Tag Archives: sex and gender

Today Is the Anniversary of a Dark Day in Abortion Rights History

Mother Jones

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For decades, millions of low-income women have been prevented from getting Medicaid coverage for their abortions—a reality that disproportionately affects abortion access for women of color. The reason? The Hyde Amendment, an appropriations rider preventing the use of federal funding for most abortions. It was first passed in the House 40 years ago today.

Even in 1976, abortion rights advocates recognized that this amendment would prove detrimental to women’s reproductive health care access. Soon after its passage, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups launched a movement to circumvent Hyde by restoring Medicaid coverage for abortions through state constitutions. Today, 15 states provide public funds for abortion coverage. But efforts to repeal the federal funding ban have gained new momentum over the last year, beginning with the introduction of the EACH Woman Act in Congress in July 2015. The bill has been stuck in committee, but this summer another proposal to repeal Hyde cropped up, this time in the Democratic Party platform, a first. Hillary Clinton also announced her support for a repeal. Now, Democrats are trying to use this momentum—as well as the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, striking down two abortion regulations in Texas—to rejuvenate debate about the country’s ban on public funding for abortions.

But here’s the catch: Even if Hyde is repealed, an old and relatively obscure Supreme Court case, Harris v. McRae, could stand in the way of making public funding for abortion a reality.

The McRae case dates back to 1976, three years after the Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. In those in-between years, low-income women on Medicaid could use their insurance to cover the costs of abortion. And they did: An estimated 300,000 women each year used federal funds through Medicaid to help pay to end their pregnancies. Female federal employees, military personnel, and federal prison inmates also relied on federal money for abortion coverage.

But that changed in 1976, when a freshman congressman from Illinois, Henry Hyde, tacked on to a budget bill an amendment to ban the use of federal dollars toward abortion coverage. Hyde made clear on the House floor that his goal in proposing this amendment was to curb abortion access as much as possible within the confines of the law: “I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” he said. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the HEW Medicaid bill.”

Immediately after the Hyde Amendment was enacted, a group of abortion rights advocates, including the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of women who needed Medicaid abortions and doctors who wanted to provide them, arguing that the law was unconstitutional because it didn’t equally protect the rights of poor women.

In a 5-to-4 decision in 1980, the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment, ruling that even though women should have the choice to abort, the government doesn’t have an obligation to help. “The Supreme Court basically said, ‘The government isn’t creating the problem,'” says Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at Florida State University. “‘If women are too poor to get an abortion, that’s not our problem, that’s just life.'”

Congress has approved the amendment every year since 1980, which it has to do because the measure is still just a rider on the budget. Debate over Hyde more or less went dormant after McRae, save for a failed attempt to drop the rider during the Clinton administration. As a result of Hyde, an estimated 1 in 4 low-income women aren’t able to get the abortions they want because they can’t pay for the procedure.

But Harris v. McRae means getting rid of public funding bans won’t be so easy; even if Hyde no longer exists, prohibitions on Medicaid coverage for abortion would still be constitutional, thanks to McRae. States would not be required to change the way they use public money to cover abortion. And given the conservative and often volatile politics around abortion at the state level, it’s unlikely most would make an effort to do so.

“To end Hyde but to keep McRae in place is to allow public insurance for abortion to float on the political wind,” says Jill E. Adams, a lawyer and the executive director of the Center for Reproductive Rights and Justice at the University of California-Berkeley. “My guess is it would remain the status quo.”

That’s why Adams and CRRJ have focused their attention not on ditching Hyde, but on overturning McRae. “The dream is for the court to say, ‘The nature of the abortion right compels the state to furnish the resources necessary to ensure equal access by all people,'” Adams says, because it would effectively invalidate public funding bans.

Repeal-Hyde advocates, including House Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.), probably know that doing away with the budget rider will not remedy the problem. Lee, along with more than 120 co-sponsors, introduced the EACH Woman Act, a bill to require abortion coverage in Medicaid and other public health insurance programs. In that case, with McRae still alive, federal law and Supreme Court precedent would contradict each other. And yet, according to Adams, the law and the ruling would coexist until another court case was brought.

Either way, the two strategies to overturn federal funding bans might not prove successful anytime soon, despite the momentum from Whole Women’s Health, according to Ziegler. “In terms of the climate in Congress and the will to move abortion policy, it’s going to be really hard to get rid of Hyde.”

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Today Is the Anniversary of a Dark Day in Abortion Rights History

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

Mother Jones

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In the past few years, sexual harassment in the sciences has become an increasingly visible problem. Disturbing allegations about the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and the former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have all made headlines. So have a number of cases involving prominent university professors.

On the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari talks to Sarah Ballard, an accomplished exoplanet researcher who was also a complainant in one of the most high-profile recent harassment controversies. Last year, Buzzfeed reported that Geoff Marcy, a renowned astronomer at the University of California-Berkeley, had faced sexual harassment accusations. A report produced by the university found that Marcy had “violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies”; it cited allegations that he had inappropriately touched students. Initially, Marcy was placed on probation; he was instructed by the university to comply with its sexual harassment policies and to avoid physical contact with students (except to shake their hands).

But the Buzzfeed story sparked a national outcry, and many began demanding a more severe punishment. Marcy posted an apology on his website, though he denies some of the allegations in the report and says that his actions didn’t harm his students’ professional lives. He ultimately retired under pressure from faculty at the university.

