start writing you local law makers NOW!
please show up to your local government meetings. they are counting on people now showing up and seeing what they are doing.
All they want to do is protect the children—or so they would have us believe. A swath of bills filed in state legislatures across the U.S. propose to clamp down on public gender nonconformity. To the alarm of queer and trans activists across the country, bills framed as “drag bans” have so far appeared in Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, Texas and Oklahoma. Sometimes the authorities want to restrict drag performers to specified locations; at other times, their scope is much murkier and potentially much wider. Tennessee’s Senate Bill 3, for example, proposes to ban “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest” from performing anywhere they “could be viewed by a person who is not an adult.”
The bills’ often calculatedly vague wording could, many fear, be abused to cover not just drag performers, but all trans and gender nonconforming people. Dressing as a gender different from the one you were assigned at birth is categorized as something that children can’t be allowed to see. At its core, these bills threaten nothing less than the exclusion of trans people from public life.
“Sex, especially when it’s supposedly about protecting sexually vulnerable people, is almost always a Trojan Horse used to censor sexually marginalized people,” Webber said, noting the harms that the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2020 and bills like EARN-IT, which was recently reintroduced in Congress, do to people’s lives. “These policies do little to protect the vulnerable, but do end up preserving white cisheteronormativity. That is apparent when we see which types of sex and which kinds of bodies are most targeted.”
Whenever a banking institution or credit card company changes its policies to be stricter than they already are for the adult industry, the workers feel the fallout directly.
John Oliver discusses the importance of Black hair, the ways it can be a target of discrimination, and some ideas to address that.
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