LGBT+ News and Discussions

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Time_Traveller
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

Post by Time_Traveller »

Amazon bows to UAE pressure to restrict LGBTQ+ search results
Thu 30 Jun 2022

Amazon has bowed to pressure from the United Arab Emirates and restricted search results for LGBTQ+-related products such as books and rainbow-coloured flags on its website in the country.

The company decided to restrict the searches after being threatened with penalties by the UAE government, according to the New York Times which first reported the story.

The news comes as Pride month, designed to celebrate LGBTQ+ people around the world every year, comes to an end.

Homosexuality is illegal in the UAE, one of 69 countries in the world that have laws that criminalise being gay.

“As a company, we remain committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, and we believe that the rights of LGBTQ+ people must be protected,” an Amazon spokesperson told the BBC.

However, they added: “With Amazon stores around the world, we must also comply with the local laws and regulations of the countries in which we operate.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ch-results

Amazon gave into the UAE government with their backwards looking country towards the LGBTQ community.
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erowind
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

Post by erowind »

/\ @SerethiaFalcon As a non-binary person myself, who is dating a trans women, I feel your fear intimately. I've been on and off hrt now and am going to try to go back on for another attempt soon. It's very hard, my body doesn't do what I want it to do and in my case I have complex dysphoria that isn't satisfied with either normal human hormone
-_-

In any case, two thoughts I want to add. Our activism, nor the speed of it is not the issue. The people saying and believing these hateful things have always been susceptible to them due to their cultural backgrounds and the worsening economic conditions in America. Reactionary people want scapegoats because their ontological bias in favor of capitalism is too strong, it's easier to blame whatever minority is present to oppress instead of understanding the real socioeconomic problems our country faces, and in many cases, be forced to confront their own egos in the process. As their white and or heteronormative identities have elements that are hostile to the mere existence of other groups, LGBT people being one of them. (That doesn't mean being straight or being of European descent is inherently wrong btw, no one on the forum get it twisted.)

What I'm saying is, that even if we shut up and conformed as much as we could they'd still hate us. And even if we shut up and conformed as much as we could the hate would still escalate because the reason it's escalating has nothing to do with us. LGBT people don't cause inflation, pandemics, wars, etc. The constructive thing to do is fight hard enough to ensure that they can't win the fascist revolution their building right now, that's the direction this is heading. Moreover, I mean fight where one can, and mostly figuratively, obviously don't risk your life.

This does come to the final thing though, if it all comes down to it. And winning isn't an option, nor is becoming a refugee an option, and I am threatened with deadly force or other such brutalization by these people. You can rest assured there will be no laying down my life and submitting to death willingly, I would fight back in self-defense and hope everyone else would too. However humble it may be to walk into a concentration camp I'm sure many of the wrongly imprisoned at Auschwitz had wished they used their prior freedom differently while they had the opportunity.
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SerethiaFalcon
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

Post by SerethiaFalcon »

@Time_Traveller I hate to take sides and agree with you, but with the way people are talking on that side anymore, I have no faith in their desire to preserve my right to even just exist and believe what I believe or follow the path that I choose to follow. I used to try to see from both, but when it comes down to my right to exist, I have a huge problem with that.
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erowind
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Post by erowind »

Time_Traveller wrote: Fri Jul 01, 2022 6:19 am The only way you can do that is to vote all the republicans from the majority of the states in the country.
Politely, this won't work. Vote, do indeed vote and stall them where possible. But they are breaking the law, convention and basic democratic ethics constantly while many democrats collude with them or are otherwise apathetic. This isn't a democracy, voting won't solve the problem, only at best delay it. We need to organize, strike, shut down the streets, force them out of their positions of power and change governmental systems entirely.
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SerethiaFalcon
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

Post by SerethiaFalcon »

@erowind Yeah, it must be so scary for you, I can only imagine. We are such a small population. The one thing I do think is that more people would probably become allies of us, especially with the threat of the government getting too involved in people's sexual lives in general. That would not be a popular move, especially after not having that be a problem for so long. For now, I'm in a state that is more liberal, so I think my fight will be to keep it that way. If we have to fight to defend the space, then I'm sure we will do so, if we can. If I had remained where I was, I don't think there would have been much chance of survival, to be honest. So, turns out, this move seemed to be something positive that I could not have foreseen. I don't much participate in groups and stuff with LGBT people, mainly because in some ways I've been an ideological outlier, being more centrist. But, this will probably force my hand to get more involved and more defensive of a stance. It's just always been our strategy as a couple to be more...blending in when we have to be because we don't fit into any one box of how to be anyway. So, I'll have to think about that. As far as a concentration camp is concerned, I've kind of taken the stance of Jewish people with that. They say "never again the Holocaust." In my own life, I say "never again" to be in a situation where I have no control over my life and others make all decisions for me. My strategy, in that case, is to force their hand to either backdown or kill me, so that I don't have to be a lamb led to the slaughter. So, I'm with you on the self-defense thing.

