[RD] LGBTQ news

Oh boy, yet another page straight of, "this is what you mean" instead of "what do you mean," complete with, I think, one Englishman saying "learn to speak" to another one.

Perfect. :lol:

I have to go watch some rain in Spain fall mostly on the plain. Audrey is hawt.
Nobody's forcing you to read or post, but you still insist on it. Maybe just let the English folk have their fun :)
 
Oh, it's high sport. The higher the better. Somebody pass that thing this way.
 
Doesn't black/gray/white look way too german to refer to pride? :p
I didn't design the flag. The bi flag is more colourful and the lesbian flag is much more colourful, but there's no point flying the flag for another nation, so to speak.
 
I'm suspicious that such videos are staged. Seems too convenient.

Great entertainment, but those events seem unlikely.
It's not totally out of the realm of possibility, but the more I look at it, the more I agree with you. First, to kick him that way, she should have continued the spin and got him with her right foot without stopping the spin and doing the little hop. Secondly, her toe is not pointed at his jaw. She kicks him with the side of her foot, which won't do as much damage. Third, if she were to kick him hard enough to presumably knock him out, her foot would have carried on past his face as his face turned as a result of the kick. There was no follow though with her foot. Much like golf, in a kick like that there is follow through. Her right foot would have landed on the ground to the bad guy's right, and her right side would be turned toward him in order to kick him again with her left foot if he got up to challenge her. A better kick (if she had to spin) would have been a kick to his right jaw with the heel of her right foot. That definitely would have put him down, if not knocked out a few teeth if she did it hard enough and connected well. Lastly, the bad guy doesn't fall as though he was kicked hard. His arm is in the way and he doesn't fall to his right as he should have.

This is how it should have been done:


I watched the girl's video about 20 times (because initially I was impressed), but the more I watched, the more I realized that it had to be faked. If it is real, she did a couple of things wrong and is lucky that he didn't get up and kick the crap out of her.

Fun video all the same. Now back to this evening's nice date. :)
 
@Lemon Merchant It is always nice to have an expert on staff! Enjoy your evening!

I know nothing about martial arts beyond "wax on wax off" and a few movies. What seemed odd to me were these:

  • Speeding car dashcam
  • Car hits a pedestrian with little effect other than her leaning on the hood.
  • A big fellow gets out all pissed
  • After being hit, she clocks him with a kick and walks away
The acting was poorly executed and seemed too staged to be real. People are unlikely to act that way. Your kick analysis seals the deal for me that it was all faked. :)
 
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He wasn't a "bad guy" either; he stopped the car instead of running her over and then was angry that she was passing the road without looking anywhere apart from her mobile phone.
So yes, it may have been staged - the "puts on glasses" moment at the end would support that too :p
 
He wasn't a "bad guy" either; he stopped the car instead of running her over and then was angry that she was passing the road without looking anywhere apart from her mobile phone.
So yes, it may have been staged - the "puts on glasses" moment at the end would support that too :p
A guy who shoves me like that is a "bad guy" whether he runs me over or not. :p
 
He wasn't a "bad guy" either; he stopped the car instead of running her over and then was angry that she was passing the road without looking anywhere apart from her mobile phone.

She was also on the crosswalk. Bit careless not to look around anyway, but stopping in time was unquestionably the driver's responsibility.
 
Plus, if you have a dash cam, why do you record and then upload footage of you failing to stop at a scene and then assaulting someone?
 
Plus, if you have a dash cam, why do you record and then upload footage of you failing to stop at a scene and then assaulting someone?
15 minutes of fame?
Spoiler :
I think it is totally fake, but in this day and age "makes him look bad so he would not have uploaded it" is not an argument.
 
I mean, boxers and MMA people gladly show off how awesomesauce they are at getting punched in the face. Why not?
 
USAID and MSI Reproductive Choices funding organisations involved with conversion therapy

6 month investigation Response

During a six-month investigation, our undercover reporters spoke to staff at 12 health centres who, between them, said that being gay is “evil”, “for whites” and a mental health problem, and advised giving a gay teenager a sleeping pill to stop him from masturbating.

Half of these health centres are run by groups that receive international aid money – including to specifically provide health services to marginalised communities, including gay men and transgender people – or belong to aid-funded health networks.

In Tanzania, a counsellor at the MSI clinic in Mwenge, Dar es Salaam, said that the sexuality of our undercover reporter’s supposedly gay brother could be “changed” and described counselling including how “a timetable will be set, including the days that he should visit the hospital, until, finally, you find he has changed.”