On Inquiring Minds, Ballard depicts Marcy as a professor who praised her talent yet abused her trust. She first met him when she was an undergraduate student in one of his classes, but her excitement to work with one of the world’s foremost experts on exoplanets soon took a dark turn. On one occasion, Marcy told Ballard a detailed story about his sexual history. On another occasion, she says, he attempted to massage her neck after driving her home.

After that, Ballard agonized over whether to confront Marcy about his behavior, ultimately deciding to do so. As described in the Berkeley report, this prospect caused “great anxiety” for Ballard, “in part because she believed such a confrontation would effectively forfeit any opportunity of receiving a letter of recommendation” from Marcy. But it never came to that. Ballard says Marcy’s behavior suddenly changed and the harassment stopped. She later found out that a graduate student had confronted Marcy about unwelcome behavior Marcy had allegedly exhibited toward a different student.

Marcy didn’t deny Ballard’s allegations—though he does deny some of the other allegations in Berkeley’s report. (According to the Berkeley report, he told the university investigator that he didn’t recall touching Ballard in the car but that it was possible he did.) In an interview with Mother Jones, Marcy’s attorney, Elizabeth Grossman, argued that Marcy’s actions weren’t serious enough to justify the backlash he’s experienced. “There is not a single allegation of sexual assault against Marcy,” said Grossman. “There is not a single allegation of soliciting sex, of requesting sex in exchange for academic favor. There is not a single suggestion of his interfering with anyone’s ability to thrive on campus.”

Ballard, however, says she was deeply affected by her interactions with Marcy. “To have Marcy say, ‘You are talented, you are full of promise’— that is so compelling,” she explains. “And then to have all of the sudden the knowledge that…that message might not have been delivered in good faith: You feel like the rug has been pulled out under you. So does that mean that I’m not promising? Does that mean that all of it was a lie?…It was profoundly rattling to my nascent sense of self as an astronomer, as a scientist.”

Years later, when Ballard heard that allegations against Marcy were going to become public, she made the decision to come forward and identify herself as one of the victims. She hopes that by doing so, she’ll make things easier for other women.

“There was one principle which helped me to unravel the tangled knot of my feelings that I could always return to…and that was you have to be the woman you needed then,” says Ballard. “You couldn’t protect yourself then, but you can protect younger you today, and you can protect women who are 20 today.”

Ballard went on to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard (she notes that Marcy wrote a recommendation letter that helped her get into the prestigious university). She now researches exoplanets at MIT. But across the country, many other women have left the sciences. That’s partly because of widespread sexual harassment, argues Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Indeed, a 2014 study found that roughly two-thirds of female scientists surveyed said they had experienced harassment while doing field research.

In January, Speier gave a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives recounting the allegations against Timothy Slater, who taught astronomy at the University of Arizona and is now a professor at the University of Wyoming. Speier had obtained the results of a confidential 2005 investigation conducted by the University of Arizona. “Dr. Slater himself admitted that he gave an employee a vegetable-shaped vibrator and that he frequently commented to his employees and students about the appearance of women,” said Speier on the House floor. “My staff spoke with one female grad student who was required to attend a strip club in order to discuss her academic work with Dr. Slater. The woman has since left the field of astronomy.” After reading the report, “I was physically sickened,” Speier says on Inquiring Minds.

Slater declined to answer specific questions from Mother Jones about the allegations, though he did provide a letter his lawyers had sent to the University of Arizona threatening to sue the university for defamation and breach of privacy over the release of the report. In the letter, Slater’s attorneys said the university’s report “contains numerous false and misleading allegations, which Rep. Speier and the media has reported as fact.” Specifically, the attorneys state that Slater “never gave a vibrator” to “any graduate student, ever” and that Slater “denies that he ever pressured anyone to go to the strip club or that anyone ever complained about going to strip club.”

Speier proposes one solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the sciences. The federal government has the power under Title IX to fight harassment, she notes. Because so many universities, even private ones, rely on federal dollars, they could lose federal funding in the form of grants or student loans if they violate the law. Last week, she introduced legislation requiring universities to inform federal grant-making institutions when they determine a professor has engaged in sexual harassment.

Speier isn’t optimistic that the bill will pass in the current Congress, but she wants harassment victims to know they have an advocate on Capitol Hill. Her message to them? “They’ve been heard.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

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Here’s the Problem With California’s Groundbreaking Sex Ed Law

Mother Jones

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Five years ago, budget cutbacks in the Fresno Unified School District put an end to “Sociology for Living,” a half-year course for ninth graders—and the only mandatory class taught in the 74,000-student district that involved sex education. Fresno has some of California’s highest rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia, plus the sixth-highest teen birth rate in the state. Yet school officials dismantled the curriculum, according to an investigation by the Fresno Bee, passing off lessons from the class, including HIV prevention, to other teachers. They explained the cut as a way for students to fit more AP classes and electives into their schedules.

A local teen pregnancy prevention group, Fresno Barrios Unidos, soon began a four-year effort to institute comprehensive sex education, according to executive director Socorro Santillan. They met with school board officials and trained youth to advocate comprehensive sex education in their high schools. But only after California passed the Healthy Youth Act in October 2015, making sex education mandatory in all districts, were they able to reach an agreement with the district. Classroom teachers would cover basic lessons like goal setting and life planning, while Fresno Barrios Unidos volunteers would teach subjects that were, Santillan says, “a little more touchy,” like STDs and birth control.

