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Video by Tiye Massey.
Egypt’s ban of virginity tests for female detainees came with smiles and a sense of victory and justice recently, thanks to a heroic woman, Samira Ibrahim. She was detained in March of 2011 and was forced to undergo an invasive virginity test, and decided to file a lawsuit to have these tests banned in Egypt. Even though the Egyptian army initially denied the use of these tests, it was quickly revealed that women were in fact forced to undergo virginity tests, as a means to shield the army from false allegations of rape and other possible sexual violations.
These tests were a clear violation of women’s rights. Thankfully, Samira Ibrahim responded and speaks out about this injustice.
People all over the world should admire Ibrahim for standing up and making such a strong statement to conservative Egypt, and the world. What was first an issue of human rights has become a touchstone for the empowerment of many young women.
While I know of many women’s rights issues facing a majority of the countries in the world, I sometimes find myself feeling sheltered from the worse realities and their impact. I am not experiencing their struggles directly, and many stories of what women are actually dealing with continue to go unheard. At 25, Samira Ibrahim did have the courage to share her story with the world, forever impacting all of us.
VenusPlusX blogger Kushaba Moses Mworeko offered another reason, or excuse, for the use of virginity tests.
“Long before the introduction of Christianity on the African soil, it’s worth noting that virginity tests were performed for different reasons across various cultures in different parts on the Continent. The major reason for these tests was and has always been for marriage. For instance, in African states virginity was largely determined the bride’s price; a virgin is sold for a higher bride price than a girl who is not. First, there would be a naked eye indicator of pregnancy, then on her first night of marriage, the paternal aunt of the groom would make sure an inspection of the bed sheets to verify the blood stains that would indicate whether or not virginity was lost the night before.
This same practice continues today in many cultures, including among many orthodox Jewish-Americans.”
Moses is really talking about a complexity that I find to be both confusing and disheartening. Worldwide, there is an obsession with calculating the value of women. There are many ways of doing it, across cultures (virginity tests, imposed images of beauty, expected roles to live out), but the result seems to be the same everywhere. Women are being demeaned, violated, silenced, and more.
The oppression of females and women has certainly been at the core of many nations’ founding and history. The oppression is sometimes clear to me, along with its effects, but a root explanation and any logic behind it is not so clear. Together, we must try to understand why so many cultures find it acceptable to objectify women and devalue our talents and advantages, in order to rid the world of sexual oppression.
Choosing to live outside of systems of oppression, instead of underneath, Samira Ibrahim showed her strength, and I definitely saw and heard all of it!
Originally published November 30, 2011
Upon visiting the new Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial in Washington, DC, I thought about how well Dr. King’s philosophy has been realized in our society almost 50 years after the delivery of his “I have a dream” speech.
Dr. King believed in non-violent advocacy for justice and equality. His work was rooted in faith, opportunity, and freedom. And while Dr. King’s honorable philosophy is a strong model to follow when doing my own advocacy work, overall we have over-romanticized his life and work. We hang onto his goals as if working toward them, but have to address the ongoing debate over whether we have in actuality been moving away from them. The notion that we have in fact brought about a safe, peaceful environment for everyone, regardless of background, is perhaps more absurd than spending $120 million on the memorial itself.
As a country, we simply do not practice non-violence. We are obsessed with war and crime, and that is reflected in our all of our media, TV shows, video games, and music. We justify violence, and desensitize ourselves, in order to obtain power or status.
Advocacy is often not rewarded and it is difficult to introduce new ideas that may actually benefit people, relieving them from poor incomes or housing or other constructed state of oppression. It can be discouraging and even dangerous to speak up about injustice in a peaceful way because it is a method of change that we greatly under-value.
An example of this is the recent video capture of non-violent protestors at UC Davis. Students gathered on their quad to protest tuition increases and social injustice, and police officers pepper sprayed many students, seemingly without second thought.
So many of us are walking the path that Dr. King paved for us, and I will remain hopeful of a day when his memorial is a complete living testament of hard work and maintained peace. I do not discredit our country for its lack of social progress. But there is hypocrisy in using so many resources to construct the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial when as a country we do not display the values of Dr. King’s teachings and practices. Since the memorial is here to stay, we need to do a better job of upholding the goals of a great American man, and make his dream a reality.
Editor’s note: This post was written by one of our interns, Jamor Gaffney.
It was the summer before I began 5th grade when I got my first relaxer. I was 
curious, nervous, and unsure of whether I was making the right decision. Not because of what I now understand to be a deeply rooted, oppressive standard of beauty in this country, but simply because I didn’t know how my hair would turn out. The morning before I went into the hair salon, I wore an Afro; I walked around my neighborhood so everyone could see my hair, and they would surely see the “new and improved” Jamor once I returned from the salon.