The Global Fund is a direct funder of both Uganda’s health ministry and a local NGO called the AIDS Support Organisation, which in turn fund an HIV clinic at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda’s biggest public hospital – where a receptionist said: “Whoever wants to quit homosexuality, we connect them [to external counsellors].”
She added that these counsellors have included a locally known, anti-gay evangelical pastor, Solomon Male. She also gave our reporter the phone number of a man who “was once a patient here” and “was once a homosexual but isn’t anymore”. In 2019, this clinic also received a $420,000 grant from the USAID aid agency, which ends this September.

Our investigation identified similar support for ‘anti-gay’ counselling activities at three hospitals in the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau (UCMB) network. This network received more than $1m from USAID between 2019 and this April, though it is unclear whether the specific hospitals identified in this investigation received any of this money.
At one of these hospitals – Nsambya, Uganda’s biggest private health facility – staff referred our reporters to the private office of Cabrine Mukiibi, on the outskirts of Kampala, who mixed Freudian theories, biblical quotes and anti-gay insults in his diagnosis.
Mukiibi, who is also a staff counsellor at Nsambya, stated that sex without procreation “becomes evil” – before recommending what he called “exposure therapy”, telling our undercover reporter to “get a housemaid” that her supposedly gay teenage brother can “get attracted [to]’’, one who is “between 18 and 20 years of age”.​

openDemocracy teamed up with local researchers to document the experiences of 20 LGBT Ugandan survivors of such ‘treatments’.
Interviewees said such ‘therapy’ “felt like murder” and that they “suffered depression and anxiety”, drug dependence and suicidal thoughts. Mulago and a hospital in UCMB’s network were among the facilities they named as having provided the treatments.

At Kisubi Hospital’s “youth-friendly” clinic, a counsellor offered a session for 50,000 Ugandan shillings ($14), saying a “17 [year-old] is still a small child we can modify”.
At Lubaga Hospital, Matthias Ssetuba introduced himself as the facility’s “mental health focal person”. He claimed that homosexuality is caused by factors ranging from peer pressure to the internet, and also said that it can be “changed”.
“It is a mental health issue,” he added, “because once you start having sex with the same sex, much as those whites are saying ‘it's normal’, in our society it's abnormal. And anything to do with abnormality has something to do with mental health.”
He stressed that a person “has to accept” that they need help “in converting”.

Homosexuality, said Cabrine Mukiibi (the counsellor referred by Nsambya Hospital) is often caused by “unresolved competition” between a child and a same-sex parent for the attention of an opposite-sex parent during their development’s “phallic stage”.
He wore a label on his coat saying “clinical psychologist” when he met our reporters. He has also been quoted in local media as a “clinical psychologist”.
He said he had just finished (but not yet been awarded) a master’s degree in clinical psychology at Uganda Martyrs University, which is affiliated to the Catholic Church. But this degree is not listed on the university’s website, and Uganda’s higher education regulator told openDemocracy the university is not accredited to offer this programme.​
 
Regardless, your argument applies to lesbian and gay rights too. If you asked a hundred people what "gay rights" meant (probably even nowadays, to be honest), you'd get a lot more than a single uniform response. Any such fixed package isn't going to be self-evident by default, but it at least can be assumed from either a brief description (if prompted) or by proxy to similar fights for gay, lesbian or even civil rights. The notion that a demographic is marginalised and thus lacks some form of rights that other demographics do not. As you have specified that I don't need to enumerate the rights, I shouldn't need to elaborate any more than that. You cannot claim that people do not know what the phrase means, which means you certainly can't use this uncertainty as an objection to whether or not someone is for or against trans rights. Just re-asserting context for a second, because it is important and I dislike it being discarded to suit the point, the context was between two specific members of CFC that have both spent time in multiple previous threads about trans rights.
I think that this discussion is becoming a bit meandering, so I will quote this paragraph which contains the two major points I wish to address.

The first is this statement that trans people represent "a demographic [which] is marginalised and thus lacks some form of rights that other demographics do not". This is dubious. Most of the rights claimed under the banner of "trans rights" are not available to cis people: trans people cannot change their legal gender, cannot enter single-gender spaces which do not correspond to their assigned gender, and so on. You could probably construct some statement that "cis people have a right to be legally recognised as the gender as which they identify, and trans people do not", but that is a criticism of how the law is constructed, not a description of how they are constructed: it highlights precisely that the law fails to make accommodations for the distinctive of trans people, rather than imposing distinctiveness upon them.

