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"Sex is about more than just anatomy.  It also includes family roles, romantic desires, cultural expectations, and ideas of masculinity and femininity."

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Op-Ed Contributor

THE showdown between the Justice Department and North Carolina officials over a new state law restricting bathroom access for transgender people has brought a question into sharp relief: Does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination because of sex, also prohibit discrimination because of gender identity?

The Obama administration thinks so, as do several district and circuit courts. But North Carolina officials call that a "baseless and blatant overreach" and a "radical reinterpretation" of Title VII. They argue that the authors of the law did not have transgender people in mind when they wrote it.

But that position not only misunderstands how legislative interpretation works, it also fails to grasp the historic complexities of Title VII's sex provision. The provision has always been contested. Since we don't know much about why Congress enacted it, we have to look at how courts have interpreted it over the years - and they have constantly expanded its meaning.

In the original bill, Title VII prohibited on-the-job discrimination only on the basis of race, color, national origin and religion. But shortly before it passed the House, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia added "sex" - perhaps as a poison pill, or to protect white women as well as black women. In any case, because the amendment was made during floor debate, we have almost no record of what representatives were thinking when they voted on it.

Once the act passed, it was largely up to courts to interpret the sex provision. At the beginning, the most blatant barriers fell - for example, rejecting employers' attempts to limit certain jobs only to women (flight attendant) or only men (switchman for a telephone company).

Over the years, the courts deepened and broadened their interpretation of sex discrimination. In the Supreme Court's first Title VII case, in 1971, the justices unanimously ruled against a defense contractor that refused to hire mothers of small children, but not fathers, because it considered them less committed to the job. In 1977, it rejected Alabama's height and weight requirements for prison guard applicants, a policy that screened out most women.

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One North Carolina resident's opinion of the governor's position on the law restricting bathroom access for transgender people. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times

The next year, the court ruled against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which required female workers to pay nearly 15 percent more of their paychecks into an employee-funded pension plan, because women, as a group, outlived men. That ruling has been cited again and again by other courts: Title VII was "intended to strike at the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women resulting from sex stereotypes."

Other court rulings have recognized myriad forms of sex discrimination that would likely blow Representative Smith's mind. A gas company that erased women's seniority while they were on maternity leave, while keeping other leave-takers' credit intact, was ruled in 1977 to have discriminated because of sex. A few years later, the Supreme Court found an employer's health plan that provided less extensive care for the wives of male employees than for female employees to be discriminatory.

Sexual harassment, a concept that didn't even have a name in 1964, was finally acknowledged by the court in a unanimous 1986 decision to be discrimination because of sex. About a decade later, the court expanded Title VII's coverage of sexual harassment by outlawing same-sex harassment, too. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion and responded to critics who argued that harassment of men by men was unquestionably not what Congress had in mind when it passed Title VII. He wrote that legal protections "often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils," and what matters is the law itself, "rather than the principal concerns of our legislators."

Ann Hopkins's successful lawsuit against Price Waterhouse in 1989 became the template on which later gender identity (not to mention sexual orientation) lawsuits have been based. Ms. Hopkins claimed that the accounting firm refused to promote her to partner because she was "macho," "overcompensated for being a woman" and didn't look or act stereotypically feminine.

The court ruled, in effect, that punishing a woman for failing to conform to her employer's notion of "womanhood" was just as discriminatory as treating her poorly because she was a woman. The punishment a transgender person faces for violating sex stereotypes is just as much discrimination because of sex as it was for Ms. Hopkins.

Earlier this week, when Attorney General Loretta Lynch compared today's bathroom bans on trans employees to "white" and "colored" bathroom signs of the past, she placed trans rights on a historical spectrum.

North Carolina's supporters don't get that sex is about more than just anatomy. It also includes family roles, romantic desires, cultural expectations and ideas of masculinity and femininity. The courts get that. In its fight with North Carolina, the Justice Department asks for something quite simple: that Title VII be allowed to mean what it says.

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Opinion | Gender Is More Than Just Anatomy

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Op-Ed Contributor THE showdown between the Justice Department and North Carolina officials over a new state law restricting bathroom access for transgender people has brought a question into sharp relief: Does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination because of sex, also prohibit discrimination because of gender identity?

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This image shows that we should not assume someone's gender because gender identity is the gender a person feels they are, which can be different than their sex.

