therapy on trans kids.
Those who want to conduct conversion therapy on trans kids hide behind a new favourite term of ‘exploratory therapy’. It is a friendly sounding rebrand of conversion therapy. It is focused on probing, delaying, questioning and at its heart, problematising trans identities. There is nothing wrong with being trans. Some kids are trans – get over it.
The same people who actually want conversion therapy for trans kids, are trying to create confusion on the meaning of affirmative therapy. They are trying to paint affirmation as a bad thing, as something forced. They are wrong and they know it. Affirmation is about meeting a person where they are, about listening to what they need. It has space for as much talk therapy on identity as a person wants. Without coercion. Without compulsion. Without considering trans or cis as a bad outcome.
Parents of trans kids are today VERY upset. People had put their faith in Cass to help our kids.
Personally, I feel something else other than upset. I feel cross at myself for not speaking up earlier.
Back when the Cass review was first announced, I had serious concerns. Concerns that have continued to mount.
There was Cass’ personal twitter following of a load of highly transphobic groups & no trans people.
There was the Cass review’s initial refusal to even say the word trans kids, in a review aimed primarily at helping trans kids.
There was the lack of any trans people on the Cass team, and the fact that the Cass team explicitly asked for people with no knowledge or experience of trans-ness, as though that was a preferable.
The fact there was no oversight group consisting of respected trans health experts and trans community leaders.
Back at the start I felt deep in my gut that this would go badly and would not serve the needs of trans kids. I seriously considered trying to get parents of trans kids together to stage a boycott until there was some proper trans representation. I didn’t for four major reasons. For one, the biggest reason, I was so tired & out of time and energy. For two, I wanted to give optimism a go – just cos everything else always fails trans kids in the UK, why couldn’t this be different – here we had a paediatrician reviewing trans kids healthcare, something I’d been asking for for years, maybe this time would be different. For three, I hoped having formal peer reviewed publications to feed into the process would make a difference (spoiler – it didn’t – the Cass team had my peer reviewed research article on the UK service from the highly respected international journal International Trans Health and didn’t even bother citing it). For four, I didn’t think things could really get much worse for trans kids in the UK, so I didn’t see how much real harm it could do.
Obviously I was very wrong. I noted my initial reaction to the pathologisation embedded in the Cass report.
The Cass interim report is now being cited everywhere to justify the need for conversion therapy for trans kids. It is being cited to deny inclusion of trans people of any age from a ban on conversion therapy.
The red flags about the Cass process meanwhile continue to grow.
I’ve been interviewed, found Cass on the face of it an empathetic listener who keeps her cards close to her chest.
Other parents of trans kids have been interviewed, again felt Cass had listened with kindness.
Many are deeply upset about the Cass interim report and the way it has encouraged further bigotry.
The Cass interim report couldn’t even take a decision on whether being trans is pathological. It couldn’t even take a decision on whether trans kids are better off being loved and supported or put through conversion torture. It is not acceptable.
I won’t dig into the details of the Cass report itself, but the references and evidence base are deeply biased and flawed. It is yet another total failure for trans kids in the UK.
There are still no trans experts involved in a senior role in the Cass review. There is no trans power at all.
The Cass process seem to think the exclusion of trans people is acceptable, because they have told themselves they are not dealing with trans people at all. They have told themselves they are dealing with healthcare for ‘children suffering from gender distress’. This phrasing has become standard.
Worryingly there are also trans-antagonistic people involved in the research for Cass.
This week, the world respected paediatrician with over a decade of practical hands on experience HELPING trans kids in Australia published a response to the Cass review in the British Medical Journal. That response is not open access to the public, but this is of incredible important to those who are directly affected (and now even threatened) by the Cass outputs, so I will put its text here:
Gender identity services for children and young people in England
Landmark review should interrogate existing international evidence and consensus
Ken C Pang, 1, 3 Jeremy Wiggins, 2 Michelle M Telfer1, 3
1 Royal Children’s Hospital; 2 Transcend Australia; 3 Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
The long awaited interim report of the Cass review was finally published in March this year.1 Commissioned in September 2020, the independent review led by paediatrician Hillary Cass examined NHS gender identity services for children and young people in England. These services are currently provided by a single specialist clinic known as the Gender Identity Development Service. After consulting people with gender diversity, health professionals, and support and advocacy groups, Cass expressed various concerns within her interim report, such as increasingly long waiting lists, the “unsustainable workload” being carried by the service, and the “considerable risk” this presented to children and young people.