When the Healthy Youth Act passed last fall, California joined 23 other states in requiring that all schools teach teenagers about sex. But California’s law goes further, mandating that comprehensive lessons start in middle school and include information on abortion, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. It’s also the only state to require sex education be medically accurate, age-appropriate, and culturally inclusive, without promoting religion. Sharla Smith, who has overseen HIV and sex education for the California Department of Education since 2005, calls the new law “the most robust sex education law in the country.” Most lessons will start this school year.

There’s just one problem: The state has little way to ensure school districts teach to these new standards. While Smith heads a team that keeps in touch with counties and districts, the state stopped auditing districts for compliance about four years ago because of dwindling funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We’re trying to do the best we can by hook or by crook,” Smith said. “I literally just do not have the money.”

“How will we know that everyone is actually being taught this? Because the law has gotten a lot of publicity,” said Christopher Pepper, who oversees San Francisco Unified’s sex education program. “I’m hoping that leads to greater compliance.”

While districts like San Francisco and Los Angeles Unified have long taught comprehensive sex education and are simply tweaking parts of their curriculum or adapting existing lessons for middle school use, it’s a different story in poor, rural areas like the Central Valley, according to Phyllida Burlingame, who works on the issue for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Northern California office. With fewer resources and a more conservative culture, some of those districts have a history of ignoring even the state’s old, looser requirements. That was the case in Clovis Unified School District, which the ACLU sued in 2012 for inadequate sex education—including using a textbook that lacked a single mention of condoms. (A judge ruled against the district last year.) “School district administrators feel that this is a complicated and challenging subject and parents in their community may not support it,” Burlingame said. “They tend to self-censor what they teach.”

Since 2003, the state has told schools that if they chose to teach sex education, they had to make sure lessons were comprehensive rather than focused on abstinence until marriage. Yet a 2011 survey from researchers at the University of California-San Francisco found that many school districts were not complying with the law. Forty-two percent did not teach about FDA-approved contraception methods in middle and high school, and only 25 percent mentioned emergency contraception. Sixteen percent told their students that condoms “are not an effective means” of protecting against pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease—an inaccurate statement, the study noted.

“California’s state financial crisis has eroded much of its network of valuable preventative health programs for young people, making schools one of the last strongholds for providing adolescents with comprehensive sex education,” the authors wrote. “Policies set at the district level may not correspond to the actual instruction taking place.”

After the financial crash, many schools also stopped teaching health classes or changed them from a graduation requirement to an elective, Smith says, and lessons on HIV and STD prevention were incorporated into science or English classes instead. Schools that dropped their health programs will not be subject to a second law, also passed last year, requiring health curricula to include information on affirmative consent—the “yes means yes” standard for consent on California college campuses.

Smith is optimistic, though, that schools will continue to react to rising STD rates among teenagers by implementing the comprehensive lessons required under the new law. “Schools have really been clamoring to teach more sex education, saying we need to do this for our students’ health,” she said.

Still, in the absence of state oversight, the task of ensuring that school districts are talking to kids about safe sex will fall to local groups like Fresno Barrios Unidos. And as the schools get back into gear for the fall and begin implement their lessons, the ACLU will be watching and lending support, Burlingame says: “Districts are aware of this new law and understand they should be implementing it. We’re counting on them to do so.”

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Here’s the Problem With California’s Groundbreaking Sex Ed Law

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High Schools Are the Next Battleground in the Fight Over Transgender Athletes

Mother Jones

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Robby Dyas didn’t play very much as a freshman on Lincoln High School’s softball team. The shortstop got a concussion from a pop fly early in the season, and spent the following weeks learning “a lot about the strategic side” of the game from the bench. After that, Dyas was done with softball.

The Nebraskan teen was also done being a girl: Junior year, Dyas came out as transgender and began using male pronouns and the name Robby. But the longtime athlete—who’d competed in taekwondo, basketball, wrestling, and softball as a kid—never got to pitch overhand. “I just remember getting a rude comment about girls playing on the baseball team,” he recalls.

This year, transgender teens may have a better shot at high school sports in Nebraska: The state’s new policy allows trans girls and boys to compete on teams corresponding with their gender preference. But before they can do that, they’ll have to prove to a four-member Gender Identity Eligibility Committee that they’re “consistently” transgender. Trans girls, who are born male but identify as female, will have to undergo sex reassignment surgery or a year of hormone therapy to play.

Nearly 40 states have adopted policies for high school transgender athletes. Some allow students to play on teams based on gender identity, without any kind of hormone requirement, while others restrict them to teams matching the sex on their birth certificates. Nebraska’s policy takes a middle road—and has fueled outrage on all sides. It also comes at a time of national debate over trans rights in schools. Nearly half of all states are currently suing the Obama administration over whether Title IX, a law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded schools, should protect trans kids, too. While that legal battle centers on questions of bathroom access, experts say it could also affect athletic participation.

In the crosshairs will be kids like Robby Dyas and Asher Wells, another trans boy at Lincoln High. Wells takes gym classes during summer school instead of the regular academic year so he can avoid the girls’ locker room. When I first spoke to him, he was pondering whether to try out for the boy’s tennis team before he graduates.

It might be simpler if Asher were just a few years older. In college, the aspiring tennis player would probably get to choose whether to try out for the men’s team or the women’s team, without having to brave any gender committees; that’s because the NCAA, which makes rules for college sports at universities around the country, came up with a policy for trans athletes back in 2011. Trans men who take testosterone—to appear more masculine—can only play on men’s teams, since the hormone has been linked with muscle mass. Those like Asher, who aren’t taking testosterone, can play on whichever team they prefer. And trans women, born with male bodies, need to medically suppress their natural testosterone levels if they want to compete against other women. (In January, the International Olympic Committee updated its policy to include similar regulations.)

