On June 1st, actress Laverne Cox took to tumblr to reflect on the love and support Caitlyn Jenner received for her Vanityfair cover.

She writes:
It feels like a new day, indeed, when a trans person can present her authentic self to the world for the first time and be celebrated for it so universally. Many have commented on how gorgeous Caitlyn looks in her photos, how she is “slaying for the Gods.” I must echo these comments in the vernacular, “Yasss Gawd! Werk Caitlyn! Get it!” But this has made me reflect critically on my own desires to ‘work a photo shoot’, to serve up various forms of glamour, power, sexiness, body affirming, racially empowering images of the various sides of my black, trans womanhood.


In her essay she explains that although she and Caitlyn Jenner have access to the resources that allow them to embody certain cisnormative beauty standards, many trans people do not have access to these resources nor do all trans people desire to embody cisnormative beauty standards.

Now, there are many trans folks because of genetics and/or lack of material access who will never be able to embody these standards. More importantly many trans folks don’t want to embody them and we shouldn’t have to to be seen as ourselves and respected as ourselves. It is important to note that these standards are also infomed by race, class and ability among other intersections. I have always been aware that I can never represent all trans people. No one or two or three trans people can. This is why we need diverse media representstions of trans folks to multiply trans narratives in the media and depict our beautiful diversities.

She then explains #TransIsBeautiful, a hashtag she started as an inclusive way to celebrate and uplift all trans people.

I started #TransIsBeautiful as a way to celebrate all those things that make trans folks uniquely trans, those things that don’t necessarily align with cisnormative beauty standards. For me it is necessary everyday to celebrate every aspect of myself especially those things about myself that don’t align with other people’s ideas about what is beautiful. #TransIsBeautiful is about, whether you’re trans or not, celebrating all those things that make us uniquely ourselves. Most trans folks don’t have the privileges Caitlyn and I have now have. It is those trans folks we must continue to lift up, get them access to healthcare, jobs, housing, safe streets, safe schools and homes for our young people.



Read more: http://theculture.forharriet.com/2015/06/laverne-cox-reflects-on-caitlyn-jenner.html#ixzz3bvxMpslc

Before being assassinated, Martin Luther King envisioned a Poor People’s Campaign descending on Washington to demand better education, jobs and social insurance. He saw it as an extension of his work on civil rights, equal in importance and scope. In “a nation gorged on money while millions of its citizens are denied a good education, adequate health services, meaningful employment, and even respect,” King wrote in announcing the Poor People’s Campaign, “all of us can almost feel the presence of a kind of social insanity which could lead to national ruin.”

Forty-seven years after the Poor People’s Campaign ended, political discussion in liberal activist circles has bifurcated in unnecessary ways. There are separate economic and racial justice movements, and as my Salon colleague Joan Walsh points out, political leaders too often speak to only one or the other. But these movements are different facets of one fight; if black lives matter, surely their economic lives matter too. And a new report shows that people of color still face discrimination and hardship in their fight for economic dignity, as sure as they do in the fight for basic respect.

The report, released today by the think tank Demos and the NAACP, focuses on African-American and Latino workers in the retail industry. While we’re supposed to believe that e-commerce and Amazon’s dominance has destroyed retail, the industry is actually the fastest growing in America, representing one out of every six new jobs in the economy last year. And while low wages and occupational hazards define retail work generally, that experience is even worse for people of color.

According to the Demos/NAACP study, black retail workers are nearly twice as likely to be living below the poverty line as the overall workforce. African-Americans and Latinos have fewer supervisory roles in retail relative to white counterparts, and more low-paid cashier positions. Among retail workers of color, there are more involuntary part-time employees, who want more hours but cannot receive them. And Black and Latino workers make less than their similarly situated colleagues — 75 percent of the average wage of a retail salesperson, and 90 percent of the average wage of a cashier, for example.
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/02/black_america_is_getting_screwed_shocking_new_study_highlights_the_depths_of_economic_disparities/

The outgoing President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, has signed a bill officially outlawing the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). The law forms part of The Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015, and has been passed by the Nigerian senate.

19.9 million Nigerian women living today have reportedly undergone the brutal procedure, which will now result in a maximum prison sentence of four years, and a £650 fine.

FGM has been defined by the United Nations as: ‘all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.’ Most FGM is carried out on girls from infancy to aged 15 years.

The process is typically carried out by a woman with no medical training. Girls are restrained during the procedure, which is conducted without the use of anesthetics or antiseptic. As a result, the side effects include HIV, organ damage and urine infections. The women will also lack pleasure during sex in later life.

140 million women and girls are estimated to have undergone FGM, worldwide, with the majority of these being in the Middle East and Africa.