And that critique is perfectly valid, laws built with the assumption that everybody is cisgender are obviously insufficient for a reality in which some people are transgender, just as laws build with the assumption that everybody is heterosexual are obviously insufficient for a reality in which some people are homosexual or bisexual. But it means that trans people are not a distinct legal class subject to certain legal disabilities, so the question of "trans rights" is not simply a case of removing these disabilities, it is a question of establishing new rights, in effect of creating a legally distinct class of trans people and bestowing upon them certain legal privileges unavailable to cis people, with the intention that these privileges will contribute to the social equality of trans people; the goal is not social equality through legal equality, but to social equality through legal non-equality.

(In practice, these privileges may be legally framed as universal, but if we make the assumption that cis people will uniformly not seek to exercise these rights, or that certain tests will be imposed that will have the uniform effect of excluding cis people from exercise of these rights. And to forestall the suggestion that I'm decrying "special treatment" of trans people, this is already commonplace and unremarkable in other areas: for example, the right to be married by a clergyman rather than by a civil officer is assumed to be one which non-religious people will not seek to exercise and so constitutes a privilege held by religious people, but nobody cares because this doesn't actually inconvenience non-religious people in any way, they do not experience legal disability as a result of another groups legal privilege, because it's not a zero sum game. So all of this is fine, but it's important to clearly establish what it is in order to proceed with clarity.)

This proceeds to the second point, that as there is no simple, close-ended goal ("removing legal disability") but a complex, open-ended goal ("achieve appropriate accommodation"), there is necessarily a process by which "appropriate accommodations" is defined, by which a consensus develops around what policy and legislative goals the demand for "trans rights" entails. When I say "consensus" I do not mean that everyone necessarily comes to agree with a particular slate of goals which are then described as "trans rights", but that everybody comes to understand what goals are commonly denoted by the term "trans rights", whether or not they agree with those goals, and I contend that this is not presently the case.

I contend that this has been achieved for the umbrella term of "gay rights": that while there remains disagreements over what the term "gay rights" should mean, there is virtually universal-recognition of what it is used to mean in practice; that even if people may disagree with certain aspects of the policy and legislative goals it implies, there is mutual understanding as to what those goals are; that even if there are differences in how those goals are articulated or justified, there is not significant variation in the sort of policies and legislation we take them to imply. Everybody knows that gay people want to be able to marry, to adopt kids, all that. While is may still be over-simplistic to sort people into "pro-" and "anti-" gay rights, we can at least describe them in terms of some sort of orientation to this umbrella term, which in practice will turn out to be some qualified form of "pro-" or "anti-".

No such consensus exists with the issue of "trans rights": not simply that there is no consensus as to whether trans rights are good, but that there is no consensus as to what trans rights are. You only need took look at the controversy around transmedicalism, so-called "truscum", to see that there are still fundamental disagreements among trans people over what constitutes appropriate accommodations, over what constitutes "trans rights". What a transmedicalist considers to be a necessary aspect of "trans rights" might be construed by an anti-transmedicalist as hostile to "trans rights". So if even trans communities have not been able to hammer out a basic working definition of "trans rights", how can we seriously claim that the broader progressive wing has done so? How can we offer unqualified support for the umbrella term of "trans rights" when the speaker may mean any number of different, contradictory things?

So when we return to Senethro's original claim "Whether trans rights or any rights are a binary or not, the answer should be 'Yes'", we cannot agree, because we simply do not know what is meant by "trans rights". We can only know what any given speaker thinks it should mean, which would seem to render Senethro's claim as "we should agree with whoever was the last person to speak to us", which is unreasonable on the face of it.
 
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The first is this statement that trans people represent "a demographic [which] is marginalised and thus lacks some form of rights that other demographics do not". This is dubious. Most of the rights claimed under the banner of "trans rights" are not available to cis people: trans people cannot change their legal gender, cannot enter single-gender spaces which do not correspond to their assigned gender, and so on.

This is just a rephrasing of the asinine "gay people have the right to marry people of the opposite gender" nonsense. It is was horse manure then, horse manure now.

You could probably construct some statement that "cis people have a right to be legally recognised as the gender as which they identify, and trans people do not", but that is a criticism of how the law is constructed, not a description of how they are constructed: it highlights precisely that the law fails to make accommodations for the distinctive of trans people, rather than imposing distinctiveness upon them.

