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This article is form a personal point of view on what it means to her for her to support feminism. A quote that stuck out to me was, "Feminism, to me, is about being empowered as the woman you are, and not apologizing for that for a minute or a second or a microsecond of your day." This is a good quote to include because all people see feminism as a different thing but there should never be a negative tie to the idea of feminism.

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I am a woman. I am a sister, a granddaughter, a friend and a best friend, a classmate, a leader, and a woman.

But we women have a problem of inclusion. Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex that women rarely talk about women as we, as if there is some fear of claiming unity. I notice this tendency in myself all the time; if I see a quality in another woman that I don't like, I quickly categorize her as being a certain type of woman that I am not. I watch The Bachelor and lament that the sort of woman who goes on that show--the sort who competes for a man's hand in marriage--is ruining all hope of tearing down the patriarchal walls that surround us, antagonizing them as impediments to gender equality. But what I have begun to envision is a feminism that embraces the we, that values all expressions of womanhood rather than isolating those who don't hold the same tools of feminism that I do. I have started to believe that the strength of feminism lies in an appreciation of all variations of being a woman, from the armpit-hair growers to the high-heel wearers (I am not trying to depict some sort of absolute scale here, but rather provide different examples of ways in which women might express themselves).

Feminism, to me, is about being empowered as the woman you are, and not apologizing for that for a minute or a second or a microsecond of your day.

Feminism, to me, is about being empowered as the woman you are, and not apologizing for that for a minute or a second or a microsecond of your day. Our world was crafted in a patriarchal fashion--it was never intended to be a place for us to feel equally important or valued or worthy of taking up space as are men. The ultimate tool with which to dismantle that order must be our own confidence in who we are; if men and society (and religion, and capitalism, and a lot of other things) are the hammers and nails that enclosed us in this asymmetric system, then our sense of empowerment and self-worth are our bulldozers and sledgehammers with which we will take it down.

A striking example of how women might find meaning in all sorts of places lies in how women practice Orthodox Judaism, an observant denomination that is often perceived as reinforcing gender stereotypes and perpetuating women's oppression. There are many ways of practicing Orthodox Judaism, including dressing modestly, refraining from reading Torah in synagogue services, and performing a set of mitzvot, or commandments, that often take place in a traditionally domestic realm. Yet many Orthodox women take pride in these duties as important ways in which they express their identities as women. They do not feel oppressed by their covered collarbones or shackled as they bake the challah for Shabbat; what some women perceive as a tool of the patriarchy, others utilize as a tool of their own feminism.

Maybe the power of feminism is found within our own unique cultures, identities, and our sometimes-divergent modes of expression. Maybe we don't need to define what a feminist looks like, because there is no single archetype.

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen-name bell hooks, writes beautifully about the importance of theory in Theory as Liberatory Practice. She writes about theory as a sort of refuge she sought as a child trying to make sense of her world. Yet, she notes, theory is not sufficient to make a change. The mere possession of a term, she explains, does not put it into practice; at the same time, we might be practicing a theory without even being cognizant of what that theory is. Therefore, she writes, we can do the work of the feminist resistance without ever using the word feminism. What if that is our best defense against the current gendered order within which we live? What if our best way to fight the feminist fight is by being ourselves and loving ourselves, living as we are and cherishing all types of womanhood? Maybe the power of feminism is found within our own unique cultures, identities, and our sometimes-divergent modes of expression. Maybe we don't need to define what a feminist looks like, because there is no single archetype.

Now, it would be false to claim that even the most empowered of women have total agency over their choices. I might feel comfortable and proud of my decision to wear heels, but that decision is still rooted in a traditional desire to please the eye of the patriarchy. There are very few choices, if any, that we women can make that will truly be the result of our own volition, rather than some societal force. However, I believe that rather than eliminating these manifestations of our gendered world, we should accept the choices of those who wish to embrace them. We cannot, unfortunately, shed all elements of patriarchy from our society, but those who choose can reclaim those elements as instruments of their own feminism. In addition, by embracing all types of women, we avoid the risk of excluding women who are often marginalized by mainstream feminism, particularly women of color, women outside of North America and Western Europe, indigenous women, and many, many other groups that are not properly represented in popular discourse about women.

We cannot, unfortunately, erase all elements of patriarchy from our society, but those who wish to can reclaim those elements as instruments of their own feminism.

This practice of feminism, the practice of seeing all expressions of womanhood as legitimate and as mechanisms with which we can achieve gender parity, is imperfect. I do not mean to suggest that it is a flawless solution to the problem of gender inequality. I do, however, believe that this practice is an important approach to consider as we look at the society in front of us and seek to devise a future in which all women are treated equally in the law, in the household, in the workplace, and in the morality of all those who share this world.

We women do not express ourselves in the same ways, nor do we express ourselves in ways that are always compatible, but nonetheless, we are all women. I believe that we must embrace all modes of empowerment as equally valid and important components of our feminist fight. By doing so, we bring ourselves closer to the world we so need and deserve.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the McGill Left Review or its editors.

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I am a woman. I am a sister, a granddaughter, a friend and a best friend, a classmate, a leader, and a woman. But we women have a problem of inclusion. Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex that women rarely talk about women as we, as if there is some fear of claiming unity.

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This article brought out a lot of statistics from years and years. All the statistics that they used were ones that people voted in about women and men being equal in areas and if the population thinks they are or not. An example they used was back in the 40s only 35% of the population believed that men and women are equally intelligent. Then recently they redid it and it stated that 86% of US adults stated then men and women are equally intelligent.

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From the days in the Savanna, when one had to hunt for food, to the days of agricultural output and the industrial economy, the superior physical abilities of man gave him an advantage over women in work efficiency. However, with the arrival of the knowledge economy, the human brain has become the most important tool for work. With this fundamental shift, women do not start at a disadvantage.

According to the World Employment And Social Outlook Trends For Women 2018 report, more women than ever before are both educated and participating in the labour market today. Even as opportunities for people without a college education shrink, men's rates of graduation remain relatively stagnant, while women across socioeconomic classes are increasingly enrolling for and completing post-secondary degrees. In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, 72.5% of females in the US who had recently graduated high school were enrolled in a two-year or four-year college programme, compared to 65.8% of men. However, The Global Gender Gap Report 2018 by the World Economic Forum does not provide much scope for optimism. According to this report, it will take 108 years to close the gender gap and 202 years to achieve parity in the workforce. Gender parity seems too far a goal to achieve. No doubt, we need a fresh and re-energized approach to solve the issue of gender inequality.

Many studies have shown that though many admit that women are equal to men at a conscious level, at an implicit level, many tend to harbour many biases towards women. The plague and power of bias are too consequential to let them go unacknowledged and unchecked. Merely having more awareness of a bias does not help overcome it. One needs to understand the root causes of it to mitigate its effects.

Why is it that women are still not accepted as equals although so many women are educated and entering the work force in larger numbers? What are the significant forces that hinder our progress towards gender parity?

For millions of years, except in few matriarchal societies, the man has always been considered the head of the family. The provider-role he played was always seen superior to the nurturer-role that women played in a family. The man's decision was always the final word. Gender parity was not a norm in families across societies.

It was hoped that with the arrival of the knowledge economy and women earning better salaries, those norms would change. However, census researchers Marta Murray-Close and Misty L. Heggeness found a peculiar tendency to "manning up and womaning down" salaries. In opposite-sex marriages in which women earned more, women said that they earned 1.5 percentage points less, on average, than they actually did. Their husbands said they earned 2.9 percentage points more than they did. Even among the educated, there are deep rooted biases that prevent people from admitting that the man is no longer the provider-in-chief.

A large study by Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica, economists at the University of Chicago, using census data from 1970 to 2000, found that marriages in which the woman earned more were less likely in the first place and more likely to end in divorce. The study also found that women who out-earned their husbands were more likely to seek jobs beneath their potential and do significantly more housework and child care than their husbands, perhaps to make their husbands feel less threatened. The norms in our families act as a huge deterrent to achieving gender parity.

When it comes to the issue of gender inequality, the elephant in the room is religion, which has been an integral part of human existence for a long time. According to Neil MacGregor, the author of the book Living With The Gods: On Beliefs And

Peoples, every religion churns out stories that give shape to the beliefs we live by. According to some of those stories, male bodies are created in God's own image and so are considered better than female bodies, which are somehow deficient and

in need of purification. All the key functions of organized religion, such as conducting religious ceremonies and heading the religious hierarchy, are reserved for men. No organized religion treats women equal to men.

The unequal treatment of women by religion has exerted a very strong influence on every society's gender norms. Kamila Klingorova and Tomas Havlicek, in their paper titled Religion And Gender Inequality: The Status Of Women In The Societies Of World Religions, have established that countries where the majority of inhabitants have no religious affiliation display the lowest levels of gender inequality, and countries with the highest levels of gender inequality are those with high

levels of religious affiliation. We cannot achieve gender parity if religion, one of the strongest forces in most societies, continues to turn its back on women. As Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of UN Women, said, "The agenda of

creating a planet 50-50 cannot come true if religion, religious leaders, and faith actors remain outside the conversation."

Achieving gender parity is not about organizing awareness programmes and pasting a few posters in offices. It is all about fundamentally altering beliefs upheld by the two strongest institutions of any society: the family and religion.
Biju Dominic is the chief executive officer of Final Mile Consulting, a behaviour architecture firm

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Opinion | Why women are still being treated as unequal to men

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From the days in the Savanna, when one had to hunt for food, to the days of agricultural output and the industrial economy, the superior physical abilities of man gave him an advantage over women in work efficiency. However, with the arrival of the knowledge economy, the human brain has become the most important tool for work.

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1 in 3 women globally experience violence 

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1 in 3 women globally experience violence 

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This is a very high percentage for women being discriminated against because they are female. This is very sad, so I added an article to speak more on this situation to help spread awareness to this subject. Women should not be getting treated this way just for being a women, this just doesn't make sense to me.

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Violence against women remains devastatingly pervasive and starts alarmingly young, shows new data from WHO and partners. Across their lifetime, 1 in 3 women, around 736 million, are subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner - a number that has remained largely unchanged over the past decade.

This violence starts early: 1 in 4 young women (aged 15-24 years) who have been in a relationship will have already experienced violence by an intimate partner by the time they reach their mid-twenties.