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Men are forced to act a certain way based on our society and it often leads to built up pain and anger because they do not want to be seen as feminine.

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Men and women are not treated the same because men have always been seen as having the higher power.  They get higher ranked positions and paid more.

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Men vs. women: How gender can impact career aspirations

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According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, your gender may impact what you expect to get out of your career.

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Gender norms causes society to think that only boys use blue and like trucks while girls use pink and like dolls.

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White people have a head start in life with all the luxuries they are handed, while black people have to work for everything.

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Social Inequalities Explained in a $100 Race - Please Watch to the End. Thanks.

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Just because someone is skinny then they have the privilege of feeling beautiful but a fat person will feel ugly and uncomfortable in their body.

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Women are being talked down to by men which include being sexually harassed, slut shaming, dress code remarks, and rude comments about menstruation.

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Hey there! Do you menstruate? Walk on the street? Wear clothes? So many examples of sexism abound on an everyday basis. Unlike Pokemon, too many of us have caught them all.
I recently found myself standing in the lobby of a local auto repair shop. The man behind the desk spoke to my father the entire time - something I let slide since my dad was doing most of the talking. However, it all went to pot when he asked my dad if I drove my Focus it like it was a race car. My dad half-shook his head like he didn't understand the question. Then, the guy turned to me and said, "Geeze girl, it ain't stolen!"

I was furious. Seeing as I'm a 32 year old woman, I don't appreciate being called "girl". What's more, this automatic assumption that I drive poorly just because I'm a woman is absolutely infuriating. We left immediately and I think it's fairly safe to say they won't be receiving my business.

As I sat in the car on the way home, I thought of all the little (and not so little) things women deal with every day. Being talked down to, being paid less for the same work, being objectified, being sexually harassed and assaulted - and then being told to stop complaining, because "women already have equality." For the most part, we do have far more rights than ever before; but we're far from being treated equal to men. Don't believe me? Here are just ten of the things women face on a daily basis:

Sexist Language

Though men aren't entirely immune to this issue, women in particular are constantly bombarded with language that erases our contributions, sexually objectifies us, or flat-out uses our gender as an insult. For instance:

Masculine generics are the most commonly used - e.g. mankind, chairman, referring to a group of people as "guys." This assumes that the default human being is male and subtly paints women as a subcategory of human.

The generic "he" - i.e. "Every student must have a pencil, and he should always bring it to class." Using the pronoun "he" to describe someone of unknown gender erases women from the discussion entirely.

The female gender is overwhelmingly targeted as a source of insults. These insults imply a person is weaker because of their anatomy or sexual activities - and strengthens the notion that women are inferior to men.

One of my biggest pet peeves: women are frequently called "girls" by adult men. This infantilizes women, implying they are childlike and dependent.

Sexist language is used so casually that it's become part of our mainstream lexicon - making it incredibly hard to eradicate. Even when it's not directed at an individual woman (or at a woman at all), it is symptomatic of broader microaggressions against women.

Objectification Of Women

Media and advertising barrage women with images and messages that dehumanize and/or objectify them. When all we see is women's bodies being used to sell products, we're taught that our worth lies only in our looks. If we don't have the body, face, or skin colour that parallels society's standard of beauty, we have no value. Advertisements, glossy magazine articles, and concern trolls routinely tell us that that we need to engage in the latest fad diet, wear "flattering" clothes, and exercise until we drop in order to remain attractive to others.

This message is spread to girls as young as ten, which is also when it begins to take on a distinctly sexualized tone. Not only are they made to believe that their worth is defined by their looks, but also to value themselves according to what boys and men think of them.

Street Harassment

Regardless of what we wear or how we behave, society gives men the green light to voice their appraisal, comments, and criticism of our bodies in public - all at the expense of our safety and comfort. Street harassment serves as a stark reminder that our bodies are not truly considered our own. When we speak against street harassment, we're told to "enjoy it" or "take it as a compliment."

Catcalling is not a compliment; it's a statement of power. It's a power that is used to intimidate and dehumanize women, a form of sexism that most experience for the first time between the ages of 11 and 17. It's an entitlement to our bodies that can turn to abuse and violence when we reject their advances. How dare we say no to them, they think, when society has allowed them to believe that commenting on our bodies is their inherent right?