And that critique is perfectly valid, laws built with the assumption that everybody is cisgender are obviously insufficient for a reality in which some people are transgender, just as laws build with the assumption that everybody is heterosexual are obviously insufficient for a reality in which some people are homosexual or bisexual. But it means that trans people are not a distinct legal class subject to certain legal disabilities, so the question of "trans rights" is not simply a case of removing these disabilities, it is a question of establishing new rights, in effect of creating a legally distinct class of trans people and bestowing upon them certain legal privileges unavailable to cis people, with the intention that these privileges will contribute to the social equality of trans people; the goal is not social equality through legal equality, but to social equality through legal non-equality.

Your definition of legal rights vs privileges is wrong, at least by the common conception of law. I obviously cannot speak for the differences in law, but I would argue that you are leaving a part of the common conception of a legal privilege unexamined - namely that privileges are conditional and that they can be withdrawn. A common example of a legal privilege is having a driver's license, that is conditional on being a good driver.

Additionally, just because a right is only going to be enjoyed or used by a certain subset of people doesn't stop it from being a right. Being allowed to start a family should be considered a legal right (and is in many countries). Just because only a certain subset of people are going to be interested in starting a family doesn't mean that the ability to start a family should be considered a privilege under the common definition!

You unintentionally point out the absurdity of conflating rights and privileges in the very next paragraph.

(In practice, these privileges may be legally framed as universal, but if we make the assumption that cis people will uniformly not seek to exercise these rights, or that certain tests will be imposed that will have the uniform effect of excluding cis people from exercise of these rights. And to forestall the suggestion that I'm decrying "special treatment" of trans people, this is already commonplace and unremarkable in other areas: for example, the right to be married by a clergyman rather than by a civil officer is assumed to be one which non-religious people will not seek to exercise and so constitutes a privilege held by religious people, but nobody cares because this doesn't actually inconvenience non-religious people in any way, they do not experience legal disability as a result of another groups legal privilege, because it's not a zero sum game. So all of this is fine, but it's important to clearly establish what it is in order to proceed with clarity.)

Being married by a religious official is not a privilege, is a right. Willing participation in a religious ceremony is part of freedom of religion. If you were to arbitrarily deny someone from willfully being married in a manner according to their religious beliefs then you would be infringing on their religious freedoms.

I am leveling such a strong objection to this line of logic because when I read that "trans rights should be conceived as trans privileges" then that can very easily be interpreted as "trans people's ability to live as their own gender free from harassment ought to be conditional". I sincerely hope that is not what you are arguing.

This proceeds to the second point, that as there is no simple, close-ended goal ("removing legal disability") but a complex, open-ended goal ("achieve appropriate accommodation"), there is necessarily a process by which "appropriate accommodations" is defined, by which a consensus develops around what policy and legislative goals the demand for "trans rights" entails. When I say "consensus" I do not mean that everyone necessarily comes to agree with a particular slate of goals which are then described as "trans rights", but that everybody comes to understand what goals are commonly denoted by the term "trans rights", whether or not they agree with those goals, and I contend that this is not presently the case.

I contend that this has been achieved for the umbrella term of "gay rights": that while there remains disagreements over what the term "gay rights" should mean, there is virtually universal-recognition of what it is used to mean in practice; that even if people may disagree with certain aspects of the policy and legislative goals it implies, there is mutual understanding as to what those goals are; that even if there are differences in how those goals are articulated or justified, there is not significant variation in the sort of policies and legislation we take them to imply.

You are painting an overly generous picture of people who are opposed to LGBT people. I would contend that many people who are opposed to LGBT people will not be able to give an eloquent definition of the actual demands of the LGBT movement and will instead give wildly inaccurate strawmen. As recently as 2017 there was a plebiscite on same sex marriage in Australia, opponents of same sex marriage presented ridiculous strawmen that claimed that the passing of same sex marriage would make crossdressing mandatory for school children. While you could argue that the people who made the ads might have known they were lying, it was clearly intended to deceive and its likely that people were deceived by that. Therefore not everyone can agree on what the LGBT movement is arguing for.

Everybody knows that gay people want to be able to marry, to adopt kids, all that.

You claim that "gay rights" is easy to provide a definition for and in the same breath you struggle to provide a comprehensive definition of it.

No such consensus exists with the issue of "trans rights": not simply that there is no consensus as to whether trans rights are good, but that there is no consensus as to what trans rights are. You only need took look at the controversy around transmedicalism, so-called "truscum", to see that there are still fundamental disagreements among trans people over what constitutes appropriate accommodations, over what constitutes "trans rights". What a transmedicalist considers to be a necessary aspect of "trans rights" might be construed by an anti-transmedicalist as hostile to "trans rights". So if even trans communities have not been able to hammer out a basic working definition of "trans rights", how can we seriously claim that the broader progressive wing has done so? How can we offer unqualified support for the umbrella term of "trans rights" when the speaker may mean any number of different, contradictory things?

