"Students Sue Department Of Education To Outlaw LGBTQ Discrimination At Christian Colleges"
”Students from 25 religiously-affiliated colleges and universities have filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, claiming the schools are unconstitutionally discriminating against students in the LGBTQ community, as activists look to put pressure on lawmakers while the Senate considers a potentially landmark bill called the Equality Act—which would make LGBTQ Americans a protected class and ban public discrimination against members of the community if the bill is passed and signed into law.”
"Arkansas Senate OKs ban on treatments for transgender youth"
”The Arkansas Senate has approved banning gender confirming treatments for minors, sending the governor a restriction on transgender youth that has been criticized by medical and child welfare groups.”
“Why Transgender Girls Are Suddenly the G.O.P.’s Culture-War Focus"
”Lawmakers in a growing number of Republican-led states are advancing and passing bills to bar transgender athletes in girls’ sports, a culture clash that seems to have come out of nowhere.”
"Bills to ban transgender kids from sports try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist"
”Already this year, lawmakers in more than 25 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender young people from sports. Mississippi enacted a law this month requiring schools to designate teams by gender assigned at birth. Efforts elsewhere are progressing.”
Michael Schulman, "Tallying the Lost Years for LGBT Seniors"
”An art exhibition at a Brooklyn retirement home features twelve of the country’s three million L.G.B.T. elders, many of whom fear having to go back into the closet when they enter senior housing.”
Marce Butierrez and Patricio Simonetto, "No uterus, no opinion? Travestis, Gays & Maricas’ Activism for the Abortion Legalization in Argentina"
”In the early morning hours of 30 December 2020, thousands of protesters surrounded the Argentine parliament. With their masks and green handkerchiefs – the symbol of the National Campaign for Legal, Safe and Free Abortion (NCRLSA) – the crowds celebrated the vote that turned Argentina into the largest Latin American country to legalize abortion. Since the 1970s, Argentine feminist groups have struggled for the right over their own bodies. After decades of activism, the NCRLSA was founded in 2005 as a result of coordinated activities across more than 305 grassroots organizations, from catholic groups to leftist movements.”
Ashley Reese, "Yes, People Are Writing Horny Fanfic About the Suez Canal and the Ever Given"
”At the time of writing, fanfiction platform ArchiveOfOurOwn boasts 27 fanworks with the tag “Suez Canal (Anthropomorphic),” the majority pairing the canal and Ever Given, the container ship at the heart of the chaos. By default, these fics could all fall under the (arguably antiquated) category of “crack fic”—fan fiction that is intentionally absurd, usually written for laughs—but they’re also pretty compelling.”
Article Spotlight
Elizabeth Faue, Josiah Rector; The Precarious Work of Care: OSHA, AIDS, and Women Health-Care Workers, 1983–2000. Labor 1 December 2020; 17 (4): 9–33. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-8643460.
This article examines a series of Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) campaigns for protection from needlestick injuries, led by women health-care workers, from the dawn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s through battles over the 1992 OSHA standard on blood-borne pathogens and the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act of 2000. We argue that these campaigns developed in response to the growing physical precarity of women health-care workers in the era of “managed care,” caused by the intensification and flexibilization of health-care labor and the deregulation and underfunding of OSHA and the CDC. We show how women workers challenged employers, OSHA, and elected federal officials to address workplace health hazards, through unions like SEIU and women’s, gay rights, and public health organizations. More broadly, we argue that the occupational hazards of health-care workers are a crucial but underexplored facet of workplace studies and the history of women workers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
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Episode Spotlight
In the 1960s, the airline industry ramped up its sexualization of stewardesses in order to increase revenues. Decades before the #MeToo movement, flight attendants navigated a workplace in which their employers required them to stay thin, remain unmarried, and squeeze into revealing clothing every day. In the early 1970s, flight attendants organized one of the first campaigns against workplace sexual harassment, assault, and sexual discrimination.
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