READ: When Roswell experiences street harrassment, she takes a photo of the offender.

Rape Anxiety

Rape "jokes", rape threats, and outright sexual assault are horrifically widespread in modern society. From a very young age, we're taught that we cannot go about the world as safely as men do. This can lead to a deep mistrust of others, as well as existing in a state of constant vigilance. We scan the streets as we walk, we choose where and when we shop and commute very carefully. We walk with our keys between our fingers in case we need a weapon.

And if the worst does happen... we question whether we should report it at all. After all, the police, the media, and society as a whole declares that we must have done something to cause it. What were we wearing? How much did we have to drink? Did we do something to lead him on? Why didn't we try harder to fight him off? Why weren't we carrying a gun? Rarely is it actually acknowledged that sexual assault can happen to anyone, anywhere - and that no matter what a victim is doing, wearing, or saying, only the rapist is responsible for the rape.

READ: Preventing Rape Culture 101

In The Office

Sexism in the office can be both subtle and overt. For instance:

Female employees are often tasked with a disproportionate share of "office housework," such as taking notes at meetings, mentoring other workers, and bringing food to office celebrations.

During meetings, women are invariably interrupted, condescended to, or just ignored altogether.

Women are underrepresented in positions of power.

When a woman behaves assertively in the workplace, she is referred to as bitchy, shrill, abrasive, aggressive, or pushy. Men displaying the same behavior are commanding, decisive, and natural born leaders.

Women who choose to have children face maternity discrimination and even losing their jobs altogether.

Women make 80 percent of what men do for working full-time (a 20% wage gap) - this indicates a lack of women in high-paying positions as well as a disparity in wages for the same positions. This gap is much larger for women of color.

Besides all the things listed above, there's also sexual harassment - something one in three women has experienced at work.

Dress Codes

Whether they're enforced at work or at school, the lion's share of dress codes are inherently sexist. Dress codes are particularly restrictive for women or girls, proving to be yet another way of controlling women and limiting both their power and confidence. Even when it has no bearing on our work or schooling, people feel they have the right to discuss how we look and how we're dressed. We're fed the message that we're not valued colleagues or students, we're distractions and our bodies will be the cause of our ruin.

Young girls are almost exclusively singled out in school dress codes. They're told that they have to cover up to avoid "distracting" male students and making male teachers "uncomfortable." This teaches them that:

Their bodies are dangerous and sexualized

Boys are biologically programmed to objectify and harass them

[When she's pulled out of class for a dress code violation] The boys' education is more important than hers

Furthermore, this policing of female students' bodies, while turning a blind eye to boys' behavior, strengthens the assumption that sexual violence is inevitable and that the victims are partially responsible - i.e. the rape culture. This sets the stage for college, where one in five female students will be directly affected by sexual assault.

The Pink Tax

Did you know we often pay more for products aimed at our gender? Apparently, women aren't considered "standard." Not only are we paying more for needlessly gendered items such as razors and ballpoint pens, they're often not as well made! A study of gendered pricing from the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that women pay:

4 percent more for children's clothing

7 percent more for toys and accessories

8 percent more for adult clothing

8 percent more for senior/home health care products

13 percent more for personal care products

In all but five of the 35 product categories analyzed, products marketed at women were priced higher than those marketed to men. Overall, the study found that women's products cost more 42 percent of the time.

Slut Shaming

Women and girls who acknowledge sexual feelings, act on sexual feelings, have sexual partners, use birth control are often made to feel guilty, dirty, or ashamed by family, "friends", colleagues, and society at large. This is known as slut-shaming and it's sexist as hell. Only girls and women are ever shamed for their sexuality - in fact, boys and men are congratulated for the same behavior. Any woman can be a victim of slut-shaming, even if she's a virgin. The crime in this case is simply being female.

Slut shaming can be incredibly damaging to those victimized. This particular reputation can single her out as a target of harassment and assault, as her peers consider her "easy" and therefore not entitled to say "no". It may also prove to her self-perception, causing her to shut down her sexual side completely.

Menstruation

Sneers and snide comments like "Are you on the rag or something?" and "That's disgusting, I don't want to know what goes on in your vagina.'" This is the derogatory attitude toward menstruation that many women have been forced to put up with for far too long.