"Violence against women is endemic in every country and culture, causing harm to millions of women and their families, and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic," said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. "But unlike COVID-19, violence against women cannot be stopped with a vaccine. We can only fight it with deep-rooted and sustained efforts - by governments, communities and individuals - to change harmful attitudes, improve access to opportunities and services for women and girls, and foster healthy and mutually respectful relationships."

Intimate partner violence is by far the most prevalent form of violence against women globally (affecting around 641 million). However, 6% of women globally report being sexually assaulted by someone other than their husband or partner. Given the high levels of stigma and under-reporting of sexual abuse, the true figure is likely to be significantly higher.

Emergencies exacerbate violence, increasing vulnerability and risks

This report presents data from the largest ever study of the prevalence of violence against women, conducted by WHO on behalf of a special working group of the United Nations. Based on data from 2000 to 2018, it updates previous estimates released in 2013.

While the numbers reveal already alarmingly high rates of violence against women and girls, they do not reflect the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

WHO and partners warn that the COVID-19 pandemic has further increased women's exposure to violence, as a result of measures such as lockdowns and disruptions to vital support services.

"It's deeply disturbing that this pervasive violence by men against women not only persists unchanged, but is at its worst for young women aged 15-24 who may also be young mothers. And that was the situation before the pandemic stay-at home orders. We know that the multiple impacts of COVID-19 have triggered a "shadow pandemic" of increased reported violence of all kinds against women and girls," said UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. "Every government should be taking strong, proactive steps to address this, and involving women in doing so", she added.

Though many countries have seen increased reporting of intimate partner violence to helplines, police, health workers, teachers, and other service providers during lockdowns, the full impact of the pandemic on prevalence will only be established as surveys are resumed, the report notes.

Inequities are a leading risk factor for violence against women

Violence disproportionately affects women living in low- and lower-middle-income countries. An estimated 37% of women living in the poorest countries have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence in their life, with some of these countries having a prevalence as high as 1 in 2.

The regions of Oceania, Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have the highest prevalence rates of intimate partner violence among women aged 15-49, ranging from 33% - 51%. The lowest rates are found in Europe (16-23%), Central Asia (18%), Eastern Asia (20%) and South-Eastern Asia (21%).

Younger women are at highest risk for recent violence. Among those who have been in a relationship, the highest rates (16%) of intimate partner violence in the past 12 months occurred among young women aged between 15 and 24.

Violence against women must be prevented

Violence - in all its forms - can have an impact on a woman's health and well-being throughout the rest of her life - even long after the violence may have ended. It is associated with increased risk of injuries, depression, anxiety disorders, unplanned pregnancies, sexually-transmitted infections including HIV and many other health problems. It has impacts on society as a whole and comes with tremendous costs, impacting national budgets and overall development.

Preventing violence requires addressing systemic economic and social inequalities, ensuring access to education and safe work, and changing discriminatory gender norms and institutions. Successful interventions also include strategies that ensure essential services are available and accessible to survivors, that support women's organisations, challenge inequitable social norms, reform discriminatory laws and strengthen legal responses, among others.

"To address violence against women, there's an urgent need to reduce stigma around this issue, train health professionals to interview survivors with compassion, and dismantle the foundations of gender inequality," said Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno of WHO. "Interventions with adolescents and young people to foster gender equality and gender-equitable attitudes are also vital."

Countries should honour their commitments to increased and strong political will and leadership to tackle violence against women in all its forms, through:

Sound gender transformative policies, from policies around childcare to equal pay, and laws that support gender equality,

A strengthened health system response that ensures access to survivor-centred care and referral to other services as needed,

School and educational interventions to challenge discriminatory attitudes and beliefs, including comprehensive sexuality education,

Targeted investment in sustainable and effective evidence-based prevention strategies at local, national, regional and global levels, and

Strengthening data collection and investing in high quality surveys on violence against women and improving measurement of the different forms of violence experienced by women, including those who are most marginalized.

***
Notes to editors:
To access the report and related materials for media, please go to: https://who.canto.global/b/QR99R

About the report

The report, Global, regional and national estimates for intimate partner violence against women and global and regional estimates for non-partner sexual violence against women was developed by WHO and the UNDP-UNFPA-UNICEF-WHO-World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (HRP) for the United Nations Inter-Agency Working Group on Violence Against Women Estimation and Data.

The Working Group includes representatives from WHO, UN Women, UNICEF, UNFPA, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) to strengthen the measurement and monitoring and reporting of violence against women, including for the purposes of monitoring the related indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

National data collection on intimate partner violence has increased significantly since the previous 2010 estimates, although challenges remain with data quality and availability. Sexual violence, in particular, remains one of the most taboo and stigmatizing forms, and hence continues to be vastly underreported.

Financial support for the analysis and report was provided by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom.

Regional and Country data

The report and database present regional data in the following categories: SDG regions, WHO regions, Global Burden of Disease (GBD) regions, UNFPA regions and UNICEF regions. Data is also presented for 161 countries and areas.

Lifetime prevalence of intimate partner violence among women aged 15-49 among the United Nations SDG regional and subregion classifications, the rates were as follows:

Least Developed Countries - 37%
Subregions of:

Oceania - 51% Melanesia; 41% Micronesia; 39% Polynesia

Southern Asia - 35%

Sub-Saharan Africa - 33%

Northern Africa - 30%

Western Asia - 29%

Northern America - 25%

Australia and New Zealand - 23%

Latin American and the Caribbean - 25%

Northern Europe -23%

South-Eastern Asia - 21%

Western Europe - 21%

Eastern Asia - 20%

Eastern Europe - 20%

Central Asia - 18%

Southern Europe - 16%

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Devastatingly pervasive: 1 in 3 women globally experience violence

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Violence against women remains devastatingly pervasive and starts alarmingly young, shows new data from WHO and partners.

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I believe that this word is not well known, so I added the definition here to help the readers understand what it truly means. Feminist Praxis is the conception and planning of a new action in response to an environmental demand.

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[prak´sis]

the conception and planning of a new action in response to an environmental demand.

feminist praxis praxis done from a belief system involving ideas of mutual nurturance, nonviolence, and small groups working for change, with attention to emotions, communal life, reciprocity, and the development of persons over time. See also feminist theory .

(prak'sis),

The performance of an action.

(prak'sis)

occupational therapy Conception and planning of a motor act in response to an environmental demand.

2. The ability to perform skilled actions.

(prak'sis)

The performance of an action.

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prak´sis] the conception and planning of a new action in response to an environmental demand. feminist praxis praxis done from a belief system involving ideas of mutual nurturance, nonviolence, and small groups working for change, with attention to emotions, communal life, reciprocity, and the development of persons over time.

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There are things that we still need to change in todays society, and this link provides things that still need improvement for gender equality. They list off areas where we hurt the most like reproductive rights and health care.

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(Pamela Drew / Flickr)

While a multitude of 2020's problems will continue to plague us in 2021, with the end of the Trump administration in sight and the arrival of the COVID vaccine, there's a sense of hope and possibility in the air as the new year approaches-and we're clinging onto hope like our lives depend on it.

As 2020 draws to a close, Ms. asked some of our favorite feminists-from our fave feminist lawyers and activists fighting for abortion and health care access for all, to scholars doing invaluable research on gender disparities in the U.S. and on a global scale-what they see as top priorities and what changes they're hoping for in 2021.

Legal Rights

"I wish that a Biden-Harris administration would bring our country's women's rights framework into the 21 st century. We are one of the few countries-alongside Iran and the Sudan-that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). We are also one of the few countries without an equal rights clause in our constitution. It's time to give women the same legal rights as men."

- Jennifer M. Piscopo, associate professor of politics at Occidental College.

"I wish that the lame-duck Trump administration would cancel the execution of Lisa Montgomery, scheduled for January 12, a mere eight days before President Biden takes office. Born with brain damage, Montgomery suffered severe and traumatic mental, physical and sexual abuse throughout her life at the hands of her mother, step-father and others and her pleas for help were ignored by those who should and could have saved her. She should not be put to death but should be granted the clemency that she will request in December 2020."

- Michelle Onello, a human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality, international law and reproductive rights, and senior counsel at the Global Justice Center and a principal at Cetana Consulting.
(For more information on how to help, see www.savelisa.org.)

Left: Lisa Montgomery during her time in prison; right: Montgomery as a young girl, age unknown. (Courtesy of attorneys for Lisa Montgomery)

"I wish that the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights will decide in favor of Tanzanian girls who, through their government's policy, are currently denied their right to education if they get pregnant. And I wish the government will make schools safe for girls and equip them with comprehensive sexuality education and access to sexual reproductive rights and services. Access to safe schooling and education will ensure that girls will be empowered and enjoy other socio-economic rights which are necessary for their human development."

- Faiza Jama Mohamed, the Africa region director at Equality Now, has more than 20 years of experience advocating for the legal rights of women and girls at the national, regional and international levels.
(You can read more about how COVID-19 threatens decades of progress on world gender equality, and learn more about the human rights issues facing women and girls in Africa here.)
Violence Against Women

"We need to pass the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) with key enhancements. It hasn't been reauthorized since 2013 and so much has changed since then. Just in the last few months because of COVID and the economic crisis, Latinas and immigrants are experiencing increased isolation, misinformation, lack of access to health care and workplace protections, and lack of sufficient access to community-based resources and support. All of this increases risks to domestic violence and makes efforts to access safety and well-being so much harder. An improved and reauthorized VAWA will save lives by providing advocates, practitioners, and survivors of domestic and sexual violence with updated and more comprehensive resources and options."

-Patti Tototzintle, CEO of Casa de Esperanza: National Latin@ Network for Healthy Families and Communities
(For more information about VAWA, including how to get involved in reauthorizing it, visit 4vawa.org. Check out casadeespereranz.org (If you are interested in learning more, check out t his important campaign to engage men by the DC-based organization Vital Voices. Read more about Donald Trump and the impact of his administration on masculinity here. for ideas on how to support Latin@ survivors and immigrant communities and visit immigrantsurvivors.org for more information on policy advocacy on behalf of immigrant survivors.)

Joe Biden accepts the nomination for the Democratic ticket for president in Wilmington, Del., on Aug 20, 2020. (Adam Schultz / Biden for President)

(Read more about how telemedicine startups are revolutionizing abortion health care in the U.S.) (Learn more about Power to Decide's helpful tools for finding verified abortion providers here.)

"Donald Trump's presidency represented an enormous setback in the ongoing struggle to reduce our society's appallingly high rates of sexual assault and domestic violence. With Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice-president, we will once again have the opportunity to see leadership from the White House on these critical issues.