At first, many high schools followed the NCAA’s lead. Some hadn’t given much thought to creating their own policies, because until recently they “really hadn’t had a lot of kids come up through the school ranks identifying as transgender,” notes Karissa Niehoff, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Schools, whose policy for trans athletes once mirrored the college guidelines. Then her association, like some in other states, changed its tune, perhaps realizing that college and high school sports aren’t the same—different ages, different goals. Connecticut ditched its hormone-based policy in 2013 and adopted more inclusive rules, allowing kids to play based on their self-identification as male or female.

Pat Griffin, a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who helped develop the NCAA’s hormone-based policy, supports that kind of move. High schoolers shouldn’t have to take hormones, she says, because at that age, “most students are playing to participate.”

But absent a national governing body, high school guidelines vary widely. In Texas, a new rule prohibits students across the state from participating on teams that don’t match up with the sex on their birth certificates. On the other hand, in 2013 California became the first state to pass a law allowing trans students to play on teams matching their gender identity, no hormone therapy required; about 15 states now have similar policies. A handful of other states require trans girls to take hormones for a year before playing on girls’ teams. (See map below.)

Chris Mosier/TransAthlete.com

In Nebraska, the school athletics association had never been able to pass an athletic policy for gender-nonconforming kids, in part due to the state’s deeply conservative roots. Then in 2015, two schools alerted the Nebraska School Activities Association about some trans students who wanted to compete on winter sports teams, so the NSAA decided to take up the issue again.

In January this year, the NSAA announced its big idea: A Gender Identity Eligibility Committee will make decisions on a case-by-case basis for trans student athletes who want to play on teams matching their gender identity. The committee—made up of a doctor with experience in trans health care, a mental health professional, a school administrator, and an NSAA staff member—will consider testimony from the student’s parents, friends, and teachers, plus medical documentation, to make sure the student consistently identifies as transgender. It will also require trans girls to have sex reassignment surgery or a year’s worth of hormone therapy to reduce testosterone levels. And to play on a team, a student will need unanimous approval from the committee.

The backlash came quickly, with critics on the left decrying the gender review process as burdensome. “They have essentially put up a sign that transgender students need not apply,” said Amy Miller, a legal director for the ACLU. For starters, critics say, many teenagers don’t want to go on hormone therapy. “It’s expensive, it’s a lot of effort, it’s like going through puberty again,” says Dyas. And the idea of proving your gender to a group of strangers can be intimidating: “I would not be comfortable with that,” says Dyas, who organized a protest against the policy at the state Capitol with a handful of trans-rights supporters.

Critics on the right worry the policy makes it too easy for trans kids to compete. “As the father of two daughters, I would be very concerned about boys competing against my daughters in sports,” Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts said. The Nebraska Catholic bishops weighed in, too, noting that “this would certainly have a negative impact on students’ and society’s attitudes towards the fundamental nature of the human person and the family.”

Another concern is competitive advantage. When a trans girl raced in a high school track and field state championship in Alaska in May, protesters showed up at the track. “Allowing students to play on teams of the opposite sex disproportionately impacts female students, who will lose spots on a track, soccer and volleyball teams to male students who identify as female,” said Jim Minnery, president of the conservative group Alaska Family Action. Karissa Niehoff, of the Connecticut Association of Schools, says signs of a competitive advantage haven’t come to fruition in her state since it dropped its hormone-based policy for trans teen athletes.

Susan Cahn, a professor at the University at Buffalo who wrote Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, can understand why female athletes might be wary about trans competitors. “Historically, girls and women have been the disadvantaged group, and they’ve been kept out of sports or haven’t been given the same kinds of training or resources,” she says. But trans kids are a disadvantaged group, too, who often put up with bullying and discrimination, she points out.

And even when we segregate sports by sex, certain kids have physical advantages. For boys’ sports, “if you look at a 9th- or 10th-grade team, you’ve got these little kids who haven’t hit puberty yet, and these giant kids, boys who have totally hit puberty. They have completely different bodies, and no one says they shouldn’t play together,” she explains. What’s more, a kid can have an upper hand for reasons unrelated to sex, like if his family has enough money to pay for summer training camps or traveling teams with the best coaches. Of all the different types of advantages, she says, testosterone is not the most critical, especially for teenagers, “so to fixate on that one is really about the politics of gender and not actual bodies.”

And the politics of gender—or rather, gender identity—have reached a fever pitch, not only in Nebraska, but on the national stage. In May this year, the US Department of Education sent a letter to public schools across the country, saying they could lose federal funding if they discriminated against transgender students. The letter made waves for its guidance on bathroom access—it said trans kids should be allowed to use facilities of their choice. It also called on schools to allow transgender kids to play on sports teams matching their identity, notes Sarah Axelson, a Title IX expert at the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Leaders in many states saw this letter as an overreach. So they turned to the courts. Now, Nebraska and 22 other states are suing the Obama administration, arguing that it has interpreted Title IX too broadly by including protections for transgender kids. On August 21, a federal judge in Texas ruled in their favor, granting a nationwide injunction that temporarily blocks the Obama administration from enforcing the recommendations in its letter about transgender rights. The administration is expected to appeal. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court is considering whether to take up a separate case about whether Title IX protects transgender students. Griffin, who helped develop the policy for trans college athletes, says she suspects that if Nebraska and other states prevail in their legal fight with the Obama administration, it will affect not only bathroom access, but sports participation.