If a woman assertively states an opinion, adamantly disagrees with someone, or shows even the slightest hint of emotion, she's dismissed as being "hormonal" and irrational. Many of us dealing with leaks, pads, tampons, or cups, have desperately tried to cover them up as we rush to the bathroom, since we've been led to believe that something completely natural - and that we have no bodily control over - is repulsive.

Not only women menstruate. Nor do all women menstruate. Nevertheless, menstruation is a lightning rod for sexism.

READ: Real talk about menstruation and period positivity with Cattitude & Co.

Pregnancy & Children

Ah, the old catch-22. It's doesn't matter whether a woman chooses to become a parent or not, she's going to face criticism.

It starts with the constant questioning of when you're going to have kids. Family, friends, coworkers, and strangers will ask you when you're going to "pop one out", completely discounting that you may be dealing with health issues, grieving a miscarriage, or one of the one in eight women struggling with infertility. And hell, maybe you don't want kids! People love to shame women for not being mothers, treating them as if a childless woman is incomplete.

Then there's pregnancy. As if being female in public wasn't hard enough, a visibly pregnant belly invites a whole host of uncomfortable interactions. Complete strangers feel it's entirely appropriate to touch your stomach and give you advice on everything from childbirth to potty training. In fact, all through pregnancy and beyond, it can be hard to get yourself heard.

Despite the known benefits of breastfeeding, doing so in public is yet another thing that women are actively shamed for. Men and women alike judge mothers and attempt to make them feel like garbage for engaging in the very natural act of feeding their child. And while we're on the subject of breastfeeding, there are the mothers who are vilified for choosing the bottle over the breast. In fact, any decision a woman could possibly make as a mother will be judged at some point.

It's not easy being a woman in a society that tries to convince you that you've achieved equality while resolutely objectifying, shaming, and outright assaulting you. I wake up every day knowing that, before long, I'll see, hear, or be on the receiving end of a sexist act. All I can do is continue to educate others, join in protests, and call my government representatives until they block my number. Keep up the good fight, sisters.

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10 Examples of Sexism Women Face Every Damn Day

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Hey there! Do you menstruate? Walk on the street? Wear clothes? So many examples of sexism abound on an everyday basis. Unlike Pokemon, too many of us have caught them all. I recently found myself standing in the lobby of a local auto repair shop.

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Life is so easy for the privileged group known as a man who is white, thin, young, straight, Christian and financially secure.  This video shows us that a strait white male has a better life that than any other group of people.

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The Rocking Horse Club - "Straight White Man" (Official Video)

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When poor people are accused for a crime they get bad punishments because of their class but when a rich person is accused for the same crime they get off easy because they have money.

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This is when marginalized groups are missing from the mass media and according to this article, "if you don't see people like you in the media you consume you must somehow be unimportant."

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The conversation about diversity in Hollywood often centers on fairness. It's unfair that It's unfair that women It's unfair that black, Asian and Latinx actors were just over a quarter of speaking roles went to people of color in 2015's top movies ― that Asians and Latinx nabbed tiny slivers. made up less than one-third of protagonists in top movies in 2016. completely left out of acting categories in the Academy Awards last year, and the year before that.

It is unfair. Although the Academy announced a small list of Oscar nominees featuring more black actors in 2017, for years, researchers have counted and recounted the vast population of bodies making up content in TV and film, only to find, again and again, that the industry's struggle to represent people of color, women and other groups the way we see them in real life ― as people with likes and dislikes, habits and whims, hopes and fears ― is endemic.

But it's not just unfair. Even if we don't stop to think much about the summer blockbuster we watch to sit in a cool theater on a hot day, or the show we turn on while we're making dinner, entertainment media saturates our lives. And for decades, researchers have worried over the effect those stories have on viewers.

"We're pretty confident that, the more TV you watch, the more media you consume, the more likely it is that media ― almost like radiation ― builds up," Darnell Hunt, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, told The Huffington Post. "And the accumulated effect is to make you feel that what you're seeing is somewhat normal."

"What you see often becomes a part of your memory," echoed Ana-Christina Ramón, assistant director of the Bunche Center, "and thus a part of your life experience."

It can even serve as a proxy for experiences audience members haven't actually lived, shaping their views on people of color and women ― and shaping the way those people view themselves.