"Specifically, I would love to see the new president use his stature and unparalleled platform to highlight and expand the multiracial, multiethnic movement of men committed to working to end misogyny and all forms of men's violence against women. This movement already exists - in the U.S. and globally - but has not yet reached the critical mass required to make transformative change. With leadership from the highest level we can accomplish a great deal more - and we must."

- Jackson Katz, Ph.D, author, activist and creator and co-writer of the new documentary film " The Man Card: White Male Identity Politics from Nixon to Trump " (co-produced by the Media Education Foundation).
(Learn more about the importance of widespread access to contraception here, or about the new and innovative ways ob-gyns are bringing sex ed to teens here. If you're interested in supporting the cause, check out Power To Decide.)
Reproductive Rights and Health Care

Outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments for Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt in June 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)

(Learn more about how the Trump administration's expansion of the global gag rule has impacted global health here.)

"I wish that the FDA would remove the REMS restriction on the abortion pill and that all states would allow telemedine abortion so that people can receive the abortion pill by mail from their health care providers, without having to travel long distances or pass through anti-abortion protesters to get abortion health care. Telemedicine abortion and distribution of the pill to patients by mail will make abortion access quick, convenient, private, and affordable to people no matter where they live."

- Carrie Baker, Ph.D, J.D., professor in the study of women and gender at Smith College and president of the Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts.

"More than 19 million women live in contraceptive deserts, yet access to contraception for those who need it most was consistently under attack. All people should have unfettered access to the full range of contraception options they need and that are right for them. My wish for the new year is that our fight for the full range of reproductive health services for people everywhere sees significant progress in 2021. Making this a reality means reversing all efforts that restricted people's access to contraception and working to protect and expand coverage and access to it. This would get us closer to a world where all people have the power to decide if, when, and under what circumstances to get pregnant."

- Gillian Sealy, PhD, MPH, Interim CEO of Power to Decide, the campaign to prevent unplanned pregnancy.
(Read more of her work at: www.ifeomaajunwa.com, and learn more about how COVID-19 could enable the inclusion of women in the workplace here.)

"I hope that 2021 will bring a renewed sense of protection of reproductive rights. The last four years have brought many increased restrictions and fears surrounding reproductive rights. I am hopeful that we can continue to fight to uphold current precedent as well as expand access and support."

-Dr. Staci Tanouye, a board-certified ob-gyn physician and advocate for expanded sexual education and reproductive rights.

"I wish the U.S. would recognize health care as a human right for all and provide health care coverage for all, including undocumented immigrants. This pandemic has shown us how we are all interconnected and how certain groups, such as Black, Latinx, and indigenous populations, are faring worse with higher hospitalization and death rates. The lack of access to health care in one of the richest countries in the world is unforgivable.

"At a time when Americans are losing jobs and associated health care coverage, the Supreme Court seems poised to uphold Medicaid mandatory work requirements. Medicaid is a vital program for millions of low income Americans. The majority of people who are on Medicaid are women. Work requirements make it more difficult for women and their kids to keep their health care coverage.

"I hope that the Georgia race results in a Democratic majority in the Senate and that laws and policies enhancing access to health care become a priority."

- Seema Mohapatra, J.D., M.P.H., tenured faculty member at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law and current visiting professor at Florida A&M University College of Law.

Here at Ms., our team is continuing to report through this global health crisis-doing what we can to keep you informed and up-to-date on some of the most underreported issues of this pandemic. We ask that you consider supporting our work to bring you substantive, unique reporting-we can't do it without you. Support our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

Inequity and Representation

"My wish for 2021 is a focus on issues affecting Black women in the workplace. Black women are less likely to feel supported at work during the COVID-19 crisis. Furthermore, publicized incidents of racial violence in the U.S. exact a psychological toll on those women. Even before the pandemic, many Black women had already reported feeling excluded at work and ignored. Issues of racism have long eroded the psychological safety of Black women in the workplace. I hope the potential loss of Black women workers will prompt businesses to finally truly engage with the work of racial equity and inclusion.

"I urge President Biden to take action to pass transparency laws that would require businesses to disclose their diversity numbers yearly, along with pay transparency. I urge businesses to engage with diversity and inclusion professionals to take the temperature of their work climates and make necessary changes for better inclusion."

- Dr. Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., Ph.D., associate professor with tenure at Cornell University and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School.

"Despite record numbers of women running for office in 2020 the United States will likely rank 70th in the world for the percentage of women elected at the national level - other countries in that range include Afghanistan, Mali, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Bulgaria and Iraq.

To make serious and sustained progress toward gender balance in politics in the coming decade we need to learn from the countries electing more women to office - faster - and invest in data-driven institutional strategies that address the structural barriers women face as candidates and as elected officials.

My hope is that the democracy reform and women's representation movements will forge partnerships to work together on systems strategies like ranked choice voting & the Fair Representation Act that will yield the reflective democracy we all crave."

You may also like:
- Cynthia Richie Terrell, founder and director of RepresentWomen, a research and advocacy hub for the best practices to advance women's representation and leadership.

"I wish for more inclusive representation of women, non-binary individuals, LGBTQ folx, and people of color in the film industry, on television, and in other visual media, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. Popular culture resonates with our lived experiences by both reflecting where we are and showing us how things could be. The more women of color who work in these industries, the more opportunities there will be for other women of color. The more compelling and varied representations we see of characters who are often marginalized in society, the more we will see this diversity understood and acknowledged in our real lives."

- Aviva Dove-Viebahn, Ph.D, assistant professor of film and media studies and contributing editor of the Scholar Writing Program for Ms.

My wish for the new year in books is that the Big 5 publishers listen to readers and writers when they express their concerns about #PublishingSoWhite. They (literally) need to put their money where their mouths are. We need more writers, editors, scouts, agents, imprints and BOSSES of color in order to ensure the industry reflects the broad spectrum of writers - this is what readers want!

- Karla J. Strand, Ph.D, M.L.I.S., a gender and women's studies librarian for the University of Wisconsin.

Bravely Facing the New Year

"Guided by the wisdom of Karen Armstrong: 'Compassion is not an option. It is the key to our survival.'

"I wish that women and girls may courageously embrace the ethical principle of compassion. May we confidently and firmly lead in establishing relationships of respect, interdependence, and generosity with others and all of creation."

-Martha Ann Kirk, Th.D., professor emerita and Compassion Integrity Training Facilitator.

The coronavirus pandemic and the response by federal, state and local authorities is fast-moving. During this time, Ms. is keeping a focus on aspects of the crisis-especially as it impacts women and their families-often not reported by mainstream media. If you found this article helpful, please consider supporting our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

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Feminist Wishes for 2021: Continuing the Fight - Ms. Magazine

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As 2020 draws to a close, Ms. is looking forwards towards the new year (and new administration!), and thinking about the most vital issues for feminists to be aware of - because there's so much more work to be done.With this in mind, we talked to some of our favorite feminists about their top priorities for issues the country is facing from the environment to reproductive rights to voting, and what changes they're hoping for 2021.

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They go through many different ways that you can have your voice heard being from different backgrounds, cultures, sexualities, and anything that makes you unique. My favorite tip that they gave is respecting the voices of those who are most affected by issues to make sure they understand they are being heard. They are the spokesperson for their own lives and they are allowed to talk about their own causes.

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Ten Tips for Putting Intersectionality into Practice

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We've compiled ten tips for putting intersectionality into practice to promote opportunity for individuals and communities who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination.

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Intersectionality matters even more in 2020

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Intersectionality matters even more in 2020

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The world is becoming a different place and people are finally becoming comfortable enough to express how they really feel. Thats why it matters more now than it did in the past. People are not afraid to express their true identities, so know there are more people to represent inclusion in places of work.

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Why Intersectionality Matters Even More in 2020 | Catalyst

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A quote from this article that really stood out to me was, "Diversity initiatives that center 'all Women' often do not center non-white women, and as a result, fail to account for the multidimensional impact of race and gender on hiring practices, promotion tracks, and more. The opportunity is not distributed fairly across for all women of different backgrounds.

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All women are unique and have things that make them different. This includes race, education, sexuality, class, age, ability, and culture. The only thing that isn't different is that we are all humans. This means that even though we all are different in many different ways, we all are humans.

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This article had a quote that I really enjoyed and it talked about how, "many conservatives, intersectionality means 'because you’re a minority, you get special standards, special treatment in the eyes of some.'" When that is not what it is, it is just some people are better educated in some areas and lack knowledge in others.

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When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 30 years ago, it was a relatively obscure legal concept. Then it went viral.

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This article provided me with a picture that I really enjoyed. This quote on the sign in that picture is where a lot of harm to Asian Americans comes from. The American people are harming Asian lives because they say that Covid19 came from the Asian culture. This is a problem and is going to cause oppression of asian lives. The virus is a world wide thing and can be fixed by all people, not just the Asian culture.

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This article talked about how white supremacy, racist myths fuel anti- asian violence. I would like to bring these topics up because they do need more attention. Many asian lives have been at risk of harm lately and people have never brought these types of problems up. I would like to share awareness for asian lives and help promote to fix these problems.

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Expert quotes | Social science | UW News blog

As an assistant professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Linh Thủy Nguyễn focuses on a number of research areas, including Asian American and Southeast Asian American studies, immigration and refugee issues, and gender and family.

She also values the role of community, whether as a means of providing services or taking collective action, in tackling problems and offering a voice.

The recent, national wave of violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) is only the latest in a much longer history of oppressive, hateful acts, Nguyen said. (Nguyen points out that this term is used here to be inclusive of the experiences of Pacific Islanders while acknowledging the complicated political conditions of some Pacific Islanders whose experiences as indigenous populations are not adequately captured through the lens of race.)

The organization Stop AAPI Hate has tracked nearly 3,000 incidents over the past year, which advocates say is likely an undercount, because many people don't report what happened to them. That's not surprising, Nguyen said: Reporting incidents of discrimination or violence can be traumatic and potentially lead to even more harassment.

"The lack of visibility around the issue also means that those who choose to speak out may face denials and threats for doing so," Nguyen said. "Individualized acts of violence may be disregarded as a one-off rather than part of a larger system of attitudes and beliefs that contributes to violent acts against particular communities."

