Stella Belia is a Greek activist for LGBT rights. She is the President of Rainbow Families organization, which represents Greek families of same sex parents and their children and strives for equal opportunity policies. She works as a kindergarten teacher in Athens and raises five children with her partner.
The introduction of a civil partnership law in Greece (December 2015) brought to the forefront the question of LGBT rights in the Greek society, and it is in this framework that Rethinking Greece* asked Stella Belia to answer questions on the current status of LGBT people in Greece, the human rights agenda in times of pauperization and crisis, the perception of homosexuality in Greek public opinion as well as possible conflicts between more traditional values and the liberal mindset that permeates the international LGBT agenda.
The recent enactment, with a broad parliamentary majority, of the of same-sex partnership law is regarded as an important milestone in the history of LGBT claims in Greece. How do you assess this development? Read more via Greek News Agenda
Why LGBT and sex worker rights go hand-in-handsex worker rights go hand-in-hand
The fact that many LGBT people end up in sex work is an issue often overlooked rather conveniently by many activists and charities. Sex work is still talked about in moralizing terms, and the LGBT community has sought to paint the picture of LGBT identities as being respectable as a way to win rights such as marriage.
The image of the LGBT world in recent campaigns has been that of white cisgender gay people in long term relationships, often with children. It’s a one dimensional idea that aims to show queer people as heteronormative and matching the moral virtues of conservative bigots. That kind of tactic does little to recognize the humanity of LGBT identities and it also leaves a lot of people behind. Read more via Huffington Post
China: Gay people pledge not to enter into sham marriages
A social media campaign has taken off among China's LGBT community which sees members pledging not to enter into sham marriages with straight people. Since last week, a number of users on popular microblogging network Sina Weibo have been posting selfies of themselves with the hashtag #I'm gay and won't marry a straight person#.
Several parents of LGBT people have also posted pictures of themselves with signs declaring they would not pressure their children into marriage.
The campaign was started by LGBT rights group Pflag China. Spokesman Zhou Ying told the BBC they had come up with the idea after noticing greater discussion in the media and online on gay rights and the issue of marriages in recent weeks. Read more via BBC
Philippines: Why call centers might be the most radical workplaces
You may not realize it, but the person on the other side of your customer service phone call might be transgender. On calls, Filipino workers can safely adopt women’s voices, names, and clothing, all while earning a decent wage. But their success at work doesn’t protect them from the discrimination they face outside of it.
In the Philippines, call centers have become havens for gender-nonconforming people, a place where they can experiment with their gender presentation and identity. Since most of the labor takes place over the phone, employees assigned male at birth may adopt traditionally feminine names, take on a “female voice,” or wear women’s clothing while talking to customers, a freedom that would be impossible in most other industries in the country.
For decades, beauty parlors were a rare refuge where gender-variant Filipinas could openly work, at the expense of low wages. But today “call centers are the new beauty parlor,” said Naomi Fontanos, the head of a major Philippine transgender organization and herself a former call center worker. Read more via Buzzfeed
US: New ‘Don’t Be Mean To People’ Beer Is Fighting Bigotry In North Carolina
Craft beer breweries in North Carolina are rallying together against anti-queer House Bill 2 (HB2) by creating a special beer, the proceeds of which will benefit pro-LGBT organizations in the state.
The beer, called “Don’t Be Mean To People: A Golden Rule Saison,” is the subject of an online fundraiser that has already passed $20,000. More than 30 craft breweries have committed to supporting the special brew with many “directly involved in creating the beer“ and others donating “ingredients, supplies, and time or are helping spread the word.” All profits from the beer and any funds raised beyond those needed to help create the beverage will be donated to Equality North Carolina and QORDS summer camp for LGBT youth. Read more via HuffingtonPost
US: The long, winding road to marriage equality
Excerpted with permission from "Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law,"
The path to marriage equality did not begin, of course, with Evan Wolfson’s Harvard Law School paper. The very fact that Wolfson could conceive of such a paper was itself testament to the efforts of countless gay and lesbian advocates before him, operating in far more difficult circumstances.
A good place to start in assessing the prehistory of the marriage equality movement is the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay organizations in the United States. Founded in Los Angeles in 1950, the Mattachine Society ultimately included chapters around the country, and in the 1950s and 1960s was the nation’s leading gay organization. It took its name from masked critics of ruling monarchs in medieval France. At its inception, the very idea of a gay organization was so radical that the group met only in secret.