Nebraska’s new athletic policy, adopted before this legal drama unfolded, says trans athletes have to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding with their birth sex or, when possible, a private facility—even if they qualify to play on teams matching their preferred gender.

“You’ve fought and you’ve fought to be able to play on the sports team,” Dyas says in response to this caveat. “And finally you’re allowed to be the boy, you’re allowed to have everything you’ve ever wanted. And then right then and there, they rip it all out of your hands and are like, ‘But actually you can’t even use the locker room.'”

Jim Tenopir, the head of Nebraska’s high school athletics association, acknowledges that this rule “flies in the face of” the Obama administration’s guidance but aligns closely with the state of Nebraska’s position on protecting the privacy rights of other kids.

Asher Wells just started his junior year at Lincoln High. He’d been considering whether to try out for the boys’ tennis team this year, but in the end he decided against it. Even if he were good enough, he worries the Gender Identity Eligibility Committee wouldn’t approve his application, he says. “And I would have to get a school physical exam, and I haven’t done that because I feel uncomfortable.” He’s also nervous about getting bullied during matches at other schools. “I’ll think about it for next year,” he says.

As executive director of the NSAA, Tenopir says he intended to create an athletic policy that gave all Nebraskan kids a chance to compete, regardless of gender identity: “Although there may be some steep hills that a transgender student has to climb to be eligible to participate, at least that opportunity is there.”

Tenopir acknowledges that high school “is probably a borderline age for kids to consider” hormone therapy. But he adds that the policy would have never been approved without this requirement—given the political muscle of right-leaning critics who argued that trans girls would otherwise have an unfair advantage. “You don’t begin to have an idea what conservative values are until you get to a place like Nebraska,” he says.

As the school year kicks off, it’s unclear when the state’s new Gender Identity Eligibility Committee will be put to the test—Tenopir says that so far, not a single transgender student has applied.

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High Schools Are the Next Battleground in the Fight Over Transgender Athletes

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A Federal Judge Just Stopped Trans Students From Using the Bathrooms of Their Choice

Mother Jones

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The school year is off to a rough start for transgender students. A federal judge in Texas has given public schools across the country permission to ignore the Obama administration’s instructions to let trans kids use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, rather than their birth sex.

In May, the US Department of Education sent a guidance to public schools, saying they could lose federal funding if they kept trans kids out of bathrooms of their choice. On Sunday, a federal judge in Texas granted a preliminary, nationwide injunction that blocks the department’s guidance from being enforced. The injunction also prevents the Obama administration from using the guidelines in any lawsuits.

The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by 13 states against the Obama administration over the federal government’s position on bathroom choice for students.

“Defendants have conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights,” representatives for the states wrote in the lawsuit filed in May. The case was filed by a long list of state attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas, Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

A main question in the case is whether Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools, also bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The Obama administration says it does. The suing states argue that references to “sex” in Title IX refer only to biological sex.

US District Judge Reed O’Connor granted the nationwide injunction because the states that filed the lawsuit have a strong chance of winning their case, he wrote in his decision, which was filed on Sunday.

“It cannot be disputed,” he wrote, “that the plain meaning of the term sex as used…following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical difference between male and female students as determined at their birth.” He noted that the injunction would only apply to states that want to separate school bathrooms according to biological sex. Other states can maintain policies allowing kids to use facilities based on gender identity.

“I’m pleased the court has ruled against the Obama Administration’s latest overreach,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on Twitter following the decision. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union, which has represented transgender students in other civil rights cases, and four other civil rights groups blasted the judge’s ruling in a joint statement.

“The court’s misguided decision targets a small, vulnerable group of young people…for potential continued harassment, stigma and abuse,” the statement said.

The impact of the injunction may be limited, however. Legal experts told the New York Times that higher-level courts in other regions have previously sided with the Obama administration’s view that transgender people are protected by existing anti-sex-discrimination laws, and those rulings won’t be affected by the new injunction.

The Texas decision follows a similar order from the US Supreme Court. Earlier this month, the high court’s justices temporarily blocked a transgender boy in Virginia from using the boys’ bathroom at his school while the justices decide whether to take up a case concerning that school board’s bathroom policy. If the justices agree to hear the case, it would be the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue.

The 13 states suing the Obama administration include Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, Maine, Arizona, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Separately, 10 other states sued the Obama administration in July over the same issue. Those states include Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

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A Federal Judge Just Stopped Trans Students From Using the Bathrooms of Their Choice

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2 Months, No Food: The Story of a Transgender Inmate’s Hunger Strike

Mother Jones

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A transgender inmate at a local San Francisco jail just ended a dramatic two-month hunger strike in protest of her housing situation. Over the course of her strike, Athena Cadence lost 40 pounds and was sent to the hospital at least three times, according to trans rights advocates working on her behalf. On Wednesday, she was taken to the hospital after a judge ordered for her release from jail.

San Francisco County doesn’t house prisoners according to their gender identity. Instead, trans inmates are currently held together in a segregated area of a men’s facility, at least until the county decides how to handle their housing in the long term. Before going on hunger strike, Cadence said she had been mocked by inmates, deputies, and other staff for being transgender. She filed multiple grievance forms to express her frustration. But she says they did little to make the harassment stop.