"There's this body of research and a term known as 'symbolic annihilation,' which is the idea that if you don't see people like you in the media you consume, you must somehow be unimportant." Nicole Martins of Indiana University

We spoke to several sociologists and researchers about the power of representation, and what the lack of it might mean for people who don't see themselves up there on the screen. Since the 1960s, research has found expressions of unequal power in media that, according to Michael Morgan, can be "very dangerous" and "very damaging" to people watching.

"I think the moral argument is self-evident. Stories matter," Morgan, former professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of dozens of reports on media effects, told HuffPost.

"Stories affect how we live our lives, how we see other people, how we think about ourselves."

That sentiment was common among the researchers we spoke to, although all of them noted that the sociology of representation is a topic infrequently covered specifically. It comes down to a problem common in academia ― the problem of finding subjects and funding, as mentioned by Glenn Sparks of Purdue University and Nicole Martins of Indiana University. Simply put, it's costly to look into media effects in a large enough group of people over a long enough period of time.

Martins managed to co-author one study, however, about television's effect on self-esteem with Kristen Harrison of the University of Michigan, published in 2012. Focusing on children, the pair found that TV made subjects feel good about themselves ― if those subjects were white boys. Girls and boys of color, on the other hand, reported lower self-esteem as they watched.

"We feel pretty comfortable that it's this lack of representation that could be responsible for this effect," Martins said.

"There's this body of research and a term known as 'symbolic annihilation,' which is the idea that if you don't see people like you in the media you consume," she explained, "you must somehow be unimportant." (In a 1976 paper titled "Living with Television," researchers George Gerbner and Larry Gross coined the term with a chilling line: "Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation.")

In Ramón's words, "You may wonder, 'Do I matter? Does society value me as a person?'"

The cathartic experience of finally relating to a character on screen has inspired heartfelt essays. As part of a HuffPost series called "When Representation Mattered," our own Zeba Blay, who is black, explained how she felt empowered by the Spice Girls' Melanie Brown. "She was unapologetically loud and unapologetically fierce in a way that (in my mere 10 years) I had never seen a black girl have the permission to be," Blay wrote. HuffPost's Carol Kuruvilla, whose family hails from India, described how the soccer flick "Bend It Like Beckham" made her feel less alone by not forcing its Indian protagonist to conform to a trope. "Jess wasn't just the nerdy best friend, the submissive shy girl, or the exotic temptress (all tropes that are far too common for Asian women)," Kuruvilla explained.

Character tropes ― molds that shape dialogue and casting decisions to produce the nerdy Asian math student, the sassy black sidekick, the icy female boss ― do their own damage, too.

For the underrepresented, seeing a character who looks like them can have a limiting effect if that character is restricted to behaving only in certain ways, which don't reflect the breadth of their life's experience. If you are a black, Asian or Latinx person who sees an "inauthentic" or "one-dimensional" version of yourself, Ramón explained, you "may wonder if that is all that is expected of you in society."

"Visual media teaches us how the world works and our place in it," she said.

"When you don't see people like yourself," Morgan echoed, "the message is: You're invisible. The message is: You don't count. And the message is: 'There's something wrong with me.'"

"Over and over and over, week after week, month after month, year after year, it sends a very clear message, not only to members of those groups, but to members of other groups, as well," he said.

To all viewers, on-screen representation serves as an important (if undervalued) way to glean information about the world. Hunt pointed to decades-old research out of the University of Pennsylvania that showed a correlation between a range of topics as presented on TV ― violence, integration, women's rights ― and how people thought about those issues in real life. Over time, they found that people who watched more TV embraced what they called the "TV view of the world."

"And if the 'TV view of the world' was violent, then people assume that the world was more violent," Hunt said.

And perhaps they would, say, vote for a presidential candidate who claims the nation is drowning in a wave of violent Latinx trespassers because that's how they look on screen. Or believe that America is mostly over racism because there are secondary black characters in films. Or continue to live their lives not realizing Asian men are, indeed, quite attractive.

"Entertainment provides the seeds under which these things make sense to people, because they've seen a thousand images of 'Latinos are violent,' or 'Asians are invisible,' or 'blacks are this' or 'women are that,' so it is so easy to exploit," Morgan said, "because it's a knee-jerk reaction. It's this, 'Oh yes, yes, of course. I know that.'"

