Category: LGBTQ+ / Gay / Trans / Gender
Tennessee’s Age Verification Bill Escalates Effort to Criminalize Adult Sites
My dogs that love gravy! These laws are being driven by religion, more truthfully people that hid their true religious intent to get elected to then try to force their religious views on everyone else. To force everyone to live by their churches doctrines and their religious driven idea of what is moral or not. Do you understand this is a bunch of hyper religious people wagging their fingers at the people they dislike and telling them god sees what they are doing? This is our time of the temperance movement or the prohibition of alcohol that went so badly wrong. It is a small group of people who have extreme views of morality based on their own religious views who insist on forcing everyone else to live according to their views. It is the morality police and the vice patrols of the Islamic theocracies that the same people doing this in the US claim to hate. It is scary to me the regressive world they want to force the country into. Hugs. Scottie
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee’s version of the age verification bills being sponsored around the country by anti-porn religious conservative activists continues making its progress through the state legislature toward likely approval.
On Tuesday, the state’s Senate Finance Committee advanced SB 1792 — titled by its chief sponsor, Republican Senator Becky Duncan Massey, as the “Protect Tennessee Minors Act” — out of committee.
SB 1792 “would make porn websites criminally liable if they don’t verify the ages of users of their sites through photo matching,” local CBS affiliate WREG reported.
Massey compared the proposed new requirement to “age verification when folks go on an alcohol-related site,” and said her bill is necessary because, she believes, pornography “can cause damage” and “mental health issues.”
FSC Director of Public Affairs Mike Stabile, however, told XBIZ that Massey’s bill effectively criminalizes the distribution of adult content online, which he cited as a frequently stated goal of many conservatives.
Stabile also called SB 1792 “an escalation of what we’ve seen in other states” and deemed it “a grave threat” to First Amendment protections.
“First it was private lawsuits, then fines from attorneys general — Tennessee evidently wants to become the first state to begin arresting pornographers,” Stabile said, adding that the Tennessee bill’s chilling effect on legal speech will be substantial.
“The legislature’s own fiscal review committee says that it assumes ‘a majority of entities’ will simply stop publishing content in the state, but that, if not, ‘the increase in such convictions could be significant,’” he explained.
Stabile also pointed out that for many legislators, age verification is “just an excuse to increase liabilities for people that create, and platforms that host, material dealing in sex or sexuality. It’s no surprise that Tennessee has also recently expanded the definition of ‘material harmful to minors’ to include drag and other non-explicit LGBTQ+ content offline, and the bill itself criminalizes as little as the description of a nipple.”
Aylo: Recent Slew of AV Laws Are ‘Ineffective, Dangerous’
SB 1792 would also require websites to keep “anonymized age-verification data” for extended periods of time.
Massey told WREG, “They keep the data but not personally identifying data. They have to keep the data to prove that they did verify for seven years, but it can’t have their name, address. It can’t have any personal identifying markers.”
Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Utah and Virginia have passed similar age verification bills, all introduced by Republicans, while 19 other states have introduced similar legislation. Florida recently passed its version of the law, written by a legislator who is also a pastor, as part of a more comprehensive social media bill.
Aylo issued a statement about the Tennessee bill and the other laws, stating, “The way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”
Main Image: Anti-Porn crusader Tennessee Sen. Becky Duncan Massey (R)
Sweden’s parliament passes a law to make it easier for young people to legally change their gender
https://apnews.com/article/sweden-vote-legal-gender-law-minimum-age-9cfb3c6879ae03c3187f520eed308377
One of the anti-trans haters go to things is that the European countries are reversing themselves on pro-trans beliefs. It is all selective misinformation and ideologically driven attempts to deny the progress in medical science / understanding over nearly 50 years. Their goal is to roll society back to when the LGBTQ+ had no representation nor equality. It is entirely to create the idea that trans kids / people and their best medical practice is wrong and shouldn’t be. But this article again shows they are incorrect. Just so those who are denying the progressive trend for trans rights in the European countries, a quote is below. Hugs. Scottie
Elias Fjellander, chairman of the organization’s youth branch, said it would make life better for its members. “Going forward, we are pushing to strengthen gender-affirming care, to introduce a third legal gender and to ban conversion attempts,” Fjellander said in a statement.
Last Friday, German lawmakers approved similar legislation, making it easier for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to change their name and gender in official records directly at registry offices.