So when we return to Senethro's original claim "Whether trans rights or any rights are a binary or not, the answer should be 'Yes'", we cannot agree, because we simply do not know what is meant by "trans rights". We can only know what any given speaker thinks it should mean, which would seem to render Senethro's claim as "we should agree with whoever was the last person to speak to us", which is unreasonable on the face of it.

Traitorfish, from my understanding you identify with the tradition of Communism, or at least more broadly what could be identified as the Far Left. The Left is notorious for infighting and disagreeing on definitions. I think it would be utterly unreasonable to say that Leftists should sort out all their differences before advocating for change, about as unreasonable as what you are saying about the trans (and more broadly the LGBT movement because they are inseparable) movement.

Literally every civil rights group in the world have fundamental disagreements within their community. There are people in the LGBT movement who would strongly disagree with your conception of conception of gay rights for example (primarily making same sex marriage the primary goal). It is utterly unreasonable to demand that all people for civil rights come to a unified consensus before demands for change are made.

I can't speak for @Senethro because I was unable to find the post that you are referring to. However, I sincerely doubt that they were advocating for that.

If you're not sure what someone means by "trans rights" then why don't you ask them instead engaging in semantic shell-games?
 
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This is just a rephrasing of the asinine "gay people have the right to marry people of the opposite gender" nonsense. It is was horse manure then, horse manure now.
I mean, if you actually read what Traitorfish is posting instead of looking to get angry, you would have noticed he wasn't endorsing such a position. Its the old saying "the prince and the pauper have the same right to go hungry". And he literally goes on to devote a whole paragraph pointing out that the granting of rights and legal benefits to certain populations is a perfectly uncontroversial position.
Traitorfish said:
You could probably construct some statement that "cis people have a right to be legally recognised as the gender as which they identify, and trans people do not", but that is a criticism of how the law is constructed, not a description of how they are constructed: it highlights precisely that the law fails to make accommodations for the distinctive of trans people, rather than imposing distinctiveness upon them.

And that critique is perfectly valid, laws built with the assumption that everybody is cisgender are obviously insufficient for a reality in which some people are transgender, just as laws build with the assumption that everybody is heterosexual are obviously insufficient for a reality in which some people are homosexual or bisexual. But it means that trans people are not a distinct legal class subject to certain legal disabilities,

Like, I consider myself a solid enough supporter of trans rights, but I got hounded out of a discord server and called a transphobe for saying that, especially in the case of minors, the current push by some in the trans community to make the only permissible response by medical professionals when approached by someone saying they are experiencing gender dysmorphia is to encourage the undergoing of powerful hormones and chemical interventions. Gender dysmorphia is a real medical condition that can be treated by medical intervention, but some in the trans community are pressing to make it the quite possibly the only medical condition where the medical profession is expected to provide major and largely irreversible without any examination and based entirely on self-reporting. If that is the the best way to treat gender dysmorphia, then alright; but that isn't an answer that strikes me as being self evident without any need for larger discussion.

Literally every civil rights group in the world have fundamental disagreements within their community. There are people in the LGBT movement who would strongly disagree with your conception of conception of gay rights for example (primarily making same sex marriage the primary goal). It is utterly unreasonable to demand that all people for civil rights come to a unified consensus before demands for change are made.
Again, it really strikes me as if you are trying to misread him. Like, look at the civil rights movement. There were some in the civil rights movement that came very close to arguing for black separatism; but when talking about the civil rights movement both today and at the time, it was understood it was primarily about voting rights and anti discrimination legislation. Once we start getting beyond non-discrimination legislation, purely onerous laws regarding legal change of gender on official documents, and the ridiculous Genitalia Gestapo outside bathrooms, it appears to me as the meaning of "trans rights" becomes less self-evident.

EDIT: Though I will say it does feel like at this point TF is engaging in hair-splitting for the sake of hair-splitting.
 
Being married by a religious official is not a privilege, is a right. Willing participation in a religious ceremony is part of freedom of religion. If you were to arbitrarily deny someone from willfully being married in a manner according to their religious beliefs then you would be infringing on their religious freedoms.

What if the religious official doesn't want to be involved?
 
What if the religious official doesn't want to be involved?

Stop being disingenuous. The key word in the quoted sentence is "arbitrarily".
 
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