The invisibility of the “closet” made mobilizing for lesbian and gay rights all but impossible. Thus, the first strategic step toward achieving equality was, as gay rights scholar and advocate Bill Eskridge has called it, a “politics of protection.” The aim was to create space for gays and lesbians to come together without fear of official harassment. Read more via Salon
US Op-ed: LGBT hate is actually losing
The Christian right can no longer directly demonize gays and transgender people, so it has to lie and even the lies are backfiring. In the wake of last year’s loss on same-sex marriage, the Christian Right has begun to act tactically, attacking what it perceives to be the LGBT equality movement’s weakest links. And yet amazingly, this strategy is backfiring. Not only is the right failing to make their easiest cases, they are hardening opposition in those very cases, losing key battles in the areas of transgender rights and religious freedom.
Consider the strategy in North Carolina. North Carolina’s Republican legislature and governor used what they thought would be their best tactic to repeal anti-discrimination ordinances, one that that worked in Houston and elsewhere: that pro-LGBT laws would let men use women’s restrooms.
And notice what North Carolina didn’t do. They didn’t mount a frontal attack on Charlotte’s anti-discrimination law. They didn’t argue that gay people shouldn’t get “special rights.” They sneaked in under the cover of a lie, and still lost, first in the court of public opinion and next, probably, in courts of law. Read more via the Daily Beast
Intersectionality and discrimination
Intersectionality. The main impression this inelegant heptasyllabic word has made on me over the years is the almost automatic way in which any analysis focusing on it tends to indulge in spatial metaphor.
No wonder, as the notion of intersectionality is itself a spatial metaphor struggling to
upgrade itself (or reduce itself, depending on one’s perspective) to a technical legal and/or social science term. This issue of the Equal Rights Review is an ample case in point, as well as, hopefully, a snapshot capturing the current state of understanding among the experts.
Different people mean different things when they talk about intersectionality. That which intersects can relate to identities, prohibited grounds of discrimination, human rights, human rights violations, disadvantages, inequalities, systems of oppression, and so on; and intersectionality itself is referred to variously as a theory, a framework (another spatial metaphor), a method, a practice… The reader will find all of these usages, and more, in this issue alone.
US: After notorious faked study, new work finds that one conversation can curb transphobia
Volunteer door-to-door canvassers who engaged in a 10-minute conversation were able to reduce some voters’ negative feelings about trans people for up to three months, a new study suggests. This decrease in prejudice was greater, the researchers say, than the change in Americans’ feelings toward gay people from 1998 to 2012.
The study, published today in the journal Science, may have strong implications for changing voter attitudes during a time when many cities and states — including Houston, Tennessee, Mississippi, and most recently, North Carolina — are introducing legislation to ban transgender people from certain restrooms, among other things, based on harmful stereotypes about transgender women being sex predators.
The results come nearly a year after the now-notorious study by then-UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour that Broockman and co-author Joshua Kalla exposed as fraudulent. Advocates are relieved that the new study found that those experiences were, in fact, legitimate. Read more via Buzzfeed
Australia: LGBTI Victorians speak out about the issues they want addressed by local and federal government
The Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby recently surveyed LGBTI Victorians about issues they were most important and should be addressed on both a local and federal level.
On a federal level, 88 per cent of respondents said they wanted to see greater legal protections from discrimination, while 85 per cent said they would like to see violence and public harassment addressed. On a local level, 83 per cent of respondents said they wanted to see their local government focus on LGBTI-inclusive health and community services. Read more via Star Observer
Brazil: How to fight transphobic violence
Imagine if one transgender person was murdered every 21 hours in the United States. In Brazil, we don't have to imagine this horrific, overwhelming epidemic of fatal violence against transgender individuals. One transgender person truly is killed every 21 hours, according to a statement from Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring Project emailed to my colleague Eduarda Alice Santos. She is a correspondent for Planet Transgender, an English-language hub for international transgender concerns, who also provided the image above from a "die-in" protest in Rio de Janeiro this year.
Brazil has the world’s highest rate of fatal violence against transgender people. In fact, the South American nation's trans murder rate is 16.4 times higher than anywhere else on the planet. If the world overall experienced Brazil’s transgender murder rate, there would be 1,260 homicides in approximately 70 days worldwide. In a year, we would lose an estimated 6,588 transgender people to homicide. Read more via the Advocate
India: Old custom, new couples
It’s a custom for which India is well known: arranged marriages, when parents pick appropriate spouses for their children based on caste, class, education and looks. By some counts, as many as three in four Indians still prefer to find a partner this way. “Matrimonial” ads — personal ads seeking brides and grooms — have been common in Indian newspapers for decades, and in the Internet age apps and websites have proliferated around the demand.
Now, an Indian-American is bringing these convenient matchmaking tools to gay men and women around the world — even if India won’t recognize their marriages yet.
“The big step for us was when the United States made gay marriage legal,” said Joshua Samson, the CEO of Arranged Gay Marriage. “We knew there is a huge underground gay and lesbian community in India, and we thought why not spread some light out there, help people who feel like they can never be helped?” Read more via PRI