When I visited her in July, 35 days into her hunger strike, Cadence was drained of energy. During her protest, she refused all solid foods, only consuming rehydration salts in water and vitamins, amounting to about 150 calories per day. She told me she couldn’t stand for more than a short period of time and spent most of her days napping. But her cheeks were still rosy and she spoke clearly. “Playing ball the way the sheriff’s department wanted to through paperwork and meetings wasn’t going to work,” she told me. “I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose.”

The vast majority of transgender inmates across the country are housed according to the gender they were assigned at birth, putting them at risk for abuse. In 2012, the Department of Justice instructed jails and prisons to give serious consideration to transgender inmates’ placement preferences—rather than just housing them according to their “genital status.” But those guidelines were rarely followed, according to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on criminal justice. So in March, the DOJ doubled down, releasing a new directive that again emphasized that any housing policy “must allow for housing by gender identity when appropriate.”

For the past two years, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department has been working with advocates on an updated policy that allows trans inmates to be housed according to their gender identity. In September 2015, the Sheriff’s Department announced that the new policy would be in place by the end of the year, and the city was heralded as a leader in the correctional community. But December came and went, and inmates continued to be held in a segregated wing of the downtown facility while the new sheriff, Vicki Hennessy, carried on drafting the policy.

According to Eileen Hirst, chief of staff for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, changing the way the jail handles trans inmates has been a priority from day one, but it’s more complex than it would seem. “There’s a tendency to think this is about putting trans women in women’s housing and trans men in men’s housing, and everything’s fine,” she says. “But it’s a lot more complicated. What needs to happen is a change in policy from the moment an individual walks in the door to be booked into custody.” New guidelines would need to address inmate classification, searches, and programming access—not just inmate housing.

Before she ended up in San Francisco County Jail, Cadence was a soldier in the Army. In 2006, she was deployed to Iraq, where she came out as trans to some of her fellow soldiers and presented as female off base. Even in the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, she described her gender identity as mostly a “nonissue” while she was enlisted.

But that wasn’t the case in the San Francisco County Jail. “Of course I’ve experienced some harassment before thism but never so violent,” she said of her experience there. Cadence said that even though trans inmates are held separately from the general population, they are often cat-called and harassed by male inmates in neighboring cells. “Men stare at us a lot,” she said. “They stare at us in bed.”

Being in a male detention area also meant being searched by male deputies. Cadence told me she’d been strip-searched by men four times since she arrived. That changed in June when Sheriff Hennessy ordered supervisors to first ask for a female volunteer to conduct a strip search if a trans inmate requests it. However, if no women deputies volunteer, the directive says the jail should stick to its current strip-search policy, which is based on “the genitalia of the individual.”

Although the sheriff’s department says that housing trans inmates separately from the general population is meant to protect them from harassment by other inmates, Cadence said it didn’t protect them from harassment from staff. During a strip search, one staff member allegedly told her that she should chop off her genitals. In another incident, she says, a deputy bent her fingers backward so far that her knuckles turned black and blue. The Transgender Law Center, which has been representing her, says Cadence filed multiple complaints related to verbal harassment and misgendering by staffers. Hirst said she couldn’t comment on specifics but said that the jail is investigating Cadence’s claims “as we do any complaint from a prisoner.” The jail has also been working since last year on developing trans-awareness training for all members of the department.

Abuse of transgender inmates by staff members is a problem across the country, both in jails and in prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that between 2011 and 2012, about 18 percent of trans inmates experienced sexual victimization by jail staffers, compared with just over 2 percent of inmates in the general population. Transgender inmates who’ve been harassed are often placed in solitary confinement—which ends up being more like a form of punishment than a means of protection.

This week, Cadence’s hunger strike came to an end. On Tuesday, a judge determined that she had served enough time and ordered her released from the jail’s custody. The next morning, she was sent to the hospital to begin reintroducing food.

But the rest of the transgender inmates at SF County Jail remain in the men’s section of the facility. Last week, advocates sent a revised policy proposal back to the sheriff’s department for review. Hirst says she doesn’t know when the new housing policy will be finalized. Still, she expressed admiration for what Cadence has put herself through: “An individual who feels strongly enough about the issue to have a hunger strike, who is very committed, and who is seeking social change—that has to be respected.”

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2 Months, No Food: The Story of a Transgender Inmate’s Hunger Strike

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Comic Phoebe Robinson Is Tired of Being the Token Black Girl

Mother Jones

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Perhaps you know and love her from 2 Dope Queens, the comedy podcast she co-hosts every week with Jessica Williams of Daily Show fame. Perhaps you don’t know her yet. But Phoebe Robinson is someone you’ll want to familiarize yourself with if you like funny interviews about race, gender, and the struggle of being a young adult. Now you’ll have more ways to listen to her: Robinson’s new podcast, Sooo Many White Guys, launches today on WNYC.

In each episode, Robinson says she will talk to people who are “killing it”—whether in music, TV, comedy, books, or anything in between. The first show’s guest is hip-hop artist and vocal Black Lives Matter supporter, Lizzo. Upcoming guests include actress Nia Long (known for her role as Lisa on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), trans-rights activist Janet Mock, and Broad City‘s Ilana Glazer, the executive producer of the podcast. “I’m picking them because they’re talented, but also because…they’re not just straight up white dudes,” Robinson says in the show’s trailer.

At the end of the season, Robinson plans to speak to one white man (“the token”), who will have to speak on behalf of white people everywhere. Sound familiar?

“Coming from a comedy background where cis straight white dudes are the norm and everyone else is the ‘Other’ or the token, it feels great to flip that and have the majority of the guests on SMWG be women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks and not reduce them to what they identify as on a census form,” Robinson said.