Viewers might not think that the shows and films that enrich our lives and let us happily escape after a day or week of the usual routine may affect our view of our neighbors, fellow citizens, or people around the world. And it's true that Middle Ages fantasy with a reputation for bloodshed or a tap-dancing couple in a sunny dreamland, on their own, might not have too much of an impact. But they are part of a much larger force that consistently dilutes the richly diverse experiences of lives enjoyed by people of color and women.

"We can sit by as this continues for another decade," wrote some of the researchers who diligently record the makeup of the on-screen population, in a recent report, "or can act to ensure that equality and inclusion are the hallmark of entertainment in the years to come."

Because it's not just "not fair." It's not right.

BEFORE YOU GO

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Why On-Screen Representation Actually Matters

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The conversation about diversity in Hollywood often centers on fairness. It's unfair that It's unfair that women It's unfair that black, Asian and Latinx actors were just over a quarter of speaking roles went to people of color in 2015's top movies ― that Asians and Latinx nabbed tiny slivers.

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This article explains the importance of intersectionality and how being a part of many discriminated classes can mean that ones issues will be ignored.

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Have you ever heard the term "intersectionality" and wondered what it means? If so, this post is for you.

What Is Intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a sociological theory describing multiple threats of discrimination when an individual's identities overlap with a number of minority classes - such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, health and other characteristics.

For example, a woman of color may face sexism in the workplace, which is compounded by pervasive racism. Similarly, trans women of color face exceptionally high levels of discrimination and threats of violence. Looking through the lens of intersectionality, it's not hard to see why: these women potentially face anti-trans prejudice, sexism, misogyny, racism and - due to the ignorance surrounding trans identity - homophobia.

While intersectionality is traditionally applied to women, a person of any gender may be affected by this phenomena of overlapping minority status. A man from a Hispanic background could face xenophobia in today's America despite being a naturalized citizen. If that Hispanic man is in his 50s, ageism might add to the discrimination he could face in trying to secure employment.

More precisely though, intersectionality describes the hierarchical nature of power and the fact that belonging to multiple discriminated classes can mean that one's issues are ignored.

Who Invented the Term?

The term intersectionality itself is attributed to legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and her 1989 essay "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color" - though the actual thought behind intersectionality emerged much earlier, with academics recognizing the problem in the 19th century.

Crenshaw coined the term to express the particular problems that immigrant women of color face - and, crucially, why their issues were being ignored by both the feminist anti-racism movements of the time.

Often, intersectional experiences reveal that existing legal and policy mechanisms are stacked against people with a multiple minority identity. And these institutions may fail to account for critical cultural differences.

A Controversial Word

Within each separate movement - whether feminism or anti-racism - some individuals claim that intersectionality actually harms their personal cause. The arguments against intersectionality tend to focus on proving it to be a meaningless term. If a woman experiences racism then that's racism. If she experiences sexism then that's sexism. There is no need to overlap these forms of discrimination, so the school of thought goes.

But a strong body of evidence suggests that discrimination does overlap. While we might deal with the issues separately, denying that convergence could leave people vulnerable.

That's not to say that intersectionality as an analytical tool doesn't have its problems, however. A chief concern is that, for both scholars of racism and feminism, it remains a rather murkily defined perspective - and one that we are still struggling to effectively apply.

The Modern Civil Rights Movement

While accepting that intersectionality needs refining as a tool, a majority of social commentators and mainstream feminist and racial justice groups believe intersectionality does have an important role to play in today's civil rights movements.

Take the gay rights movement that is often called upon to speak for the wider LGBTQA community. These figureheads are overwhelmingly white, cis-gendered, able-bodied men and women - and that can be a problem, given that they are representative of only one aspect of the LGBT community.

And in terms of feminism, the closing of women's health clinics and the passing of antagonistic anti-abortion measures can disproportionately affect women of color - particularly those from lower economic backgrounds.

As such, while intersectionality might not be a perfect term, recognizing its uses and limitations helps to ensure that we don't overlook the challenges faced by people who belong to multiple marginalized groups as we strive to achieve a more just society.
Photo Credit: Dimitar Belchev/Unsplash

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What Is Intersectionality, and Why Is It Important? | Care2 Causes

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Have you ever heard the term "intersectionality" and wondered what it means? If so, this post is for you. Intersectionality is a sociological theory describing multiple threats of discrimination when an individual's identities overlap with a number of minority classes - such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, health and other characteristics.