Nguyen spoke with UW News about the history of racism and violence, and ways forward.
Racism and violence against those in the AAPI community has gotten more attention recently, but it's not new. Can you talk about the history of these attitudes and incidents?
In the last year we have seen a marked uptick in physical and verbal attacks against Asians and Asian Americans. The senseless murders at massage parlors in Atlanta - the killings of eight people, six of whom were Asian women - also shed light on the gendered dimensions of racial violence. What Celine Parreñas Shimizu has called the hypersexuality of race is so normalized in representations of Asian women as hypersexual, sexually available and submissive, which are tied to a longer history of imperialism and Orientalism. Dating back to 1875, the Page Act barred the migration of Chinese women and effectively cast them as prostitutes. In this long tradition of representation, Asian women have been constructed racially through these images of sexuality.

When Asians are blamed for the coronavirus, we can see the Orientalist discourse of "Yellow Peril," which frames Asians as perpetually foreign and threatening to Western civilization. Mass acts of racist violence have tended to abate in times of economic prosperity and surge in times of economic contraction or uncertainty. In Seattle and Tacoma, after completion of the railroad system, the Chinese were driven out of neighborhoods. Once their highly exploited labor was no longer needed, they faced mob violence, upheld by state and federal laws rooted in fear of their foreignness and the false conception that Chinese settlement would overrun local communities and take away American jobs.
The latest wave of anti-Asian violence surged due to anxiety over the coronavirus. Even with the arrival of vaccines, anti-Asian violence has persisted. What can explain that?
The pandemic brought into relief the extreme disparities that exist in this country. The wealthy and middle class have more or less been able to shift to remote work, while the working class has either faced unemployment or had to continue low-wage work with constant anxiety of uncertain protections against the virus. Essential workers like grocery store employees and farmers have not had opportunities to socially distance and work from home. The former president's anti-Asian rhetoric tied to the "Chinese Virus" and "Kung Flu" provided a target for the frustrations of many whose lives were upended and thrown into uncertainty.
What is the "model minority" myth, and how can it better enable us to better understand anti-Asian sentiment?
The "model minority" concept is attributed to sociologist William Petersen's 1966 New York Times story detailing the quiet successes of the Japanese community after the devastation of internment during World War II. The myth upholds Asians as models for other minorities to emulate and suggests that Asians have somehow overcome racism because of their economic successes. When Black communities in the civil rights movement demanded structural changes, such as access to jobs and education, the myth blamed them for not cultivating the individual attitudes and work ethic that would supposedly allow them to overcome racism. We know that individual achievements cannot undo racism and does not protect you from racist violence, as the attacks against AAPI communities have revealed.

It's a fallacy that ignores the reality that, while white supremacy is the foundation, racism is not experienced in the same way by all communities; the racialized character of capitalism means that value is extracted through differentiation and the differential valuation of marginalized communities. The myth is so pervasive and rooted in ideas of merit and hard work that benefit Asian Americans at the exclusion of Black Americans. This relative benefit makes it difficult to see the damage, not only to other racialized communities, but also to our own families and communities. It creates a monolithic Asian community, which fails to capture the economic and generational heterogeneity of Asian groups and leaves out the experiences of many Asian communities who face poverty and underemployment.
What lessons can we take from the past?
Nothing has ever changed because a single person in a position of power decided to do it. I am always heartened at the responsiveness of the AAPI community. At the start of the pandemic, it was community members who organized to support one another through mutual aid, food pantries and campaigns to support the businesses in the Chinatown-International District in Seattle. As social movements of the past and present show us, attitudes and racist policies change when we name them and demand action to change them.

For more information, contact Nguyen at lnguye@uw.edu.

Tag(s): College of Arts & Sciences * Department of American Ethnic Studies * Linh Nguyen

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How white supremacy, racist myths fuel anti-Asian violence

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Linh Thủy Nguyễn, an assistant professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington, discusses the recent wave of violence against Asians and Asian Americans, and the history...

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Asian Americans Experience Discrimination 

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Asian Americans Experience Discrimination 

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There has not been enough awareness on this situation and it should be more widely spread. Asian Americans lately have been tormented more than any other race and it needs to be talked about. This all is due to the spread of Covid19 and some American people blame the Asian race when it is a problem that everyone is facing. This is discrimination at its worst in America and many asian lives have been at harm.

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A string of brutal attacks on elderly Asian Americans has brought new attention to the rise of violence and harassment of Asian Americans. Since the pandemic began, more than 3,000 anti-Asian "hate incidents" have been reported in the U.S. according to the group, "Stop AAPI Hate." Asian American and Pacific Islander activist Helen Zia and Rise founder Amanda Nguyen join Amna Nawaz to discuss.

Judy Woodruff:
A recent string of brutal attacks on elderly Asian Americans caught on video has brought new attention to the rise of violence and harassment of Asian Americans.

Since the pandemic started, more than 3,000 anti-Asian hate incidents have been reported in the U.S., according to the group, Stop AAPI Hate.

Earlier today, Amna Nawaz hosted a live conversation unpacking the history behind these attacks, concerns in the community, and what happens next.

Amna Nawaz:
Joining me now is Helen Zia, activist, award-winning author and former journalist and, of course, the author behind the seminal book "Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People."

Also with us is Amanda Nguyen. She's a social entrepreneur, a civil rights activist and the CEO and founder of Rise, a nongovernmental civil rights organization.

So, welcome to you both. And thank you for being here.

Helen, what would you say to someone who's trying to understand what's driving this surge we're seeing now?

Helen Zia:
I think we have to understand that this, as you said, Amna, was something that has been happening for a very long time and is actually part of the fabric of America, how Asian Americans have lived with this, ever since we have been in America.

I was part of a very similar time in the 1980s, when a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin was killed in Detroit because Japan was being blamed for the economic crisis in America. And, today, unfortunately, we are facing something very similar, that now China is the cause of everything bad in America now.

Folks are looking for people to blame. And from time immemorial, since Asian Americans have been in the Americas, Asian people have been blamed and attacked and scapegoated, even with periods of ethnic cleansing, killing, eliminating, lynchings, mass attacks.

So, this is not something new.

Amna Nawaz:
Well, Amanda, I want to ask you about this, because, as these videos have been surfacing, report after report of what are really brutal and brazen attacks, often in broad daylight, what were you thinking as you were watching report after report and video after video come in?

Amanda Nguyen:
Quite honestly, I was hurt.

When I saw these videos and felt like mainstream media wasn't covering it, I turned to social media, because I think the core issue is about visibility. I think these things are happening because people are ignorant. And they're ignorant because they haven't been able to get to know us, or they haven't done the work to get to know us.

I don't think people are born hateful. I think that there are systems in place, tools of oppression that shape people to other groups of entire communities. And so, at this moment, my call to action was to humanize us by getting our stories out there.

Helen Zia:
I think it's partly an enforced lack of knowledge. I mean, we have systems. We have - it's part of the systemic racism of depriving all Americans, including Asian Americans, of our own history.

I call it MIH, missing in history. And so it's not like there's this void in our brains. That gets filled with garbage, things that are like cartoon caricatures of what Asian - people from Asian backgrounds are supposed to be like. And many of those caricatures are subhuman, not human, animalistic, disease carriers, enemy invaders, which is a very constant caricature.

And so, instead of real knowledge about how the treatment of Asian Americans goes way back, and, in fact, is part of the systemic racism of America that came along with the enslavement of people from Africa and the genocide of indigenous people, there was the xenophobia, the ethnic cleansing, the use and manipulation of Asian Americans to sort of be an in-between wedge against other people.

And so that is damaging. The absence of knowledge is fundamentally the way to keep people fighting each other.

Amna Nawaz:
Thank you so much to both of you for joining us today.

That is Helen Zia and Amanda Nguyen.

And for anyone out there who wants to watch the full, unedited conversation, you can go to our website. That is PBS.org/NewsHour.

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Asian Americans face a wave of discrimination during the pandemic

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A string of brutal attacks on elderly Asian Americans has brought new attention to the rise of violence and harassment of Asian Americans. Since the pandemic began, more than 3,000 anti-Asian "hate incidents" have been reported in the U.S. according to the group, "Stop AAPI Hate."

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The white population has a big platform and following just based on the color of their skin. This is when their words can become very powerful and educational. They can teach people by just re-sharing things that show the dark side of racism in todays society. The more they spread the word the more awareness we have to the situations going on. If no words are said that can not educate your following and cause more violence.

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What white men think about their own white privilege 

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What white men think about their own white privilege 

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This article talked about how they don't understand what the white man takes for granted. They are able to do so much more than the rest of the population, being a white cis men. They went into depth even including race, gender, and sexual orientation and how it can make a difference.

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Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

Feature

My college class asks what it means to be white in America - but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

In the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. "What's redlining?" someone would ask. "George Washington freed his slaves?" someone else would inquire. But as I listened to Donald Trump's inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect the treatment of the undocumented with the treatment of Irish, Italian and Asian people over the centuries?

In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to "any alien, being a free white person," develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from "free white person"? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation at the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black people's freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921? How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?

I wanted my students to gain an awareness of a growing body of work by sociologists, theorists, historians and literary scholars in a field known as "whiteness studies," the cornerstones of which include Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness," Matthew Frye Jacobson's "Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race," Richard Dyer's "White" and more recently Nell Irvin Painter's "The History of White People." Roediger, a historian, had explained the development of the field, one that my class would engage with, saying, "The 1980s and early '90s saw the publication of major works on white identity's intricacies and costs by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, alongside new works by white writers and activists asking similar questions historically. Given the seeming novelty of such white writing and the urgency of understanding white support for Ronald Reagan, 'critical whiteness studies' gained media attention and a small foothold in universities." This area of study aimed to make visible a history of whiteness that through its association with "normalcy" and "universality" masked its omnipresent institutional power.

My class eventually became Constructions of Whiteness, and over the two years that I have taught it, many of my students (who have included just about every race, gender identity and sexual orientation) interviewed white people on campus or in their families about their understanding of American history and how it relates to whiteness. Some students simply wanted to know how others around them would define their own whiteness. Others were troubled by their own family members' racism and wanted to understand how and why certain prejudices formed. Still others wanted to show the impact of white expectations on their lives.

Perhaps this is why one day in New Haven, staring into the semicircle of oak trees in my backyard, I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself - a middle-aged black woman - walking up to strangers and doing so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Ind., did when his female colleague told him during a diversity-training session that he benefited from "white male privilege"? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. ( She was placed on paid administrative leave, and a reprimand was placed permanently in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert and just forgot my camera crew? The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don't normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.

