Alisha Haridasani Gupta, "Ice Detainees Faced Medical Neglect and Hysterectomies, Whistleblower Alleges"
”Immigrants in a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Georgia are being subjected to horrific conditions and treatment, including “jarring medical neglect” and a high rate of hysterectomies among women, according to a whistleblower complaint filed by several legal advocacy groups on behalf of a nurse who works there.”
Britni De La Cretaz, "It’s Not Just Hysterectomies: The U.S. Has A Long, Shameful History Of Forced Sterilizations"
"From eugenics campaigns a century ago to the current-day hysterectomies being performed in ICE facilities, attacks on the reproductive freedom of marginalized people are baked into the history of the U.S.”
Jonathan Blitzer, “The Private Georgia Immigration-Detention Facility at the Center of a Whistle-Blower's Complaint"
”Roughly seventy per cent of all immigration jails in this country are run by private corporations, and longstanding calls for accountability at these centers have done relatively little to change systematic patterns of abuse.”
Chris Johnson, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion of LGBTQ Rights on the Bench, Dies at Age 87"
”U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of LGBTQ rights, died on Friday, 18 September in Washington D.C. at 87.”
Neil J. Young, "The Long History Behind Donald Trump’s Outreach to LGBTQ Voters"
”Hoping to attract electoral support, Trump is aggressively reaching out to LGBTQ voters. In addition, the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest LGBTQ Republican organization, has launched OUTspoken, a multimedia platform to produce pro-Trump content. Trump’s rhetoric may be new, but the policies he supports and the role of LGBTQ Republicans are not.”
Joshua Mcdonald, “LGBT Community Targeted by Police in Indonesia"
”Homosexuality is legal in Indonesia, apart from in the conservative province of Aceh, but attacks on the community from politicians, police, conservative think tanks, and Islamist and other religious groups have been on the rise in recent years.”
Patrick Kelleher, “Northern Ireland Just Committed to Banning Traumatising Conversion Therapy in a Groundbreaking Move"
”Conversion therapy is defined as the effort to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity. It has been condemned by most major psychiatric bodies and has been described by the United Nations as a form of torture. Despite this, it is still legal in the UK – but plans are now underway to outlaw the harmful practice in Northern Ireland.”
Luke Broadwater and Erica L. Green, "DeVos Vows to Withhold Desegregation Aid to Schools Over Transgender Athletes"
”The Education Department has told Connecticut schools that desegregation grants will be cut off Oct. 1 if they continue to allow transgender students to choose the teams they compete on.”
Julian Borger, “US Reframing of Human Rights Harms Women and LGBT People, Advocates Say”
”Mike Pompeo has stepped up his campaign to change the US approach to human rights, reframing them as “unalienable rights” rooted in American traditions, with a particular emphasis on religious freedom.”
Article Spotlight
Gabriel Rosenberg; “How Meat Changed Sex: The Law of Interspecies Intimacy after Industrial Reproduction.” GLQ October 2017; 23 (4): 473–507. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4157487.
The article explores the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sexual contact between humans and animals to demonstrate how the ecological conditions of late capitalism are remaking sexual taxonomies, practices, and identities. It notes that the majority of these statutes have been enacted within the past three decades and most contain language that explicitly exempts animal husbandry and veterinary medicine from prosecution. The article explores the legislative politics that produce these exemptions and exposes an underlying ambiguity: in the age of industrial reproduction, the “accepted practices” of animal husbandry can be distinguished from bestiality only through legal fiat. The structure of the laws exempts human sexual contact with animals when it reproduces biocapital and produces “perverse” bestialists and “normal” farmers as mirrored categories, distinguished not by their relations to animals but by their relations to capital. Finally, the article reads this insight against the biopolitical theorist Giorgio Agamben's concept of anthropogenesis and notes that such exemptions reveal a limitation in his theory. In place of the timeless ritualism of Agamben's “anthropological machine,” the article argues for an account of speciation that recognizes strategic gradations of pain and pleasure, the critical role of sexual violence and reproduction, and processes of trans-speciative procreation.
Episode Spotlight
For a short time in the 1970s, Canary Conn was everywhere. She was on television. On the radio. And on bookshelves. Her story, that of a Texas-born recording artist, husband and father who transitioned into a woman whom the media described as “young,” “lithe” and “with flowing blonde hair,” captured national attention. Although some newspaper interviews with Canary have been preserved, there are very few accessible recordings of Canary’s many public performances, or her radio and television interviews. What’s more, the trail of evidence disappears after 1980, when Canary inexplicably left the public spotlight and returned to private life. In this episode we introduce and then play a rare extended audio interview with Canary that she recorded with the magazine Psychology Today in 1977. The interview profiles Canary’s childhood, her transition, her sexuality, and her gender identity.
Books