I later arrived at the hair salon, sweating bullets as I sat in the chair. The stylist parted my rough, kinky Afro to base my scalp with grease to protect my skin; soon, I felt the cold, heavy relaxer on my head… there was no turning back now. A few minutes in, I noticed a tingling sensation on my scalp, then, a burn! I started tapping my foot against the floor to signal to someone that I was uncomfortable and was met with the response, “Beauty is pain, beauty is pain”.
Now, I knew I couldn’t say this out loud but I wanted to scream, “That makes no sense! Get this out of my head!”
The hair washing person eventually rescued me and the rest of this seemingly stupid process was fine. Seemingly stupid turned into genius because the finished product was in fact, a new and improved, Jamor. I had shiny, silky, straight, long hair… I never looked back.
Today, I am more conscious of the implications of the relaxer in the black community and I wonder if my mom and I made the right choice in having my hair chemically straightened. The new BET original television show “Reed Between the Lines” about a black family deemed “the new Cosby Show” has an episode that speaks to my questions about perming my hair at a young age. Kaci is a young teenage girl who wants to perm her hair because a boy she likes at school prefers her hair straight. Her mother Carla tries to talk her out of the decision, explaining the potential consequences of putting a perm in her hair. A conversation like this would have been very helpful for me when I was younger.
Black Hair, Still Tangled in Politics articulates my thoughts on my hair, and the ways that black women present themselves. For black women, myself included, their hair is a performance of both their race and their gender. How I present my hair to others is in many ways, a statement or declaration of my race and gender. I’m pressured to keep my hair long and straight by men, black men!
I find it disheartening that within my own racial community, I’m not comfortable enough to present my hair, as is, how it grows from my scalp, without being considered less beautiful. This stems back to the Great Migration when blacks moved from the South to the North looking for better job opportunities and an overall better way of life. There were pressures by both whites and Northern blacks for this new influx of people to appear elegant, polished, and classy and “taming” their hair was the first step to maintaining that appearance. Today, similar pressures are put on blacks to appear more professional and approachable. All of these adjectives are just indirect ways of telling me to try to look white and be friendly, and that the efforts I make toward doing so will impact my success.
What’s unprofessional about a black woman washing her natural hair and putting a little holding gel on it for work in the morning? Some white women do just that, and no one is uncomfortable or appalled. For a country with such racial diversity as America, it should be considered highly problematic that our standard of beauty is still so sourly, solely skewed toward whiteness. How is this affecting young black girls today? Based on how perming my own hair as a 5th grader changed my perspective on black hair, I can’t imagine other young girls not wanting to feel new and improved too.
A Canadian-developed vaccine to prevent HIV has been given the green light for testing in human clinical trials.
The vaccine, developed by researchers at the University of Western Ontario, has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to start being tested in humans in January.
It is the first preventive HIV vaccine approved for clinical trials to use a whole HIV-1 virus, which has been both killed and genetically engineered, to activate immunity. In this way, the new vaccine is much like the killed whole virus vaccines that are successful against polio, rabies and influenza.
This is yet another huge step towards the cure for HIV. A future without sexually stigmatizing diseases looks more realistic everyday. Keep an eye on VenusPlusX for continuing coverage of these exciting breakthroughs.
Here’s another video from the I AM: Trans People Speak project of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. Please be sure to check out their website for more information and videos of transgender individuals telling their own stories in their own words.
Mycroft identifies as an interfaith leader, a writer and artist, a life partner, and a transgender person. Mycroft experienced discrimination when it came time to do co-op work in the field as part of his college program. People would not even consider hiring him, because he is transgender. It was an eye-opening, shocking experience for him. One of the positive experiences that came out of this was it called him to be a leader in the transgender community.
How did you become a leader in your community? Was there one particular experience that changed the way you recognized and expressed your gender expression and/or sexual orientation? Can a bad experience bring unexpected rewards, financially, emotionally, educationally, spiritually? Do you have any advice for other people just coming to grips with their sexual orientation or gender identity? Is there any advice you wish you had been given at an earlier age?
We want to know what you think or hear your own story. Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express yourself. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.
December 10, Saturday, was Human Rights Day 2011, and I reported on its origns, history, and background, noted the important role Eleanor Roosevelt played in drafting The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and delved into the direct connections between human rights and sexual freedom contained in the Declaration.
Last week, on December 6, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton surprised a lot of people all around the globe when she made an historic address to international diplomats gathered at The United Nations Office at Geneva (Switzerland) about the specific intersection between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights and human rights. The Secretary said, “Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”
Secretary Clinton gave a powerful and moving address, in which she put the world on notice that:
It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity.
