Discrimination and destitution defines this vulnerable community.
Yesterday, the National Center for Transgender Equality released the 2015 U.S. Trans Survey, the largest survey of trans Americans ever conducted.
More than 27,000 people completed the survey, conducted in September 2015. Of those, about 29% were trans men, 33% were trans women, and 35% were nonbinary or genderqueer. 62% had transitioned, 22% wanted to transition someday, 13% weren’t sure and 3% did not want to transition.
While it’s incredible that NCTE was able to gather so much information, the results of the survey are, not surprisingly, bleak. The ThinkProgress article linked above gathered a handful of stats from each category, including:
77% of those who were out or perceived as trans while in K-12 grades experienced some form of mistreatment at school.
16% of those who had ever had a job lost their job because of their gender identity or expression.
15% of those who had a job in the past year were verbally harassed, physically assaulted, or sexually assaulted at work because of their gender identity or expression.
30% of respondents had been homeless at some point in their lives.
46% had experienced verbal harassment in the past year while going about their daily lives.
9% had been denied access to a public bathroom in the past year.
Transgender people were three times as likely to be unemployed and twice as likely to be living in poverty as the general U.S. population, especially trans people of color.
In spite of so much bad news, here’s Zack Ford from ThinkProgress on how the survey can help us in our work going forward:
The report notes that the sheer number of trans people who came forward to take the survey reflects the increasing visibility that the transgender community has experienced, including those who identify outside the gender binary.
The study also suggests that acceptance is growing, with respondents actually highlighting many family members, classmates, and coworkers who were supportive of their identity.
Moreover, the study is a trove of information about the transgender community and its diversity of experiences. As happened with the NTDS, there will likely be countless follow-up analyses of the data compiled that will serve transgender advocacy for years to come.
We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.
Martin Luther King Jr. (via quakertownsbutt)
The MLK people don’t bother to quote when they pull the WHAT WOULD MLK SAY card as if they know anything about him.
Here is how the internship scam works. It’s not about a “skills” gap. It’s about a morality gap.
1) Make higher education worthless by redefining “skill” as a specific corporate contribution. Tell young people they have no skills.
2) With “skill” irrelevant, require experience. Make internship sole path to experience. Make internships unpaid, locking out all but rich.
3) End on the job training for entry level jobs. Educated told skills are irrelevant. Uneducated told they have no way to obtain skills.
4) As wealthy progress on professional career path, middle and lower class youth take service jobs to pay off massive educational debt.
5) Make these part-time jobs not “count” on resume. Hire on prestige, not skill or education. Punish those who need to work to survive.
6) Punish young people who never found any kind of work the hardest. Make them untouchables — unhireable.
7) Tell wealthy people they are “privileged” to be working 40 hrs/week for free. Don’t tell them what kind of “privileged” it is.
8) Make status quo commentary written by unpaid interns or people hiring unpaid interns. They will tell you it’s your fault.
9) Young people, it is not your fault. Speak out. Fight back. Bankrupt the prestige economy.
The moral bankruptcy of the internship economy | Sarah Kendzior (via brutereason)
solarbird added: see also the intrinsic fraud of the prestigious internship. (via solarbird)
this comes from the top rope.
(via bainard)
I pretty much hit reblog on this after point 1 alone.
“This idea that back then we had made a ‘gay’ movie, [Megan] was a ‘gay’ cheerleader, and now I’m a ‘gay’ prisoner … is such a glaring injustice. You would never say, ‘Oh what’s this movie about?’ ‘It’s this guy, he’s a straight lawyer and he falls for this straight doctor and they go on a straight honeymoon.’”
Natasha Lyonne speaking about But I’m A Cheerleader, Orange is the New Black, and what we really say when we call shows with LGBT characters “gay shows.” (via the Huffington Post)
Justice Department to investigate entire Ferguson police force
NBC News: The Justice Department intends to launch a broad civil rights investigation into the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department, officials said Wednesday.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been investigating the fatal shooting of Michael Brown for the last month, but the new investigation would look into the conduct of the entire department.
Phillip Agnew of The Dream Defenders. The Dream Defenders is a human rights organization that’s building leadership and power among young people of colour to challenge racism in their communities. | Phillip Agnew on All In
It always seemed to me that the people who invented the hierarchy of ‘race’ when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist.
Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (via feministquaintrelle)
Thanks to a generation of massive amounts of standardized testing, our students conceive education primarily as a tool for determining a ranking. The Obama administration’s policy is even called Race to the Top. We have the most read columnist in the country telling us how important it is to raise “standards” so our students don’t fall behind.
For our students’ entire lives we have communicated that the reason to learn things is not to fulfill curiosities, but to see where you stack up relative to others. Grades are no longer a proxy for learning, but a lap time determining how well they’re doing at achieving a secure financial future. Under this system, a “B” is genuine cause for distress. A “C” is a disaster that points towards a ruined life.
At the same time, we have made it increasingly difficult to pay for a genuine education. The burden of loans threatens to strangle adult lives before they really begin. It is now impossible to work your way through college. Concerns over even paying for college are also at an all-time high. We communicate that a college degree is more important than ever and then make it more difficult to achieve.
Students look at the larger culture and see not a ladder of opportunity, but a treadmill of obligation. No wonder they’re distressed.
The Anxiety Crisis | Inside Higher Ed (via notational)
This times a billion trillion.
(via coffee-teach-wine)
And nobody profits from this idea more than textbook companies (especially if they happen to be in the standardized testing game) and the federal government (projected to make $127 billion off of student loan interest over the next 10 years according to forbes.com).
Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past and the historical vestiges of which still afflict black people today. They believe we need policies—though not race-specific policies—that address the affliction. I view white supremacy as one of the central organizing forces in American life, whose vestiges and practices afflicted black people in the past, continue to afflict black people today, and will likely afflict black people until this country passes into the dust.
The recent debate between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait is really fascinating. It started when Coates compared Obama's approach when speaking with all-black audiences to Paul Ryan's recent comments about inner-city culture. It's all worth reading: Coates's first column, Chait's response to the first article, and then Chait's response to the article linked above and Coates's latest response.
If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.
If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.
If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.
If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.
If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.
A Short Post on Rape Prevention (via fucknosexistcostumes)
LIST OF THE WEEK: TEN NATIVE AMERICAN PROTAGONISTS
We thought about what to put here, but these ten Native American protagonists speak for themselves. For more fun lists and all things YA lit, visit our website, follow us here and on Twitter, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter!
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