Recognising that “one service is not going to be able to respond to the growing demand in a timely way,” Cass used her interim report to recommend creation of a “fundamentally different service model.” Under this model, the care of gender diverse children and young people becomes “everyone’s business” by expanding the number of providers to create a series of regional centres that have strong links to local services and a remit to provide training for clinicians at all levels.1 Although it remains to be seen how and when this key recommendation will be implemented, the proposal will be largely welcomed by gender diverse children and adolescents and their families in England. The shift away from centralised, tertiary, and quaternary centres is already occurring internationally, including in Australia,2 where local services are being enhanced to meet growing demand and provide more equitable and timely care.
Hormonal treatment In what was likely a disappointment to many, the interim report did not provide definitive advice on the use of puberty blockers and feminising or masculinising hormones. Instead, Cass advised that recommendations will be developed as the review’s research programme progresses. In particular, the report expresses the need for more long term data to assuage safety concerns regarding these hormonal interventions. Although additional data in this area are undoubtedly needed, the decision to delay recommendations pending more information on potential unknown side effects is problematic for several reasons.
Firstly, it ignores more than two decades of clinical experience in this area as well as existing evidence showing the benefits of these hormonal interventions on the mental health and quality of life of gender diverse young people.3 -9 Secondly, it will take many years to obtain these long term data. Finally, Cass acknowledges that when there is no realistic prospect of filling evidence gaps in a timely way, professional consensus should be developed on the correct way to proceed.” Such consensus already exists outside the UK. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the World rofessional Association for Transgender Health have all endorsed the use of these hormonal treatments in gender diverse young people,10 -12 but curiously these consensus based clinical guidelines and position statements receive little or no mention in the interim report.
Indeed, there is no evidence, as yet, that the Cass review has consulted beyond the UK. This inward looking focus may be a reflection of how England’s gender identity service has come to chart its own path in this field. For example, its current use of puberty blockers diverges considerably from international best practice. In particular, NHS England mandates that any gender diverse person under the age of 18 years who wishes to access oestrogen or testosterone must first receive at least 12 months of puberty suppression.13 However, many young people in this situation will already be in late puberty or have finished their pubertal development, by which time the main potential benefits of puberty suppression have been lost.11 Moreover, using puberty blockers in such individuals is more likely to induce unwanted menopausal symptoms such as fatigue and disturbed mood.14 For these reasons, puberty suppression outside the UK is typically reserved for gender diverse young people who are in early or middle puberty, when there is a physiological reason for prescribing blockers.
Another possible reason exists for the Cass review appearing to have neglected international consensus around hormone prescribing. While the interim report often mentions the need to “build consensus,” Cass seems keen to find a way forward that ensures “conceptual agreement” and “shared understanding” across all interested parties, including those who view gender diversity as inherently pathological. Compromise can be productive in many situations, but the assumption that the middle ground serves the best interests of gender diverse children and young people is a fallacy. Where polarised opinions exist in medicine—as is true in this case—it can be harmful to give equal credence to all viewpoints, particularly the more extreme or outlying views on either side. Hopefully Cass will keep this in mind when preparing her final report.
(Back to me typing) The authors of the above include some of the most respected paediatricians with decade long expertise in working with trans kids in Australia. The Cass team should have been queuing up to learn from Australian experts. The fact they have totally ignored expertise from outside of the UK and its partner system in the Netherlands, strikes as amazing arrogance. The fact the Australian experts felt the need to write a submission to the BMJ to raise their concerns with the Cass report is again astonishing, and in another less transphobic country would set off alarm bells.
I don’t know where we go from here.
I do know the cards are now on the table. I have zero faith in the Cass process. It has already done more harm than good.
My number one hope for Cass was it would take significant strides in depathologising approaches to trans kids. It has done the exact opposite. 18 months in and they won’t even say the word trans.