Weeks later, it occurred to me that I tend to be surrounded by white men I don't know when I'm traveling, caught in places that are essentially nowhere: in between, en route, up in the air. As I crisscrossed the United States, Europe and Africa giving talks about my work, I found myself considering these white men who passed hours with me in airport lounges, at gates, on planes. They seemed to me to make up the largest percentage of business travelers in the liminal spaces where we waited. That I was among them in airport lounges and in first-class cabins spoke in part to my own relative economic privilege, but the price of my ticket, of course, does not translate into social capital. I was always aware that my value in our culture's eyes is determined by my skin color first and foremost. Maybe these other male travelers could answer my questions about white privilege. I felt certain that as a black woman, there had to be something I didn't understand.

Just recently, a friend who didn't get a job he applied for told me that as a white male, he was absorbing the problems of the world. He meant he was being punished for the sins of his forefathers. He wanted me to know he understood it was his burden to bear. I wanted to tell him that he needed to take a long view of the history of the workplace, given the imbalances that generations of hiring practices before him had created. But would that really make my friend feel any better? Did he understand that today, 65 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the American population? White men have held almost all the power in this country for 400 years.
[The grief that white Americans can't share.]
I knew that my friend was trying to communicate his struggle to find a way to understand the complicated American structure that holds us both. I wanted to ask him if his expectation was a sign of his privilege but decided, given the loss of his job opportunity, that my role as a friend probably demanded other responses.

After a series of casual conversations with my white male travelers, would I come to understand white privilege any differently? They couldn't know what it's like to be me, though who I am is in part a response to who they are, and I didn't really believe I understood them, even as they determined so much of what was possible in my life and in the lives of others. But because I have only lived as me, a person who regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect and abuse, I fell into this wondering silently. Always, I hesitated.

I hesitated when I stood in line for a flight across the country, and a white man stepped in front of me. He was with another white man. "Excuse me," I said. "I am in this line." He stepped behind me but not before saying to his flight mate, "You never know who they're letting into first class these days."

Was his statement a defensive move meant to cover his rudeness and embarrassment, or were we sharing a joke? Perhaps he, too, had heard the recent anecdote in which a black woman recalled a white woman's stepping in front of her at her gate. When the black woman told her she was in line, the white woman responded that it was the line for first class. Was the man's comment a sly reference? But he wasn't laughing, not even a little, not even a smile. Deadpan.

Later, when I discussed this moment with my therapist, she told me that she thought the man's statement was in response to his flight mate, not me. I didn't matter to him, she said; that's why he could step in front of me in the first place. His embarrassment, if it was embarrassment, had everything to do with how he was seen by the person who did matter: his white male companion. I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his imagination, she said. Should this be a comfort? Was my total invisibility preferable to a targeted insult?

During the flight, each time he removed or replaced something in his case overhead, he looked over at me. Each time, I looked up from my book to meet his gaze and smiled - I like to think I'm not humorless. I tried to imagine what my presence was doing to him. On some level, I thought, I must have dirtied up his narrative of white privilege securing white spaces. In my class, I had taught "Whiteness as Property," an article published in The Harvard Law Review in 1993, in which the author, Cheryl Harris, argues that "the set of assumptions, privileges and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect." These are the assumptions of privilege and exclusion that have led many white Americans to call the police on black people trying to enter their own homes or vehicles. Racial profiling becomes another sanctioned method of segregating space. Harris goes on to explain how much white people rely on these benefits, so much so that their expectations inform the interpretations of our laws. "Stand your ground" laws, for example, mean whites can claim that fear made them kill an unarmed black person. Or voter-registration laws in certain states can function as de facto Jim Crow laws. "American law," Harris writes, "has recognized a property interest in whiteness."

On the plane, I wanted to enact a new narrative that included the whiteness of the man who had stepped in front of me. I felt his whiteness should be a component of what we both understood about him, even as his whiteness would not be the entirety of who he is. His unconscious understanding of whiteness meant the space I inhabited should have been only his. The old script would have left his whiteness unacknowledged in my consideration of his slight. But a rude man and a rude white man have different presumptions. Just as when a white person confronted by an actual black human being needs to negotiate stereotypes of blackness so that he can arrive at the person standing before him, I hoped to give the man the same courtesy but in the reverse. Seeing his whiteness meant I understood my presence as an unexpected demotion for him. It was too bad if he felt that way. Still, I wondered, what is this "stuckness" inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies? I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.
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The phrase "white privilege" was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define "invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." McIntosh came to understand that she benefited from hierarchical assumptions and policies simply because she was white. I would have preferred if instead of "white privilege" she had used the term "white dominance," because "privilege" suggested hierarchical dominance was desired by all. Nonetheless, the phrase has stuck. The title of her essay "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies" was a mouthful. McIntosh listed 46 ways white privilege is enacted. "Number 19: I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial"; "Number 20: I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race"; "Number 27: I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared"; "Number 36: If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones." I'm not clear why McIntosh stopped at 46 except as a way of saying, "You get the picture." My students were able to add their own examples easily.

My students and I also studied the work of the white documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow. In the last couple of years, Dow has been part of Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (Incite), which gathered data on more than 850 people who identify as white or partly white and the communities in which they live. He filmed more than a hundred of their oral histories. This work, like McIntosh's, was another way of thinking about the ordinariness of white hierarchical thinking. I asked Dow what he learned in his conversations with white men. "They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their own narratives and coming up short," he said. "I include myself in that," he added after a moment. "We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male archetype. The individual actor on the grand stage always had the support of a genocidal government, but this is not the narrative we grew up with. It's a challenge to adjust."

The interviews, collected in Incite's initial report, "Facing Whiteness," vary greatly in terms of knowledge of American history and experiences. One interviewee declares: "The first slave owner in America was a black man. How many people know that? The slaves that were brought to America were sold to the white man by blacks. So, I don't feel that we owe them any special privileges other than that anybody else has, any other race." While this interviewee denies any privilege, another has come to see how his whiteness enables his mobility in America: "I have to accept the reality that because I'm a man, I - whether I was aware of that or not at any specific time - probably had some sort of hand up in a situation." He added, "The longer I'm in law enforcement and the more aware I am of the world around me, the more I realize that being of Anglo-Saxon descent, being a man and being in a region of America that is somewhat rural, and because it's rural by default mostly white, means that I definitely get preference." This interviewee, who while recognizing his privilege, and who according to Whitney Dow had been "pretty ostracized because of his progressiveness" in the workplace, still indicates - through his use of words like "probably" and phrases like "because it's rural by default mostly white" - that he believes white privilege is in play in only certain circumstances. Full comprehension would include the understanding that white privilege comes with expectations of protection and preferences no matter where he lives in the country.
[How privilege became a provocation.]
How angry could I be at the white man on the plane, the one who glanced at me each time he stood up the way you look at a stone you had tripped on? I understood that the man's behavior was also his socialization. My own socialization had, in many ways, prepared me for him. I was not overwhelmed by our encounter because my blackness is "consent not to be a single being." This phrase, which finds its origins in the work of the West Indian writer Édouard Glissant but was reintroduced to me in the recent work of the poet and critical theorist Fred Moten, gestures toward the fact that I can refuse the white man's stereotypes of blackness, even as he interacts with those stereotypes. What I wanted was to know what the white man saw or didn't see when he walked in front of me at the gate.

It's hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence. Frank Wilderson III, chair of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, borrows the sociological term "social death" to explain my there-but-not-there status in a historically anti-black society. The outrage - and if we are generous, the embarrassment - that occasioned the white passenger's comment were a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of the understood privileges of whiteness.

I was waiting in another line for access to another plane in another city as another group of white men approached. When they realized they would have to get behind a dozen or so people already in line, they simply formed their own line next to us. I said to the white man standing in front of me, "Now, that is the height of white male privilege." He laughed and remained smiling all the way to his seat. He wished me a good flight. We had shared something. I don't know if it was the same thing for each of us - the same recognition of racialized privilege - but I could live with that polite form of unintelligibility.

I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing (as well as obnoxious). Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play about white male privilege in one act. I appreciated the drama. One or two of them chuckled at their own audacity. The gate agent did an interesting sort of check-in by merging the newly formed line with the actual line. The people in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and accepting.

After I watched this scene play out, I filed it away to use as an example in my class. How would my students read this moment? Some would no doubt be enraged by the white female gate agent who let it happen. I would ask why it was easier to be angry with her than with the group of men. Because she doesn't recognize or utilize her institutional power, someone would say. Based on past classes, I could assume the white male students would be quick to distance themselves from the men at the gate; white solidarity has no place in a class that sets out to make visible the default positions of whiteness.

As the professor, I felt this was a narrative that could help me gauge the level of recognition of white privilege in the class, because other white people were also inconvenienced by the actions of this group of men. The students wouldn't be distracted by society's abuse of minorities because everyone seemed inconvenienced. Some students, though, would want to see the moment as gendered, not racialized. I would ask them if they could imagine a group of black men pulling off this action without the white men in my line responding or the gate agent questioning the men even if they were within their rights.

As I became more and more frustrated with myself for avoiding asking my question, I wondered if presumed segregation in business or first class should have been Number 47 on McIntosh's list. Just do it, I told myself. Just ask a random white guy how he feels about his privilege.

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I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem? Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

On my next flight, I came close. I was a black woman in the company of mostly white men, in seats that allowed for both proximity and separate spaces. The flight attendant brought drinks to everyone around me but repeatedly forgot my orange juice. Telling myself orange juice is sugar and she might be doing my post-cancer body a favor, I just nodded when she apologized for the second time. The third time she walked by without the juice, the white man sitting next to me said to her: "This is incredible. You have brought me two drinks in the time you have forgotten to bring her one."

She returned immediately with the juice.

I thanked him. He said, "She isn't suited to her job." I didn't respond: "She didn't forget your drinks. She didn't forget you. You are seated next to no one in this no place." Instead, I said, "She just likes you more." He perhaps thought I was speaking about him in particular and blushed. Did he understand I was joking about white male privilege? It didn't seem so. The red crept up his neck into his cheeks, and he looked shy and pleased at the same time. He brought both hands up to his cheeks as if to hold in the heat of this embarrassing pleasure.

"Coming or going?" he asked, changing the subject.

"I'm returning from Johannesburg."

"Really?" he said. "I was just in Cape Town."

Hence your advocacy, I thought ungenerously. Why was that thought in my head? I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem?