A view of the Swedish Parliament as lawmakers vote on the new gender identity law, in Stockholm, Wednesday, April 17, 2024. The Swedish parliament passed a law Wednesday lowering the age required for people to legally change their gender from 18 to 16. Young people under 18 will still need approval from a guardian, a doctor, and the National Board of Health and Welfare. The government of Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has been split on the issue.(Jessica Gow/TT News Agency via AP)
Updated 12:17 PM EDT, April 17, 2024COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The Swedish parliament passed a law Wednesday lowering the age required for people to legally change their gender from 18 to 16. Those under 18 still need approval from a guardian, a doctor and the National Board of Health and Welfare.
No longer required is a gender dysphoria diagnosis, defined by medical professionals as psychological distress experienced by those whose gender expression does not match their gender identity.
Sweden joins a number of countries with similar laws including Denmark, Norway, Finland and Spain.
The vote in Sweden passed 234-94 with 21 lawmakers absent, following a debate that lasted for nearly six hours.
Sweden Democrats, the populist party with far-right roots that supports the government in parliament but is not part of the government, opposed the law.
Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, told reporters it was “deplorable that a proposal that clearly lacks the support of the population is so lightly voted through.”
But Johan Hultberg with the Moderates of Sweden’s conservative prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, called the outcome “gratifying.” Hultberg called it “a cautious but important reform for a vulnerable group. I’m glad we’re done with it.”
Kristersson’s center-right coalition had been split on the issue, with the Moderates and the Liberals largely supporting the law while the small Christian Democrats were against it.
Elias Fjellander, chairman of the organization’s youth branch, said it would make life better for its members. “Going forward, we are pushing to strengthen gender-affirming care, to introduce a third legal gender and to ban conversion attempts,” Fjellander said in a statement.
Last Friday, German lawmakers approved similar legislation, making it easier for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to change their name and gender in official records directly at registry offices.
In the U.K., the Scottish parliament in 2022 passed a bill allowing people aged 16 or older to change their gender designation on identity documents by self-declaration. It was vetoed by the British government, a decision that Scotland’s highest civil court upheld in December. The legislation set Scotland apart from the rest of the U.K., where the minimum age is 18 and a medical diagnosis is required.
Alabama just got a step closer to jailing librarians who provide LGBTQ+ books
Russia begins banning books in its war on “gay propaganda”
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/05/russia-begins-banning-books-in-its-war-on-gay-propaganda/
Almost all of 2023’s most challenged books were LGBTQ+
EXPLAINED: Why TERF-In-Chief JK Rowling Is Celebrating Trans-Care Review Findings | Erin Reed | TMR
This interview points out some of the flaws in the Cass Report, and how Cass herself was a known anti-trans person who had worked with DeathSantis and his administration. Talk about asking the fox about the hen house security. The people who wanted a badly done report on trans care / trans kids choose a known anti-trans person to do it. Erin Reed is a trans person who is very well versed in trans issues. The video is not long, about 14.19 minutes long but very informative if you know someone who is an anti-trans hater who often says well look at the UK and those places they are stopping care, or someone who likes to refer to the Cass report. Hugs. Scottie
Journalist Erin Reed, author of the Erin In The Morning newsletter on SubStack, discusses the recent gender identity review by the National Health Services (NHS) in the United Kingdom.
Erin Reed and Emma then jump right into the background for the UK’s recent Cass Report on transgender care, stepping back to briefly cover the rise of transphobic activism in the UK at the end of the 2010s, and the major policy impacts it had despite fringe following, including the NHS-sponsored ‘independent’ and ‘unbiased’ review by Hillary Cass. After giving some background on the evidently not-so-unbiased Cass herself, Reed parses through the clear failure of the report itself to live up to these supposed standards, actively excluding both trans voices and experts on trans care from the report, relying on outdated and fraudulent statistics (compiled by notorious homophobes nonetheless), and repeatedly requiring absurdly high standards for trans care – standards not met by the vast majority of both adult and pediatric care – while rarely substantiating any of the claims about the supposed dangers.
No such thing as White Pride
“I Learned I Was Intersex At 21” | Listen Up | ABC Science
This video again shows that sex is a spectrum in a sliding scale from fully one with all the markers through to the end of the other side with fully all the markers for the other. Simply because it dangles doesn’t mean internally the person is a male or boy. There are more intersex people than red headed people in the world. See if she had not had the surgeries to remove her internal testis, she would have developed male features with a vagina. Hugs. Scottie.
How Book Bans, Threats to Honest Teaching of History, and “Don’t Say Gay” Bills Harm Our Children and Undermine Education for Citizenship
I want to thank ZORBA at https://poodyheads.wordpress.com/2024/04/25/how-book-bans-threats-to-honest-teaching-of-history-and-dont-say-gay-bills-harm-our-children-and-undermine-education-for-citizenship/ for the link. Hugs. Scottie