Before 2 Dope Queens, Robinson served as a staff writer for MTV’s Girl Code and performed stand-up comedy in New York, particularly at famed improv theater the Upright Citizens Brigade. She also recently finished her first book, You Can’t Touch My Hair, which will hit shelves this coming October.

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Comic Phoebe Robinson Is Tired of Being the Token Black Girl

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Are Your Favorite Late-Night Shows Sexist?

Mother Jones

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The controversy over a recent Daily Show tweet and the departure of one of the show’s rising comics has put a spotlight on how few women have roles on screen and behind the camera at television’s top late-night comedy shows.

And when Mother Jones did spot-check of several programs’ credits, the numbers read like a terrible punchline that female comics know all too well. While Full Frontal‘s Samantha Bee and past late-night hosts such as Chelsea Handler have helped blaze the path for women, the people penning the jokes for the most popular shows are still overwhelmingly male.

At eleven of television’s most popular late-night programs, just 30 of 175 writers were women, according to credits for episodes that aired this year. In other words, less than 18 percent of late-night comedy writers at the most popular sketch and talk shows are women. That is significantly lower than the number of female television writers overall, according to a study published earlier this year by the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism: In broadcast TV, women make up 31.6 percent of writers, compared with 28.5 percent in cable and 25.2 percent for shows that are streamed over the internet. Film still trails dismally behind—only 10.8 percent of writers are female. Though female writers find more work in television than their counterparts in film, the gender imbalance in comedy programming has continued to lag.

University of Southern California MDSC Initiative

This issue came up again after Monday’s historic US Supreme Court decision, which struck down several restrictive abortion measures in Texas. People took to social media to express relief about the ruling, which will prevent the state’s remaining abortion clinics from shutting down. It came as a surprise to some fans when The Daily Show With Trevor Noah posted what some said was a rather tone-deaf tweet.

The tweet, meant to show support for the ruling, did not land well with Twitter users on both sides of the abortion debate. One even suggested The Daily Show could avoid snafus like this by hiring more female writers. The Daily Show did not issue an apology, but it did post a follow-up tweet for clarification:

That Twitter user who clamored for more women writers raises a good point. Although The Daily Show is known for left-leaning jokes and its snarky take on American politics, the backlash to this tweet is an example of what can happen when a group of mostly male writers try to make a joke about women’s issues without much female input. Now, even fewer women will be on the show’s payroll. On Wednesday, Daily Show darling and four-year correspondent Jessica Williams announced she would be leaving the show after this week to begin work on a pilot. Williams, the youngest correspondent to join the show, inked a development deal with Comedy Central in March.

There are currently eight regular correspondents on the program, and after Williams’ departure, there will only be one female correspondent on a team of seven. The female correspondents are not credited as writing staff. Nor are the three women who are listed as semi-regular contributors on the Daily Show’s website. That means the ratio of male to female writers at The Daily Show is not any better than it is for similar programs: There are five times as many men as there are women in The Daily Show‘s writers’ room.

We took a look at the closing credits of the recent episodes of the most popular late-night shows. To get the most accurate count possible, we looked at the credits of each show or the Writers Guild of America website to verify the names of every writer. We used Twitter and IMDB to verify the gender of each writer.

Late Night with Seth Meyers, as of June 2016 (NBC):

Total credited writers: 17

Men: 14

Women: 3

Saturday Night Live, as of May 2016 (NBC):

Total credited writers: 24

Men: 20

Women: 4

The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, as of June 2016: (Comedy Central)

Total credited writers: 19

Men: 16

Women: 3

The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, as of June 2016 (Comedy Central)

Total credited writers: 15

Men: 11

Women: 4

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, as of June 2016 (HBO)

Total credited writers: 11

Men: 9

Women: 2

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, as of June 2016 (CBS)

Total credited writers: 18

Men: 16

Women: 2

The Late Late Show With James Corden, as of June 2016 (CBS)

Total credited writers: 14

Men: 11

Women: 3

Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, as of June 2016 (TBS)

Total credited writers: 9

Men: 5

Women: 4

Real Time With Bill Maher as of June 2016 (HBO)

Total credited writers: 10

Men: 10

Women: 0

*Recent episode credits were unavailable for Conan, The Tonight Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. The following numbers are from the 2016 Writers Guild Awards nominations.

Conan, as of December 2015 (TBS)

Total credited writers: 17

Men: 15

Women: 2

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, as of December 2015 (NBC)

Total credited writers: 21

Men: 18

Women: 3

Jimmy Kimmel Live, as of December 2014 (more recent list unavailable; not included in tally) (ABC)

Total credited writers: 16

Men: 13

Women: 3

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Are Your Favorite Late-Night Shows Sexist?

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

Mother Jones

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The number of transgender Americans may be twice as big as we thought. According to a new analysis of state and federal data, an estimated 1.4 million adults in the United States, or 0.6 percent of the total population, do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

The analysis by the Williams Institute at UCLA comes as policymakers increasingly consider questions of transgender rights in schools, workplaces, and the military.

Previously, the most widely accepted estimate suggested 0.3 percent of American adults were transgender. That figure came from a smaller analysis by the Williams Institute in 2011, based on a health survey in Massachusetts and a survey about tobacco use among LGBT people in California. The new analysis draws on a much bigger set of data from 19 states that have since started asking about gender identity in questionnaires about health risk behaviors run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers also used Census Bureau data to estimate the transgender populations in the 31 other states.