In response to Secretary Clinton’s statements, as well as a coordinated proclamation from President Obama on the same day, religious bigots and certain Republicans gave the expected outcry, claiming this amounted to the United States using tax-payer dollars to forward what they call “a homosexual agenda.” But her comments are already making a difference in the international community: the country of Malawi has already announced that they will re-examine their laws as they relate to the LGBT community.
Unfortunately, the condition of human rights as they relate to LGBT rights in Secretary Clinton’s own United States is pretty deplorable. In most states, LGBT citizens are not protected from discrimination in housing, employment, or public accommodations. Same-sex couples are prohibited from marrying in most states, and even in the few states where they are allow to marry, there is no federal recognition of such marriages due to the misnamed “Defense of Marriage Act” (ironically, signed into law by a President who was cheating on his wife at the time). This law is a blatant violation of the “full faith and credit” clause of the U.S. Constitution, and as a direct result of this single law, same-sex couples are discriminated against under at least 1,138 separate Federal laws that cover everything from taxes to immigration and beyond.
What do you think can be done to bring the United States more into compliance with the kinds of LGBT protections Secretary Clinton called for in the rest of the world? America likes to think of itself as “the land of the free,” but when it comes to sexual freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens, is this a hollow and hypocritical promise?
Studies show that the younger people are, the more likely they are to support the kinds of changes that Secretary Clinton has called for in her historic speech. What does this mean in terms of how soon the LGBT community can hope to achieve full equality under the laws of the United States, and in other countries around the world?
Let us know what you think. Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts on these topics. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.
Flag image by Julyo, used pursuant to Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Here is an issue that is certain to affect everyone.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that governments worldwide have been using electronic devices, such as smart-phones and computers, to monitor what people are saying, where they are going and what they are writing.
The controversial journalist spoke at a panel of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism held at the City University in London on Monday. The panel inaugurated WikiLeak’s new project: the Spyfiles. They provide details on the deals private surveillance companies made with various governments all over the globe to design monitoring software integrated into electronic devices, which could be used to monitor the activities of whoever these governments want to keep track of.
“Who here has a BlackBerry? Who here uses Gmail? Well you are all screwed!” Assange exclaimed. “The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right to countries around the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products.”
I suggest taking a look at Wikileaks’ website for the most concrete details. The simple truth is, your email and communications are not secure. This type of hacking is a growing business and one that I imagine is only gaining momentum. Keep your eyes open for further “Spyfiles” news as Wikileaks continues to reveal more information.
Today is Human Rights Day 2011. To mark the occasion, this video is from Navanethem Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, and was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948.
This Declaration contains a number of Articles that directly relate to sexual freedom, and that apply to issues around human trafficking, marriage equality, and being lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans (LGBT). There is a prohibition of the slave trade in Article 4 that directly relates to human trafficking, when it states “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” Regarding marriage equality (also known as “gay marriage,” a term that does not adequately describe the issue), Article 16, Section 1 says, “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.” Clearly, the United States is in violation of this article, as are most countries around the world.
Whether we point to the right-wing religious zealots (such as “The Family”), including American congressmen, who are helping to pass laws that would imprison for life or execute LGBT citizens in Uganda and other countries, or to the police who harass and unfairly prosecute trans people here in America, our world is filled with rampant violations of Article 7, which states unequivocally “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.”
What does the concept of “human rights” mean to you? Do you believe that sexual freedom is a human right? Does your country respect your human rights, and if not, how could they do better? What role can we play in improving human rights in other countries, including those relating to sexual freedom? How can we ensure that sexual freedom is considered and included as a priority in discussions about human rights around the world today? Have you ever felt that your human rights were being denied? If so, how did you feel, and what did you do to respond? What have you personally done to help promote human rights here and/or abroad?
Let us know what you think. Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts on these topics. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.
Coming in Part II, on Wednesday: Obama and Clinton’s historic efforts confirming LGBT rights as human rights
News of Note: Kentucky church bans interracial couples
“A small church in Pike County, Kentucky has voted to ban interracial couples from most church activities “to promote greater unity among the church body…
“Parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services and other church functions, with the exception being funerals. All are welcome to our public worship services. This recommendation is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve.”
Harville told The Kentucky Herald-Leader that the decision is an embarrassment to God, the church and the whole community.
“It sure ain’t Christian,” she explained. “It ain’t nothing but the old devil working.”
I’m absolutely dumbfounded that this type of discrimination still happens in America. Did we just take a step 100 years backwards? I don’t want this to be news. I don’t want to pay attention to this short of behavior, but we can’t just sweep it under the rug. It’s groups just like this that continue to embarrass America in front of the eyes of the world. These people even vote — how does that make you feel?