Read more at http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/lifestyle/549455/nigeria-criminalises-female-genital-mutilation.html#7wD0lKMm5zezFgiQ.99

Before being assassinated, Martin Luther King envisioned a Poor People’s Campaign descending on Washington to demand better education, jobs and social insurance. He saw it as an extension of his work on civil rights, equal in importance and scope. In “a nation gorged on money while millions of its citizens are denied a good education, adequate health services, meaningful employment, and even respect,” King wrote in announcing the Poor People’s Campaign, “all of us can almost feel the presence of a kind of social insanity which could lead to national ruin.”


Forty-seven years after the Poor People’s Campaign ended, political discussion in liberal activist circles has bifurcated in unnecessary ways. There are separate economic and racial justice movements, and as my Salon colleague Joan Walsh points out, political leaders too often speak to only one or the other. But these movements are different facets of one fight; if black lives matter, surely their economic lives matter too. And a new report shows that people of color still face discrimination and hardship in their fight for economic dignity, as sure as they do in the fight for basic respect.

The report, released today by the think tank Demos and the NAACP, focuses on African-American and Latino workers in the retail industry. While we’re supposed to believe that e-commerce and Amazon’s dominance has destroyed retail, the industry is actually the fastest growing in America, representing one out of every six new jobs in the economy last year. And while low wages and occupational hazards define retail work generally, that experience is even worse for people of color.

According to the Demos/NAACP study, black retail workers are nearly twice as likely to be living below the poverty line as the overall workforce. African-Americans and Latinos have fewer supervisory roles in retail relative to white counterparts, and more low-paid cashier positions. Among retail workers of color, there are more involuntary part-time employees, who want more hours but cannot receive them. And Black and Latino workers make less than their similarly situated colleagues — 75 percent of the average wage of a retail salesperson, and 90 percent of the average wage of a cashier, for example.

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/02/black_america_is_getting_screwed_shocking_new_study_highlights_the_depths_of_economic_disparities/

This post on his family’s Facebook page came on the heels of an InTouch article revealing that Josh Duggar had confessed to his father, Jim Bob, that younger Duggar had molested several girls, reportedly including his sisters, when he was 15 years-old.

In my own Facebook post, I asked the question, “Isn’t molestation a form of sexual assault, and isn’t sexual assault a crime?” I wondered how and why Josh Duggar’s actions could be downgraded from “crimes” to “wrongdoing” and “very bad mistakes.” It seemed to me that Duggar’s perverse actions were being minimized. Several of my friends commented that Josh’s parents had protected him from criminal punishment.

In the state of Arkansas, where the Duggars lived in 2006, first, second, and third degree sexual assault are felonies. Instead of facing the legal system for his deplorable offenses, Duggar received “God’s kindness, goodness, and forgiveness,” in his parents’ words, or “God’s grace, mercy, and redemption,” in his own words.


Read more: http://www.forharriet.com/2015/05/how-white-male-privilege-allowed-josh.html#ixzz3bTPUHoke

How do you explain that the leading cause of death of women aged 15 to 19, worldwide, is suicide? An internationally recognized expert on global mental health and suicide said in an interview with the Telegraph: “The most probable reason is gender discrimination.”

In other words, misogyny kills.

There are plenty of shocking statistics in a recently rediscovered 2014 study on suicide from the World Health Organization. The report found that suicides are responsible for half of all violent deaths in men and 71% of violent deaths in women. It also showed that globally, suicide is the second leading cause of death for all young people between the ages of 15 and 29 years old. Yet, somehow, it took us until now to notice just how badly it affects young women.

It was Dr Suzanne Petroni, the senior director for gender, population and development at the International Center for Research on Women, who first realized the chilling statistic as she was going through a WHO special report on adolescents. In a section on how maternal mortality has dropped, there was almost a throwaway line: “[M]aternal mortality ranks second among causes of death of 15–19-year old girls globally, exceeded only by suicide.”

Petroni called a friend at the WHO to make sure the stat was correct and then dug a little deeper: she found that not only had suicide taken over maternal mortality as the top cause of death for adolescent girls, but she told me: “it was clear that from at least 2000 it was a leading cause of death in this age group”.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/worldwide-sexism-increases-suicide-risk-in-young-women

Despite the era’s prudish, repressed reputation, the Victorians loved a good craze — the weirder, the better. Well-to-do men and women alike found themselves gripped by fashionable momentary obsessions with novelties, from blue-and-white porcelain to orchids to roller skates to spiritual seances. When the late 1870s brought the so-called “Ordinary” or penny farthing bicycle (the epitome of an old-timey bike, with a front wheel many times larger than the rear) into the public eye, the comical-looking contraption was a sensation.

Bicycle mania swept the nation, and the advent of the more manageable “Safety” bicycle — named for its relative safety compared to the high-wheeled penny farthing — meant that even women could get in on the fun. While today it seems completely natural to hop a bike and hit the road, the advent of the bicycle had a hugely liberating (and controversial) impact on women’s lives; for the first time, there was a way for them to leave their houses and embrace their own autonomy without facing social suicide.