Williams Institute

The study’s authors say their analysis is the first in the United States to estimate the transgender population in each state. Hawaii, California, Georgia, and New Mexico had the biggest percentages of adults who identified as transgender, at 0.8 percent each. North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota had the smallest percentages, at about 0.3 percent each. Young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were most likely to identify as transgender (0.7 percent), compared with 0.6 percent of those between the ages of 25 and 64 and 0.6 percent of adults older than 64.

The District of Columbia had a far higher rate of transgender identity than any state in the study, at an estimated 2.8 percent of adults.

The Census Bureau does not ask about gender identity in its population count, so we still don’t know exactly how many Americans identify as transgender. In May, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona introduced a bill that would require federal agencies to include questions about gender identity in national demographic surveys.

“The findings from this study are critical to current policy discussions that impact transgender people,” says Jody Herman, one of the study’s authors. “Policy debates on access to bathrooms, discrimination, and a host of other issues should rely on the best data available to assess potential impacts, including how many people may be affected.”

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

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Lena Dunham’s New Documentary Puts You in a Trans Man’s Shoes

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever gone clothes shopping after gaining some weight, you might be familiar with the particular dread the experience can stir up: You sift through the racks and face your reflection in a full-length mirror, feeling like every piece of clothing is accentuating things you wish you could hide. For transgender and gender-nonconforming people, the feeling goes even deeper. “I would be thrilled about encountering these on anyone but myself,” says writer Grace Dunham, glancing down at at her T-shirt-covered breasts, which she says are “extraordinarily beautiful” when she’s not binding them. But “that doesn’t mean they feel good.”

Suited, a new documentary premiering on HBO on June 20, tells the story of a Brooklyn-based tailoring company, Bindle & Keep, that makes custom suits for transgender and gender-nonconforming clients. Co-produced by Lena Dunham (of Girls fame), the film is most moving in its depiction of the complicated lives of clients like Grace—Lena’s kid sister—and five others who have long struggled to find the right fit.

Among them is Everett Arthur, a black transgender male law student and cellist who needs a new suit for job interviews. “I want to be stealth,” he says, sporting a red, white, and blue flannel bow tie. He wants to hide his curves and the fact that he was born female, he says, partly because an employer recently told him he was qualified for a job but couldn’t be hired because he was transgender.

Then there’s Aidan Star Jones, a 12-year-old trans boy from Arizona who shows up to Bindle & Keep with his grandmother—looking for something to wear to his bar mitzvah. With emo-style black hair and hipster glasses, he shrugs and stares at his feet frequently: “I’m just nervous, I suppose,” he tells the tailors. He’s never looked good in clothes and is afraid this suit will be “more of the same.” He takes a sip of water and clutches a stuffed dinosaur after explaining that his dad doesn’t support his gender identity and he doesn’t have many friends at school.

Rae Tutera takes Grace Dunham’s measurements. JoJo Whilden /Courtesy of HBO

Suited‘s director, Jason Benjamin, approached Lena Dunham about the documentary after reading a profile on Bindle & Keep in the New York Times. Bindle & Keep’s founder, Daniel Friedman, who is straight and cisgender—meaning he identifies as the gender of his birth—had originally intended to cater to Wall Street businessmen. Then he met Rae Tutera, who convinced him to make masculine suits for people like her who don’t identify with their feminine curves. They began working together, and now serve hundreds of clients with a range of identities—from a trans-male nurse preparing for his wedding to a trans woman attorney looking for a conservative suit to wear when she argues a case in front of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Fashion is universal. Everybody has to get dressed. Everybody has to be comfortable in their clothing,” Lena Dunham told the Hollywood Reporter. “We all live in this complicated world where we are navigating our own relationship to our bodies, and to what’s been assigned to us culturally and what our own desires are.”

The film asks us to consider tough questions as its characters talk candidly about their lives. “When I was a kid, I did fucking want to be a boy,” says Melissa “Mel” Plaut, 39, a gender-nonconforming cabbie. “The problem is like, did I want to be a boy, or did I just want to be treated like a boy? Right, like treated the same way the world treats boys, but still be okay to be me? And that where I think I’ve landed.” Mel, who’s in the market for a suit for a birthday celebration, recalls fighting to get out of frilly dresses as a kid and into Metallica T-shirts and skin-tight jeans as a teenager. Female pronouns don’t sit right, but neither do male ones: “I don’t feel like any of it quite fits.”

Some of the most touching moments come during interactions with family members, such as when Derek Matteson, the nurse, hugs his gray-haired mother before going under the knife for a hysterectomy, or later knots his father’s tie before getting married to the love of his life. Or when Aidan, the 12-year-old, comes back for a fitting with his dad, whose cutoff denim vest reveals tattooed arms. “You look sharp,” he says to his son, who’s smiling in his new suit.

“It’s all about just feeling great in your body,” explains Bindle & Keep’s Friedman. “Especially when people have been struggling their entire lives, and they finally get into something that really fits them, that really fits them the way they’ve always envisioned something would fit them. That’s not fashion anymore. And that’s what we’re after.”

Suited premieres at a time when Americans are growing more aware of transgender issues, with Caitlyn Jenner coming out and ongoing battles over which bathrooms trans people are allowed to use. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re trans or you know someone who is or you only just recently learned what the word “transgender” means. The film is a testament to the courage of embracing who you truly are, whoever that may be, and a poignant reminder that one size rarely fits all.

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Lena Dunham’s New Documentary Puts You in a Trans Man’s Shoes

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