As I looked at the man in Seat 2B, I wondered if my historical positioning was turning his humanity into evidence of white male dominance. Are white men overly determined by their skin color in my eyes? Are they being forced, as my friend suggested, to absorb the problems of the world?

On the long flight, I didn't bring up white male privilege, jokes or otherwise, again. Instead we wandered around our recent memories of South Africa and discussed the resort where he stayed and the safari I took. I didn't bring up Soweto or the Apartheid Museum that I visited in Johannesburg or the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala., which the Apartheid Museum reminded me of. I wanted my fellow traveler to begin a conversation about his privilege this time. For once. I wanted him to think about his whiteness, especially because he had just left South Africa, a country that suffered, as James Baldwin said, "from the same delusion the Americans suffer from - it too thought it was a white country." But I imagined he felt the less said about race relations in the United States or South Africa, the more possible it was for us to be interlocutors. That was my fantasy, in any case.

Back home, when I mentioned these encounters to my white husband, he was amused. "They're just defensive," he said. "White fragility," he added, with a laugh. This white man who has spent the past 25 years in the world alongside me believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition. These phrases - white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation - have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation. At that moment, he wanted to discuss our current president instead. "That," he said, "is a clear case of indignation and rage in the face of privilege writ large. Real power. Real consequences." He was not wrong, of course, but he joined all the "woke" white men who set their privilege outside themselves - as in, I know better than to be ignorant or defensive about my own privilege. Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white male dominance is the privilege. There's no outrunning the kingdom, the power and the glory.

I finally got up my nerve to ask a stranger directly about white privilege as I was sitting next to him at the gate. He had initiated our conversation, because he was frustrated about yet another delay. We shared that frustration together. Eventually he asked what I did, and I told him that I write and teach. "Where do you teach?" he asked. "Yale," I answered. He told me his son wanted to go there but hadn't been accepted during the early-application process. "It's tough when you can't play the diversity card," he added.

Was he thinking out loud? Were the words just slipping out before he could catch them? Was this the innocence of white privilege? Was he yanking my chain? Was he snapping the white-privilege flag in my face? Should I have asked him why he had the expectation that his son should be admitted early, without delay, without pause, without waiting? Should I have asked how he knew a person of color "took" his son's seat and not another white son of one of these many white men sitting around us?

I was perhaps holding my breath. I decided to just breathe.

"The Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues," he added after a moment. Perhaps the clarification was intended to make it clear that he wasn't speaking right now about black people and their forms of affirmative action. He had remembered something. He had recalled who was sitting next to him.
[50 years of affirmitive action: what went right and what it got wrong?]
Then I did it. I asked. "I've been thinking about white male privilege, and I wonder if you think about yours or your son's?" It almost seemed to be a non sequitur, but he rolled with it.

"Not me," he said. "I've worked hard for everything I have."

What was it that Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing? "I got into Yale Law School. That's the No. 1 law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college." He apparently believed this despite the fact that his grandfather went to Yale. I couldn't tell by looking at this man I was sitting next to, but I wondered if he was an ethnic white rather than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, in "Whiteness of a Different Color," describes "the 20th century's reconsolidating of the 19th century's 'Celts, Slavs, Hebrews and Mediterraneans.' " By the 1940s, according to David Roediger, "given patterns of intermarriage across ethnicity and Cold War imperatives," whites stopped dividing hierarchically within whiteness and begin identifying as socially constructed Caucasians.

I said to the man, "What if I said I wasn't referring to generations of economic wealth, to Mayflower wealth and connections?" I asked him if he gets flagged when he passes through T.S.A. "Not usually," he said. "I have Global Entry."

"So do I," I said, "but I still get stopped." The "randomness" of racial profiling is a phenomenon I could talk about forever, but I stopped myself that day. "Are you able to move in and out of public spaces without being questioned as to why you are there?" I asked. "Do people rush forward asking how they can help you?" I knew the answer to my question, but I asked it anyway, because I wanted to slow down a dynamic he benefited from.

He said he saw my point. I wanted to say, "It's not my point, it's your reality," but the declarative nature of the sentence felt sharp on my tongue. I wanted to keep talking with this man, and I knew my race and gender meant he was wary of me and my questions - questions that might lead to the word "racist" or "sexist." If only skin color didn't have such predictive power.

I didn't want our different historical positioning derailing our already strained chat. I wanted to learn something that surprised me about this stranger, something I couldn't have known beforehand. Then it hit me. There wasn't enough time to develop trust, but everyone likes a listener. "Coming or going?" is the traveler's neutral, nonprying question. So now I asked him. He was heading home.

The word "home" turned him back to his son. He said his son's best friend was Asian and had been admitted to Yale on early action or early decision or early admissions. Neither of us knew the terminology. I wondered how he comforted his son. Had he used "the diversity card" as he had with me? I didn't want to discuss college-admissions policy anymore. I wanted our conversation to go down any other road, but I had somehow become a representative of Yale, not a stranger sitting next to another stranger.

I reminded myself that I was there only to listen. Just listen. The man was deeply earnest and obviously felt helpless about the uncertainty of his son's future. But it couldn't be too dismal if Yale was still an option. Don't think, I reminded myself. Know what it is to parent. Know what it is to love. Know what it is to be white. Know what it is to expect what white people have always had. Know what it is to resent. Is that unfair? Resentment has no home here. Know what it is to be white. Is that ungenerous? I don't know. Don't think.

I didn't ask this white man why he thought his son was any more entitled to a place at Yale than his son's Asian friend. I didn't want him to feel he needed to defend his son's worth or his son's intelligence to me. I wanted his son to thrive. I did. Were his son to arrive in my class, I would help him do his best. The more he achieved at Yale, the more pleased I would be for both of us. If his son told the class he got into Yale because many of his white teachers from kindergarten on exaggerated his intelligence, I would interrupt him, as I have done in the past, and say, "No, you got into Yale, and you have the capacity to understand that many factors contributed to your acceptance."

College-admissions processes can't be discussed in definitive ways; they're full of gray areas, and those gray areas are often white-leaning, even as plenty of whites are denied entrance. We know that. I was suddenly reluctant to have a conversation about white-perceived spaces and entitlement or, God forbid, affirmative action, which would of course flood the space between us with black and brown people, me included. I said instead, "Wherever your son goes will work out, and in five years none of this will matter." It was in this moment that I recognized my exhaustion. And then came the realization that we were, in fact, in the midst of a discussion about the perceived loss of white male privilege. Was I implicated in his loss? Did he think so?

Not long after this, I was on another flight and sitting next to a white man who felt as if he could already be a friend. Our conversation had the ease of kicking a ball around on a fall afternoon. Or it felt like stepping out the door in late spring when suddenly the temperature inside and out reads the same on your skin. Resistance falls away; your shoulders relax. I was, metaphorically, happily outdoors with this man, who was open and curious with a sense of humor. He spoke about his wife and son with palpable affection. And though he was with me on the plane, he was there with them as well. His father was an academic, his mother a great woman.

He asked who my favorite musician was, and I told him the Commodores because of one song, "Nightshift," which is basically an elegy. He loved Bruce Springsteen, but "Nightshift" was also one of his favorite songs. We sang lyrics from "Nightshift" together: "I still can hear him say, 'Aw, talk to me so you can see what's going on.' " When he asked if I knew a certain song by Springsteen, I admitted I didn't. I could only think of "American Skin (41 Shots)": "No secret, my friend, you can get killed just for living in your American skin." I knew those lyrics, but I didn't start singing them. I made a mental note to check out the Springsteen song he loved.

Eventually, he told me he had been working on diversity inside his company. "We still have a long way to go," he said. Then he repeated himself - "We still have a long way to go" - adding, "I don't see color." This is a statement for well-meaning white people whose privilege and blind desire catapult them into a time when little black children and little white children are judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." The phrase "I don't see color" pulled an emergency brake in my brain. Would you be bringing up diversity if you didn't see color? I wondered. Will you tell your wife you had a nice talk with a woman or a black woman? Help.

All I could think to say was, "Ain't I a black woman?" I asked the question slowly, as if testing the air quality. Did he get the riff on Sojourner Truth? Or did he think the ungrammatical construction was a sign of blackness? Or did he think I was mocking white people's understanding of black intelligence? "Aren't you a white man?" I then asked. "Can't you see that? Because if you can't see race, you can't see racism." I repeated that sentence, which I read not long before in Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility."

"I get it," he said. His tone was solemn. "What other inane things have I said?"

"Only that," I responded.

I had refused to let the reality he was insisting on be my reality. And I was pleased that I hadn't lubricated the moment, pleased I could say no to the silencing mechanisms of manners, pleased he didn't need to open up a vein of complaint. I was pleased he was not passively bullying. I was pleased he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation - random, ordinary, exhausting and full of a shared longing to exist in less segregated spaces.

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I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked. (Published 2019)

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Feature My college class asks what it means to be white in America - but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do. Credit...

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Letting children pick their own clothing out 

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Letting children pick their own clothing out 

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This article made me so happy because it shows that people are truly letting kids express their true selves and allowing them to find their gender at a younger age. This is through allowing them to play with what they want and letting them find clothing that they are attracted to. This will help with the development of the children and letting them grow into who they want to be.

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'Boy or girl?' Parents raising 'theybies' let kids decide

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A small group of parents across the U.S. are raising "theybies" - children being brought up without gender designation from birth.

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This is an important article as it talks about the coverage of hormones for people that are transgender. They spoke about the topic of discrimination of trans people in the doctors office, which is not fair because they are human too. Hormones are very important for a transgender-being and for them to deny is very discriminatory. In the end of it all your insurance should cover most expenses with the mediations needed for trans people.

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National Center for Transgender Equality

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What are my rights in insurance coverage?

Federal and state law prohibits most public and private health plans from discriminating against you because you are transgender. This means, with few exceptions, that it is illegal discrimination for your health insurance plan to refuse to cover medically necessary transition-related care.

Here are some examples of illegal discrimination in insurance:

Health plans can't have automatic or categorical exclusions of transition-related care. For example, a health plan that says that all care related to gender transition is excluded violates the law.

Health plans can't have a categorical exclusion of a specific transition-related procedure. Excluding from coverage specific medically necessary procedures that some transgender people need is discrimination. For example, a health plan should not categorically exclude all coverage for facial feminization surgery or impose arbitrary age limits that contradict medical standards of care.