A woman born during the Victorian era had precious few options. Middle- and upper-class ladies were expected to marry, give birth to babies (preferably boys), entertain guests, and keep a respectable household — that’s it. A proper lady’s place was in the home, where she whiled away her days strapped into a suffocating corset and cumbersome hoop skirt, minding the servants, popping out children, and serving as an ornamental object for her (hopefully rich) husband to either cossett or ignore as it suited him. Women weren’t meant to exercise their bodies or their minds, which led to generations of frail creatures whose lives were governed by fainting spells and striving for an arsenic-white complexion, no matter how much they secretly yearned to write or debate or explore.

Those who ran afoul of these social conventions ran considerable risk of ostracization and/or "spinsterhood" — a fate which, back then, meant a life of poverty and loneliness. However, once the bicycle entered the picture, all of these bored, idle housewives and daughters were suddenly given a safe, respectable route out of their velvet prisons. They grabbed those handlebars like drowning people straining towards life preservers. As an 1896 issue of Munsey’s Magazine explained, "To men, the bicycle...was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world."
http://www.refinery29.com/women-victorian-era-society-bike-riding

Seventeen years after Viagra, the blockbuster anti-impotency pill, hit the market, not a single medicine has been formally approved for sexual problems in women.

Now, the makers of a drug that purports to boost a woman’s libido by targeting her brain are launching their third attempt to win American government approval, amid a debate over whether there has been a gender bias in the high-stakes field of sexual pharmacology — or a manufactured cure for a medical disease that may not exist.

Next week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will hold a public hearing to review new safety data for flibanserin, a once-a day drug Sprout Pharmaceuticals says restores sexual desire in women by “fixing” an imbalance of brain chemicals that drive sexual excitement and inhibition.

Twice the FDA has rebuffed flibanserin, dubbed “pink Viagra,” over safety and efficacy concerns, leading to charges that the agency is sexist for approving sexual medicines for men, but not for women. Other women’s groups are furious for what they see as a hijacking of feminist rhetoric by drug-company orchestrated campaigns designed to put political pressure on regulators to approve a pill for a “hypoactive” sex drive.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/drug-to-boost-womens-sex-drive-struggles-for-government-approval-as-debate-rages-over-need-for-it#__federated=1

Young women looking to learn more about the feminist wave without wordy articles and extensive think pieces, look no further.

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Freelance illustrator, Ellen T. Crenshaw took cartoons to another level when she contributed to The Nib‘s “We Are Entitled To Wear Cowboy Boots To Our Own Revolution” series, featuring quotes from 10 women in American history who spoke on gender equality and serve as some of the countless faces of feminism.

The cartoonists’ work spotlights powerful words from Sojourner Truth in 1851, to Coretta Scott King’s support of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 1994, to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s infamous TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” in 2012. Other notables made into caricatures include Malala Yousafzai, Beyoncé, Jessica Valenti (feminist writer), Faith Whittlesey (politician), Naomi Wolf (author), and Bette Davis (actress) with their thoughts on power, language, and women’s rights.
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Scroll through the gallery above to get your dose of woman power through Crenshaw’s beautiful illustrations.

Dear Editors and Founders of Rabble.ca

We write to you because we are disturbed by your response to the recent smear campaigns against Rabble contributor, writer, and fellow leftist Meghan Murphy.

We are disappointed in your statement regarding the attacks and the petitions against Meghan. It is troubling that Rabble repeated the libelous claims made about Meghan rather than making a fulsome defense of her right to hold or present opinions critical of the sex industry and its apologists. We note that your statement gives an inordinate amount of attention to appeasing those maligning Meghan.

Attacking Meghan for using her platform to present feminist analysis and critique has the effect of squashing and threatening those whose voices she reflects. As women of colour and indigenous feminists, we are more aware than ever that our dissent is not welcome by Rabble. Your tyrannical enforcement of neo-liberal ideals is to the detriment of women of colour and indigenous women working to end racism, sexism and colonialism in the midst of overwhelming poverty imposed on us by unfettered capitalism and imperialist agendas. We expect more openness, democratic practice and intellectual rigour from you who pride yourselves as progressives and who lay claim to alliance with the oppressed.

Pornography and pop culture portray Indigenous women as “squaws”, Asian women as “geishas”, and Black women as being animalistic – available for any kind of sex with anybody at all times. These profitable and easily consumable images serve to further marginalize racialized women as these oversimplified tropes are turned into commodities to be exchanged through monetary transaction, and thus fuelling a particular demand for these women, who already have very limited choices, in prostitution. Indigenous women, Asian women and Black women are immersed in racialized sexism in our society. The idea of giving “equal opportunity” to all women to be objectified will not help end racism or sexism. In fact, such fetishizing has highly negative consequences particularly for poor, working class women of colour.
http://awcep.org/news/open-letter-rabbleca