The Queer Trans War Ban toolkit has been updated for 2019 with new designs by JB Brager and Chris Vargas. Go and print them out and do outreach in at queer and trans events in your town this summer!
Podcast Interview on Trans Rights
I had the opportunity to talk with Susan Stryker, J Mase III, Liz Coston and the host of 1A, Joshua Johnson recently. You can listen here.
Article about Sylvia Rivera’s Legacy
Don’t miss this article by Raquel Willis, How Sylvia Rivera Created the Blueprint for Transgender Organizing.
New Vice Article about Queer Trans War Ban!
Big thanks to Leila Ettachfini for this new article about Queer Trans War Ban! We are getting ready to create new sticker and poster designs for 2019 summer outreach, so if you have ideas or designs, be in touch!
Continue reading “New Vice Article about Queer Trans War Ban!”
New Syllabi and Article about Feminism and War
Sarah Lazare and I recently published an article raising concerns about the celebratory declarations the media has been making as women take leadership positions in defense industry companies and military and intelligence government agencies. Thanks to Jacobin for republishing it.
In other news, I am teaching Race and Law for the first time this semester, and teaching Gender and Law again and added some new books and articles. I am thinking about pulling together all the reading questions I give the students and posting those with the syllabi as well in case they are of use to other teachers or to reading groups. Look out for those soon!
And here is a picture of my dog Bennie, when he was a puppy, with the dearly departed Shelby.
Interview with Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford
I had the honor of talking to Glen Ford about my dismay at recent celebrations of women leading weapons manufacturing corporations and military and defense agencies in the government. You can listen here.
Organizational Culture Chart
In recent years, I have been spending more of my time helping organizations doing work I care about (mostly work to end borders, police and prisons) to build their organizational infrastructure to make it work and prevent conflicts that can tear us apart. In the course of that, we often have conversations about what the organizational culture is like now, its strengths and challenges, and what they want it to be like. This semester, at the end of my Poverty Law class when we were exploring critiques of the non-profit structure and alternatives, I made a little chart to help my students think about the structures of organizations they have been part of, and to stimulate discussion of how we build organizational culture that benefits the work we are trying to do. These days I am enjoying sharing more bits and pieces of early drafts of things and things that may never be further developed here, so here is this thing!
Building Accountable Communities Video Series
Please watch and share this new video series featuring Shannon Perez-Darby, Kiyomi Fujikawa, and Mariame Kaba, produced by me and Hope Dector.
Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it? What does it look like to be accountable to survivors without exiling or disposing those who do harm? We made four short videos featuring Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby talking about these issues, and then recorded a live discussion between Shannon, Kiyomi, and Mariame exploring models for building accountable communities for the purpose of healing and repair.
The online event:
Part 1: What is Accountability?
Part 2: What is Self-Accountability?
Continue reading “Building Accountable Communities Video Series”
More on pronouns in group spaces and higher ed
In case it is useful, here is a repost of an article I wrote for Radical Teacher some years back about pronouns and about how we talk about purportedly gendered body parts.
We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds
Jen Manion’s thoughtful and provocative essay, The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary, proposes that having participants in group spaces identify their pronouns to each other causes more harm than good. I disagree. For almost two decades, I have been working to address the harm and exclusion that trans people face that lead to astounding rates of poverty, criminalization, deportation, and interpersonal violence. I agree with Jen that there is a lot of work to be done to address these injustices, and that engaging in practices aimed at helping people refer to each other respectfully in group settings is one small part of this work. I do not agree that it is more harmful than beneficial, or that it has run its course and can be discarded.