Also, with the voting thing, I'm aware they are taking that part away for a lot of people too. Do you think that protesting and shutting down things will get them to change, or will it just result in a doubling down of sorts? From my observation, it seems non-violent protesting doesn't force change, only ignoring the problem. But, violent protesting just leads to being labeled "thugs" and being taken to court, etc. So, I don't see any solution that works in this scenario that isn't explained away, blamed on something else, or where the attention is redirected.
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Time_Traveller
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

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Uniformed police not welcome at Pride in London, say organisers
Thu 30 Jun 2022

Pride in London says uniformed officers should not march in the parade, following calls from LGBTQ+ campaigners to bar them due to Scotland Yard’s “homophobic” handling of the investigation into the serial killer Stephen Port.

The move came after the human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said the case, which the independent police watchdog recently announced it was reinvestigating, showed that “institutional homophobia is alive and kicking in the Metropolitan police”.

Tatchell added that the case, as well as other recent revelations of homophobia, racism and misogyny in the force, meant Pride in London needed to take a stand on police officers’ participation in the parade.

He said if the Met police had conducted a proper investigation after the murder of Port’s first victim, Anthony Walgate, the three other young gay men Port subsequently killed would still be alive.

Officers failed to link the deaths between June 2014 and September 2015, despite striking similarities and the fact that three of the men were found in St Margaret’s churchyard, Barking, yards from Port’s home, while the fourth was found outside his flat.

Tatchell said: “While there are many good officers, and they are welcome to march in civilian clothes, Pride needs to challenge the police as an institution, otherwise they will never reform.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... organisers
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Vakanai
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

Post by Vakanai »

SerethiaFalcon wrote: Fri Jul 01, 2022 6:53 amAs far as a concentration camp is concerned, I've kind of taken the stance of Jewish people with that. They say "never again the Holocaust."
Something of note, while they were the primary target and victims of the Holocaust, the Jews weren't in the concentration camps alone - among the Nazis' list of undesirables were homosexuals as well. The LGBTQ community should take the same lessons from those dark times as the Jews have, because they were there with them.

Hopefully such will never happen in America - hopefully such will never happen again anywhere. But the only true guard we have against such things reoccurring again is to be forever vigilant.
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

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Same-sex marriage now legal in Switzerland

Published: 1 July 2022 09:41 CEST

After Switzerland voted to legalise same-sex marriage in a nationwide referendum on September 26th, 2021, the new law has entered into force on July 1st.

Gay and lesbian couples will also be able to convert their registered partnership — which did not provide the same rights as marriage, including for obtaining citizenship and the joint adoption of children — will suffice to convert a current partnership.

https://www.thelocal.ch/20220701/same-s ... itzerland/
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After Facial Feminization Surgery, Transgender People Report Better Psychosocial Health
by July 6, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) A UCLA study offers the first evidence that transgender patients who receive gender-affirming facial feminization surgery reported better mental health after their procedures.

The study was published in the journal Annals of Surgery.

According to Dr. Justine Lee, UCLA’s Bernard G. Sarnat Professor of Craniofacial Biology, gender-affirming facial surgery is frequently classified by insurers as a cosmetic procedure, in part because of a lack of evidence that the procedure improves patients’ quality of life.

“Access to facial gender-affirming surgeries under health insurance coverage in the U.S. is more limited than gender-affirming surgeries of other anatomic regions due to a lack of data on mental health quality-of-life outcomes,” said Lee, who was the study’s lead author and is an associate professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Our findings have the potential to change health insurance policies for the better for transgender patients.”

Researchers compared mental health assessments for 107 patients who were awaiting surgery with those of 62 people who had already completed it, an average of a little more than 6 1/2 months after their procedures.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/958096
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Re: LGBT+ News and Discussions

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Slovenia Legalises Same-Sex Marriage, Adoptions

By STA, 08 Jul 2022, 15:27 PM

The Constitutional Court legalised same-sex marriage and adoptions with immediate effect after finding a law under which only heterosexual partners can marry and same-sex couples cannot adopt children to be in contravention of the constitutional ban on discrimination.

Announcing the news on Friday, the court gave the National Assembly six months to amend the law accordingly, but until the law is amended its ruling stands as the law and means that marriage is a union between two persons regardless of gender, and same-sex partners living in a civil partnership may adopt a child together under the same conditions as married spouses.

The court deliberated on the matter based on a constitutional complaint by two same-sex couples who, respectively, failed in front of regular courts to marry or to make the list of candidates for adoption.

Referring to marriage, it said discrimination against same-sex couples "cannot be justified with the traditional meaning of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, nor with special protection of family."

The decision "does not diminish the importance of traditional marriage as a union of a man and a woman, nor does it change conditions under which persons of the opposite sex marry. All it means is that same-sex partners can now marry just like heterosexual partners can."

https://www.total-slovenia-news.com/pol ... -adoptions
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