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This image shows that this type of feminism focuses on white middle-class women's issues and they are in a different category than other groups which are not as important.

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Intersectionality in the LGBTQ Community

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Intersectionality in the LGBTQ Community

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When someone says something about one group of people it is a stab at all of them because people who are transgender may be from many of those groups.

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The Intersectionality Of The LGBTQ And The Immigrant Communities

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Men and women earn different wages but it goes further than that because it also depends on a person's race, which shows us that intersectionality is involved due to race and gender interacting.

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See something equals say or do something to help a bad situation and this image explains how to do so.

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This article is an example of how there is issues with athletics and how some people will say that it does not matter because they are still making their money so they should not complain and just worry about playing.

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On May 23, 2018 the NFL announced a new policy that requires players and league personnel on the field to stand for the national anthem, but gives them the option to remain in the locker room if they don't want to stand. Teams will have the power to set their own policies to ensure the anthem is being respected during any on-field action. If a player chooses to protest on the sideline, the NFL will fine the player. Earlier this year, GlobalSport Matters looked at why reaction to player protests is so strong.
In March, the Charles Barkley who hosted Saturday Night Live was a faint image of the Charles Barkley who spoke out on political issues in the early '90s. The current Barkley is a cuddly class clown who is, not coincidentally, much more beloved than when, as an NBA all-star 25 years ago, he'd hold court on political matters in the locker room of the Philadelphia 76ers.

"Just because you give Charles Barkley a lot of money, it doesn't mean I'm not going to voice my opinions," he lectured the media throng around him back then. "Me getting 20 rebounds ain't important. We've got people homeless on our streets and the media is crowding around my locker. It's ludicrous."

At the time, his friend and rival, Michael Jordan, explained his unwillingness to endorse a credible black challenger to right-wing Senator Jesse Helms in his home state of North Carolina by saying "Republicans buy sneakers, too." Barkley's response was to pose on the cover of the hip-hop basketball magazine SLAM with Spike Lee, proclaiming themselves to be "Nineties Niggas." "I don't have to be what you want me to be," Barkley said to the sportswriters chronicling him, echoing a Muhammad Ali line from the '60s.

Now here he was on the set of SNL, just a few months after stumping for Democrat Doug Jones' Senate election in his native state of Alabama, ("at some point, we gotta stop looking like idiots to the nation") and just days after Fox News' Laura Ingraham had told LeBron James to "shut up and dribble" after he'd deigned to talk about social justice. "A lot of athletes are worried that speaking out might hurt their career," Barkley said in his SNL monologue. "Well, here's something that contradicts all of that: Me. I've been saying whatever the hell I want for over 30 years and I'm doing great...LeBron, keep on dribbling and don't ever shut up."

The audience cheered. And therein lies the difference in athlete activism today. Athletes have always spoken out on societal issues-Ali's anti-Vietnam stand in the '60s is oft-mentioned, but you could go all the way back to Irish long-jumper Peter O'Connor, an activist for Ireland's independence, waving the Irish flag when the British anthem played during the medal ceremony at the 1906 Olympic games. But few cheered. Ali, in fact, wasn't widely beloved in opinion polls until-not coincidentally-Parkinson's disease had robbed him of his voice.

"There have always been instances of social protest by athletes," says Dr. Douglas Hartmann, chair of the sociology department at the University of Minnesota and author Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports and Neoliberal Social Policy. "But now it's a movement, and it's not just professional athletes."

Since at least 2012, it's become hard to pick up a sports page and not read about an athlete taking action or weighing in on life beyond his or her field of play. Name the issue and there's been an athlete, or group of athletes, engaging it: Racism, police brutality, gay and transgender rights. Others-Bob Knight, Curt Schilling-have stood for conservative causes.

What was once verboten has become trendy, and that's brought along its own backlash, as the NFL has found out. Last season, league TV ratings were down 10 percent and at least one study found that nearly one-third of 1,000 random respondents said they were less likely to watch a game because of players protesting during the national anthem. But that hasn't slowed the parade of athletes who are wading into societal matters.

What explains the trend? "It's a lot easier to feel free enough to get involved and take stands when the greatest athlete in the world leads the way," said Los Angeles Ram Connor Barwin, whose foundation rebuilds inner-city parks and who has supported political candidates, of LeBron James. James, who, in addition to dust-ups like the one with Ingraham, has underwritten some $40 million in college tuition for underprivileged children in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.