I had hoped Cass would educate the public that being trans is not a problem or a pathology. It has done the opposite, and legitimised some incredibly problematising media pieces this week alone.
I had hoped it would move us from psychoanalysis to modern healthcare – instead people are using Cass to justify the need for exploratory therapy, conversion therapy by a different name.
I had hoped it would move trans kids’ healthcare away from a monopoly mental health trust to modern secondary or primary care. Instead, the focus appears to be on talk therapy to problematise trans-ness, without tackling the hostile climate that makes life so hard for trans kids, and perhaps with even less route to medical intervention where needed.
Cass has done nothing to highlight the biggest problem for many trans kids. The climate of societal transphobia. Just this week we have had headlines stating trans people can be humiliated and segregated as the UK tries to bring in a bathroom bill by the back door. Trans kids and adolescents have been in crisis again this week, many are really struggling with mental health. Not because there’s something inherently wrong with being trans, but because the UK is a hostile terrifying place to be trans as our rights are continually debated or taken away. Cass has done absolutely nothing to highlight the crisis in mental health caused by the terrible way our country treats trans people.
Cass has failed us on every level.
The whole process is cis-supremacism in full dominance.
Why do a bunch of cis people continue to debate and dictate whether or not trans kids should be put under conversion therapy.
Why do cis people continue to have all the power, and continue to use it to harm trans kids.
Trans liberation now. Trans kids deserve so much better than this.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas and declared that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Attendees gave the right-wing authoritarian a standing ovation in response.
“Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” he said to applause. “Family ties shall be based on marriage or the relationship between parent and children. To sum up, the mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone. Full stop. End of discussion!”
Viktor Orbán receives a standing ovation at CPAC for expressing his country’s bigoted anti-gay marriage policies. pic.twitter.com/ldPjwQidoc
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) August 4, 2022
Hungary allows for legally recognized same-sex unions, but not gay marriage. Last year, Orbán’s government enacted a law banning the promotion of content in schools the government deems to be promoting homosexuality. Critics said the aim of the law is to associate homosexuality with pedophilia.
Last month, Orbán courted controversy again when he stated he doesn’t want Hungary to become a country of “mixed race” people.
“We are not a mixed race, and we do not want to become a mixed race either,” Orbán said. “We mix within Europe.”
Orbán has become something of a darling among American conservatives, particularly after Fox News host Tucker Carlson traveled to Budapest last August for a softball interview with the prime minister.
Last year, the group Reporters without Borders put Orbán on its list of enemies of press freedom.
For as long as I can remember (and I’m in my sixties) conservatives have been using the fear of LGBT people to hook gullible bigots into voting against their own economic self-interests. It’s worked like a charm for generations and shows no sign of letting up. This is just the latest example.
I am 86, and I can remember further back, when it was actually worse. At least, for now, we cannot be put into prison just for being gay — but I would not at all be surprised if those draconian laws returned, should the so-called “conservatives” get total control of the government. They are not conservative. They are simply bigots, and hateful ones, at that.
Texas and Florida are far advanced in accelerating their plans for genocide (at Stage 8 of the 10 stages), and other red states are at least at Stage 3, with plans to follow,
They’re coming first for little trans girls and their parents, then the trans community as a whole, and then the rest of the LGBTQ+ community.
Who will speak out for us?
And when the GQP comes for them later, will there be anyone left to speak up for them?
*and lower taxes on the wealthy and corporation, and let companies dump toxic waste into your drinking water, take away social security and reduce the minimum wage are remove worker protections and send more tax money to our government contractor friends.
The GOP hates gay people. Anyone old enough to remember the AIDS epidemic remembers how they laughed because AIDS was killing all the right people That was in the 1980s
If the GQP gets into power the first people going to the camps will be us
Pssst….Hey Log Cabin Republicans….have you gotten the hint that the GOP really will never let you be “real” Republicans and that you’ll always be 2nd class citizens to them?
Much like temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they think they’re only temporarily kept out of the club.
They don’t understand that the more power the people they bolster get the less they need the LCRs or others like them. Give the right enough power, and watch the long knives come out as soon as the gays are disposable. Homocons should really be careful what they wish for.
