transgender – The Orbital

21Feb

By Amal AbdiNo Comments

Features

Trans-exclusionary Laws

On October 21 The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had drawn up a policy paper to define gender as strictly male or female. The administration further instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to consider ‘sex’ as an unchangeable condition that is determined by a person’s genitals at birth, despite the American Medical Association ruling last year that gender and sexual identities are not always binary. The proposed reforms have apparently been influenced by recent meetings of the UN’s Third Committee concerned with social, humanitarian and cultural rights, in which US officials have pushed for general assembly policy statements to remove what the administration sees as vague and politically correct language — an ‘ideology’ of treating gender as an indivi...

RuPaul, transphobia, and remembering your Herstory

“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”, “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” … we’re all familiar with RuPaul’s famous one-liners, which are often expressions of self-love; defending our right to be authentically and unapologetically ourselves. RuPaul’s status within the LGBTQ+ community cannot be understated. Bringing drag into mainstream culture is no small feat, but being the most famous drag queen in the world also comes at a price. So when RuPaul recently sparked a debate about who can or can’t be a drag queen, it made me wonder how valuable RuPaul’s opinions still are when he’s clearly forgotten his Herstory. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Ru shocked us all when he said he wouldn’t accept a transgender contestant on his...

Transphobic Literature Distributed Across Campus

Content warning: Transphobia, Transphobic Language Transphobic literature has been discovered in various places across the Royal Holloway campus, including the women’s bathrooms in the Wolfson, Windsor, and Boilerhouse buildings. The leaflets and stickers were created by a prominent transphobic group ‘Fair Play For Women’, who have started a widespread campaign against the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), claiming that reforming the GRA to be trans (including non-binary and inter-sex) inclusive is ‘the worst assault on women’s rights in over a century’. Their campaign includes a full-page ad in the Metro newspaper, which was met with public outrage last week. The government is currently in the process of reforming the Gender Recognition Act, and have released consultation forms to be...