An insurance company can't place limits on coverage for transition-related care if those limits are discriminatory. For example, an insurance company can't automatically exclude a specific type of procedure if it covers that procedure for non-transgender people. For example, if a plan covers breast reconstruction for cancer treatment, or hormones to treat post-menopause symptoms, it cannot exclude these procedures to treat gender dysphoria.

Refusing to enroll you in a plan, cancelling your coverage, or charging higher rates because of your transgender status: An insurance company can't treat you differently, refuse to enroll you, or limit coverage for any services because you are transgender.

Denying coverage for care typically associated with one gender: It's illegal for an insurance company to deny you coverage for treatments typically associated with one gender based on the gender listed in the insurance company's records or the sex you were assigned at birth. For example, if a transgender woman's health care provider decides she needs a prostate exam, an insurance company can't deny it because she is listed as female in her records. If her provider recommends gynecological care, coverage can't be denied simply because she was identified as male at birth.

What should I do to get coverage for transition-related care?
Check out NCTE's Health Coverage Guide for more information on getting the care that you need covered by your health plan.

If you do not yet have health insurance, you can visit our friends at Out2Enroll to understand your options.
Does private health insurance cover transition-related care?
It is illegal for most private insurance plans to deny coverage for medically necessary transition-related care. Your private insurance plan should provide coverage for the care that you need. However, many transgender people continue to face discriminatory denials.

To understand how to get access to the care that you need under your private insurance plan, check out NCTE's Health Coverage Guide.
Does Medicaid cover transition-related care?
It is illegal for Medicaid plans to deny coverage for medically necessary transition-related care. Your state Medicaid plan should provide coverage for the care that you need. However, many transgender people continue to face discriminatory denials. Some states have specific guidelines on the steps you have to take to access care. You can check if your state has specific guidelines here.

To understand how to get access to the care that you need under your Medicaid plan, check out NCTE's Navigating Insurance page.
My plan has an exclusion for transition-related care. What should I do?
There are many reasons why your plan might still have an exclusion for transition-related care in general or for a specific procedure. This does not mean that your plan will not cover your care. Sometimes plan documents are out of date, or you can ask for an exception by showing that this care is medically necessary for you.

If you get insurance through work or school, you can advocate with your employer to have the exclusion removed.

NCTE's Health Coverage Guide has more information on how to access care and remove exclusions.
Does Medicare cover transition-related care?
It is illegal for Medicare to deny coverage for medically necessary transition-related care.

For many years, Medicare did not cover transition-related surgery due to a decades-old policy that categorized such treatment as "experimental." That exclusion was eliminated in May 2014, and there is now no national exclusion for transition-related health care under Medicare. Some local Medicare contractors have specific policies spelling out their coverage for transition-related care, as do some private Medicare Advantage plans.

To learn more about your rights on Medicare, check out NCTE's Medicare page.
Does the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provide transition-related care?
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provides coverage for some transition-related care for eligible veterans. However, VHA still has an arbitrary and medically baseless exclusion for coverage of transition-related surgery.

For more information about VHA and transition-related care, check out NCTE's VAH Veterans Health Care page.
Does TRICARE cover transition-related care?
TRICARE provides coverage for some transition-related care for family members and dependents of military personnel. However, TRICARE still has an exclusion for coverage of transition-related surgery.

If you are an active military member and want to understand your coverage while serving, check out the resources from our friends at SPART*A and OutServe.

What are my rights in receiving health care?
Which health providers are prohibited from discriminating against me?
Under the Affordable Care Act, it is illegal for most health providers and organizations to discriminate against you because you are transgender. The following are examples of places and programs that may be covered by the law:

Physicians' offices

Hospitals

Community health clinics

Drug rehabilitation programs

Rape crisis centers

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities

Health clinics in schools and universities

Medical residency programs

Home health providers

Veterans health centers

Health services in prison or detention facilities

What types of discrimination by health care providers are prohibited by law?
Examples of discriminatory treatment prohibited by federal law include (but are not limited to):

Refusing to admit or treat you because you are transgender

Forcing you to have intrusive and unnecessary examinations because you are transgender

Refusing to provide you services that they provide to other patients because you are transgender

Refuse to treat you according to your gender identity, including by providing you access to restrooms consistent with your gender

Refusing to respect your gender identity in making room assignments

Harassing you or refusing to respond to harassment by staff or other patients

Refusing to provide counseling, medical advocacy or referrals, or other support services because you are transgender

Isolating you or depriving you of human contact in a residential treatment facility, or limiting your participation in social or recreational activities offered to others

Requiring you to participate in "conversion therapy" for the purpose of changing your gender identity

Attempting to harass, coerce, intimidate, or interfere with your ability to exercise your health care rights

What are my rights related to privacy of my health information?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires most health care providers and health insurance plans to protect your privacy when it comes to certain information about your health or medical history. Information about your transgender status, including your diagnosis, medical history, sex assigned at birth, or anatomy, may be protected health information. Such information should not be disclosed to anyone-including family, friends, and other patients-without your consent. This information should also not be disclosed to medical staff unless there is a medically relevant reason to do so. If this information is shared for purposes of gossip or harassment, it is a violation of HIPAA.

What Can I Do If I Face Discrimination?

Seek preauthorization for care and appeal insurance denials
You shouldn't be denied the care that you need just because you're transgender. That's illegal - no matter what the Trump Administration says.

To access transition-related care, we recommend applying for preauthorization before any procedures to understand whether your plan will cover it. You should also consider appealing insurance denials that you believe are discriminatory. We recommend you consult an attorney before filing any appeals.

See these resources for more information about your rights during COVID-19:

Check our NCTE's Health Coverage Guide for more information on how to get the care that you need covered.
Contact an attorney or legal organization
If you face discrimination from a health care provider or insurance company, it may be against the law. You can talk to a lawyer or a legal organization to see what your options are. A lawyer might also be able to help you resolve your problem without a lawsuit, for example by contacting your health care provider to make sure they understand their legal obligations or filing a complaint with a professional board.

While NCTE does not take clients or provide legal services or referrals, there are many other groups that may give you referrals or maintain lists of local attorneys. You can try your local legal aid or legal services organization, or national or regional organizations such as the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, the Transgender Law Center, the ACLU, and others listed on our Additional Resources page and in the Trans Legal Services Network.
File discrimination complaints with state and federal agencies
As of spring 2020, the Trump Administration continues to ignore and throw out most complaints of anti-transgender discrimination. If you face any of ther kind of discrimination or denial of care based on your gender, disability, age, race, or national origin, or if your health care privacy was violated, you can still file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.

Here are some other places you can file health care complaints:

Other state and local agencies: If you face discrimination, you may be able to file a complaint with your state's human rights agency. You can find a list of state human rights agencies here: http://www.justice.gov/crt/legalinfo/stateandlocal.php.

What Laws Protect Me?

Federal protections

The Health Care Rights Law, as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) prohibits sex discrimination, including anti-transgender discrimination, by most health providers and insurance companies, as well as discrimination based on race, national origin, age, and disability. Under the ACA, it is illegal for most insurance companies to have exclusions of transition-related care, and it is illegal for most health providers to discriminate against transgender people, like by turning someone away or refusing to treat them according to their gender identity. Update (6/12/20): While the Trump administration has enacted a rule change that misinterpret​ explicit protections for transgender people in health care by excluding protections from discrimination based on gender identity. It is important to know the following:

You are still protected under Section 1557--a law passed by Congress that is still fully in force--which says that sex discrimination in a health care setting or in an insurance plan is unlawful.

This repeal is not in accordance with how courts have repeatedly interpreted Section 1557, namely that transgender discrimination in health care settings is unlawful under Section 1557.

There will be multiple lawsuits challenging this repeal.

This repeal may embolden certain people to harass or deny care, but such conduct is still illegal. You should continue to report discrimination in health care and seek legal assistance when experiencing discrimination.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects patients' privacy when it comes to certain health information, including information related to a person's transgender status and transition. It also gives patients the right to access, inspect, and copy their protected health information held by hospitals, clinics, and health plans.

The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination in health care and other settings based on a disability, which may include a diagnosis of gender dyshoria.

Medicare and Medicaid regulations protect the right of hospital patients to choose their own visitors and medical decision-makers regardless of their legal relationship to the patient. This means that hospitals cannot discriminate against LGBT people or their families in visitation and in recognizing a patient's designated decision-maker.

The Joint Commission hospital accreditation standards require hospitals to have internal policies prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The Nursing Home Reform Act establishes a set of nursing home residents' rights that include the right to privacy, including in visits from friends or loved ones; the right to be free from abuse, mistreatment, and neglect; the right to choose your physician; the right to dignity and self-determination; and the right to file grievances without retaliation.

State and local nondiscrimination laws prohibit health care discrimination against transgender people in many circumstances.

A large number of states also have explicit policies that prohibit anti-transgender discrimination in private insurance and Medicaid, like exclusions of transition-related care.

Remember: Just because your state isn't listed here doesn't mean you're not protected. Check out NCTE's Health Coverage Guide for more information about getting coverage for the care that you need.

How Can I Help?

Head to NCTE's Health Action Center to see the latest on health care and how you can help fight for transgender people's right to get the health care they need

Share your story. If you are facing discriminatory treatment, consider sharing your story with NCTE so we can use it in advocacy efforts to advance public understanding and policy change for transgender people. If you successfully resolved a health care situation, we want to hear about that as well.

Additional Resources

Government agencies

Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights:
http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/office/index.html

Links to State and Local Human Rights Agencies:
http://www.justice.gov/crt/legalinfo/stateandlocal.php

HealthCare.Gov:
https://www.healthcare.gov/transgender-health-care/

Partner resources, best practices and standards of care

Creating Equal Access to Quality Health Care for Transgender Patients: Transgender-Affirming Hospital Policies, Lambda Legal, HRC, & New York Bar:
http://www.lambdalegal.org/publications/fs_transgender-affirming-hospital-policies

Healthcare Equality Index, Human Rights Campaign
http://www.hrc.org/campaigns/healthcare-equality-index

National Center for LGBT Health Education:
http://www.lgbthealtheducation.org/

National Resource Center on LGBT Aging:
http://www.lgbtagingcenter.org

RAD Remedy's guide to providing competent care for trans people

Transgender Law Center's guide to organizing community clinics

Clinical standards of care for transgender people

Mental Health Resources
Trans LifeLine National suicide prevention hotline US: 877-565-8860Canada: 877-330-6366 https://www.translifeline.org/ National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) National network of mental health care providers, as well as a provider database
http://www.nami.org/Find-Support/LGBTQ
Help Line 800-950-6264
National Council for Behavioral Health National network of community behavioral health centers, as well as a provider database http://www.thenationalcouncil.org/ SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) A national database for local professionals and agencies that provide addiction recovery services and mental health care. https://findtreatment.samhsa.gov/
800-662-HELP (4357)

Health provider resources

Insurance resources
Out2Enroll Resources to help transgender people select and enroll in insurance https://out2enroll.org TransChance Health https://www.transchancehealth.org/ JustUs Health
Leads the work to achieve health equity for diverse gender, sexual, and cultural communities in Minnesota, including the Trans Aging Project and a Trans Health Insurance guide
https://www.justushealth.mn
Helps transgender people navigate health care and insurance to receive respectful, high-quality care, and get transition-related care covered
Transition-related financial support

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Read Our Covid-19 GuidesSee these resources for more information about your rights during COVID-19:A Know Your Rights Guide for Transgender People Navigating COVID-19 (PDF)Una guía para que las personas transgénero navegando la COVID-19 conozcan sus derechos (PDF)Know Your Rights in Health CareNo matter the what Trump Administration says, federal and state laws - and, in many

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Gender Neutral Bathroom Law for New York School Districts 

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Gender Neutral Bathroom Law for New York School Districts 

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I am so happy that this is becoming more pushed because their are many people struggling with their identity and are not comfortable in either men or women bathroom. This allows people who feel discriminated against there gender to have a safe place to use the bathroom in a popular place, high school. That is where many people are not able to express their true-selves, so giving them their own bathroom and safe place, is a good start.

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On December 23, 2020, Governor Cuomo signed Assembly Bill A5240A into law, requiring, in part, that school districts and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in New York state designate all single-occupancy bathroom facilities as gender neutral. In addition to school districts and BOCES, the legislation also applies to certain higher education institutions, non-public schools, charter schools and public places including restaurants, bars, mercantile establishments and factories. The new requirements become effective on March 23, 2021.

Policies and Procedures

School districts and BOCES have specific obligations which are set forth under new section 409-m of the Education Law. Namely, the board of education of each school district and BOCES must develop "policies and procedures" requiring that all single-occupancy bathroom facilities be designated as gender neutral and "for use by no more than one occupant at a time or for family or assisted use." School districts and BOCES must develop policies (for board of education approval) and procedures in accordance with the law's requirements and March 23, 2021 effective date. It has yet to be determined whether the state will issue any further guidance on what the required "procedures" must entail. However, presumably, one board policy with an accompanying regulation or procedure should be sufficient.

Clear Designation of Gender-Neutral Facility

The law also requires that single-occupancy bathrooms be "clearly designated" as gender neutral by posting on or near the entry door of each bathroom. In other words, school districts and BOCES with single-occupancy bathrooms must remove any signage designating the bathroom as "male" or "female" and replace it with signage designating the bathroom as gender neutral, and for use by no more than one occupant at a time or for family or assisted use.

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New York Law Requires Gender-Neutral Single-Occupancy Bathrooms in School Districts and BOCES | JD Supra

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On December 23, 2020, Governor Cuomo signed Assembly Bill A5240A into law, requiring, in part, that school districts and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in New York state designate all single-occupancy bathroom facilities as gender neutral.

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In this article, they talk about how a brand has decided to move to gender neutral packaging and advertising. They are showing that it is allowed for both men and women to be into makeup and cosmetics. This is a big change because makeup brands have always been aimed towards women only.

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(Washington Post illustration/iStock)

For many years, the world of mass-market beauty and personal care has traded in gender tropes and stereotypes. Think about thick blue disposable razors vs. dainty pink ones; pine-scented, dark green deodorant sticks vs. flower-scented, pastel-packaged antiperspirant; leathery-smelling aftershave in wood-topped bottles vs. pink face lotion in clear jars. In some cases, although the products aren't very different - a razor is a razor - the packaging makes the target demographic clear.

But as skin-care-obsessed young women share their enthusiasm with their brothers and partners, a teen like James Charles takes a turn as the face of CoverGirl, and male beauty experts on YouTube show other men how to apply cosmetics, the traditional gender lines are blurring, if not disappearing altogether. And while it's too soon to tell whether men will embrace makeup with anything approaching women's fervor, one trend is obvious, observers say: Beauty brands are pivoting toward more gender-neutral products presented in unisex packaging.

Newer brands are entering the gate with gender fluidity already built into their DNA, experts say, using advertising that reflects diversity in race and gender, and packaging products in ways that avoid old stereotypes. "They're more inclusive, and they hit on more of the things that are important to younger consumers today, like 'sustainable' or 'clean' or 'genderless,' " said Larissa Jensen, senior beauty analyst at market research firm NPD Group. "That's something that's more of a movement from a younger consumer perspective."

Oft-cited brands popular with Generation Z (defined by the Pew Research Center as people born from 1997 onward) such as Milk Makeup, Glossier and Fenty Beauty all feature diverse casts in advertisements, interact with their customers on social media, offer numerous shades to cater to different skin tones and use neutral colors in packaging such as gray, white, pale pink, nude and silver. (Milk Makeup and Glossier did not respond to interview requests about their advertising and packaging strategies, and a representative for Fenty Beauty's public relations firm declined to comment.) "Our goal is really to evolve the mainstream conception of beauty while creating a space for people to express themselves authentically," said Laura Kraber, co-founder and chief executive of We Are Fluide, a gender-neutral makeup brand founded in 2018. "Our packaging and product development has tried to not be extremely masculine or feminine, and we discard those notions generally because our whole belief is that gender is more of a constellation than an extreme of one or the other," said Kraber, who is a parent of two teenagers. "If makeup is joyful and transformative and fun, nobody should be left out."

Younger consumers are largely credited with eroding gender norms and definitions, and studies suggest they have less rigid definitions of masculinity and gender identity than older customers do. A 2019 Pew survey of 10,000 Americans found that about 59 percent of members of Generation Z said forms that ask about a person's gender should include options besides "male" and "female," compared with 50 percent of millennials (ages 22 to 37 in 2018) and 37 percent of baby boomers (54 to 72 in 2018).

David Yi, founder of Very Good Light, a men's online grooming publication focused on Gen Z that aims to "redefine masculinity and men's beauty standards," credits that generation's openness to its innate fluency with social media and its global worldview. Yi, who is penning a book about the history of male makeup, notes that men around the world have used cosmetics at various points in history, and that it is more associated with femininity in Western cultures. "We're slowly untangling that with Gen Z," he said. "They're cognizant that American or Western culture isn't the end-all, be-all."

According to NPD Group, although makeup revenue sales across the board have declined, skin-care sales have increased. Jensen said that, for men, there's less of a barrier to entry for skin care because it lacks the "gendered focus" that makeup as a category has traditionally carried. Clare Hennigan, senior beauty analyst at Mintel, a market research firm, has observed growth in the men's skin-care category and notes that "across the board, we've seen men taking more care of their personal routines."

One brand poised to take advantage of this shift is the Ordinary, which Jensen called "the ultimate genderless skin care." It offers serums, creams and acids that range from about $5 to $20 in simple, clinical-looking packaging. Its unisex look is intentional. "Since its conception, [the Ordinary] was never intended to target a specific gender identity in any capacity," Nicola Kilner, co-founder and chief executive of the Ordinary's parent company, Deciem, wrote in an email. "The packaging of the line, much like the formulations, was always about being straight to the point and educational." She adds that the brand doesn't feature models in campaigns or on social media, but rather uses its own employees because "we feel as though we are a representation of our fan base - diverse, passionate, in love with skin care and ultimately, just human beings."

Ursa Major, a skin-care brand co-founded by Oliver Sweatman and Emily Doyle, also has gone all-in on genderless products. The line, whose customer Sweatman and Doyle call "the mindful explorer," includes face, hair and body products containing natural ingredients that are sold in eco-friendly packaging featuring blue, green and white mountain outlines.

The couple, veterans of the beauty industry, started the brand in 2009 after moving from New York to Vermont "to reboot" and realizing they were sharing many products. "My personal take is that the lion's share of products can be used equally by any gender," said Sweatman, whose aim is "a healthier product that delivered nourishment in a non-gendered way."

Colors aside, recent packaging tends to be simpler and more pared-back. "When you think about the trends in packaging, and I think skin care has this more, it's not pink, it's not black or blue; it's very clean and very simple," Jensen said. Steve Seeley, president of Elitefill, a packaging company that specializes in cosmetics and skin care, has noticed that packaging has become more straightforward in the 20 years he has worked in the beauty space. "I think it's probably the Apple concept of just being basic, clean and clear with your message," he said. "I think what [brands] realized is make it simple: Say what it does, and let the product speak for itself."

At this stage, the types of products being marketed to male-identifying customers are simple, too. According to NPD, the top-growing products are tinted moisturizers, lip glosses, lip balms and brow products - all items that contribute to a pared-back, minimalist makeup look.

Glen Jankowski, a senior lecturer in critical and social psychology at Leeds Beckett University in England who studies body image, wonders what effect this has. "It's promoting a very unrealistic standard in a pernicious way," he said. "At least with expressive, bold makeup, people know it's decoration and it's not part of your appearance. With this more hidden, subtle makeup, it's more like, 'This is what a human should look like.' "

Phillip Picardi, former editor of Out and Them, started a grooming column for GQ in November, with subjects such as how to look younger, how to groom eyebrows and a beginner's guide to makeup. He acknowledged the possibility that holding men as well as women to beauty standards could be a step backward. "It's not a good thing for us to be peddling consumerism to men and women," he said. "The answer would be to eradicate all of it. But it's just not the world we live in."

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Why beauty brands are removing gender from their marketing

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For many years, the world of mass-market beauty and personal care has traded in gender tropes and stereotypes. Think about thick blue disposable razors vs. dainty pink ones; pine-scented, dark green deodorant sticks vs. flower-scented, pastel-packaged antiperspirant; leathery-smelling aftershave in wood-topped bottles vs. pink face lotion in clear jars.

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Allowing females to take part in men activities 

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Allowing females to take part in men activities 

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I thought about the equality of high school sports for inclusive sports teams like football and wrestling. I think that both male and female should be able to take part in these activities, so this article talks about how this girl was not allowed to part take in wrestling because it puts her at risk for other things. Then the 14th amendment prohibits gender discrimination and allowed her to be able to take part in the following years wrestling team.