In the past, athletes like Ali who took socially impactful stands were isolated and shunned. Barkley says his outspokenness in the prime of his career cost him $10 million in endorsements and subject him to criticism from the front office of his team, his league and the media. Controversial stands taken by NBA players Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf-whose protest over the national anthem presaged Colin Kaepernick's-resulted in the end of their careers, respectively. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists during the medal ceremony in a Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, Brent Musburger referred to them on-air as "black-skinned stormtroopers" to nary a complaint.

What's changed? In recent years, Kaepernick's blackballing notwithstanding, establishment forces-perhaps kicking and screaming-have come to endorse, or at least grin and bear, athlete activism. Last fall, team owners lined up with NFL players taking a knee, defying President Trump; in response to campus racism, a boycott on football activities by the University of Missouri football team, supported by its coach, forced the resignation of the school's president; and the Miami Heat organization stood by James and his then-teammates when they tweeted a photo of themselves wearing hoodies with the hashtag #WeAreTrayvonMartin.

Establishment forces like teams, leagues and mass media outlets have come to realize the power and popularity of today's athletes and, perhaps calculatingly, have come to be on board with athletes who flex their social justice muscle. Ironically, the backlash now increasingly comes from the anti-establishment, nativist fringe.

"Don't underestimate the Trump effect," says Hartmann. "In the past, presidents have used sports to unify the country. When, last fall, Trump attacked primarily African-American football players who were protesting police brutality, he used politically motivated, racially coded speech to mobilize a nativist, reactionary response."

In that sense, Hartmann says, unlike in past examples of athlete protest, in this case the athletes were responding to, rather than making, a provocative message. Which gets us to that other hulking linebacker in the room: Race.

"There is and has always been a societal backlash against athletes, particularly Black athletes, who speak out against injustice," says Dr. Peter Kaufman, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and author of Boos, Bans, and Other Backlash: The Consequences of Being An Activist Athlete. "As William Rhoden wrote in his aptly titled book, many people view, although they would never admit or be even be conscious of, Black athletes as 40 Million Dollar Slaves. Just shut up and play, entertain us. That's what we pay you for."

That's the resentment the likes of Trump and Ingraham have instinctively sought to exploit for political purposes. The same bitterness exists for celebrities as a whole who speak out, but it's easier to mobilize it by using African-American athletes. "First, there's long been this ideology of sport as apolitical," says Hartmann. "The separation of sports and politics has long been enshrined in Olympic ceremony and protocol, and a different standard has applied to, say, actors and actresses. So athletes who speak out have been up against that norm. But when Laura Ingraham calls LeBron's comments 'ungrammatical' she's also playing off dumb jock stereotypes unique to the athlete, especially the African-American."

But what the opponents haven't counted on is the media savviness of today's athlete. In the past, activists like Ali and Jim Brown were not only dependent on the often skewed filter of sportswriters, who were themselves saddled with biases, but also on a comparatively slow news cycle. Ali, for example, might be called a "draft dodger" and the defamatory claim would have the airwaves and newspaper pages to itself for days. Today, James and his colleagues are able to respond in real time to their critics, often capturing the high ground right away.

"For better or worse, social media has changed the landscape, particularly when it comes to social justice movements," says Kaufman. "Studies have shown that the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 were driven by social media in a game-changing way. Fast forward to today, when our lives are structured around hashtags and soundbites. Social media has been a powerful tool to bring about solidarity, so an athlete who speaks out never has to really be all alone out there."

U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!

- LeBron James (@KingJames) September 23, 2017

So there was James last fall, stealing the headline from Trump, the master headline maker, after the president preemptively withdrew a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors after that team's star, Steph Curry, expressed his desire to skip the traditional visit. "U bum," James tweeted. "@StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!" The flurry of Twitter support for Curry, led by James, bore out Kaufman's point: The protester no longer has to go it alone. And it showed that athletes-with their millions of followers-could own the public narrative instead of finding themselves at its mercy.

It's a power trickling down to athletes who don't have the freedom that comes with million-dollar contracts. "In recent years, college athletes have publicly taken up the causes of racial justice and student-athlete rights, while still playing," says Dr. Victoria Jackson, a sports historian at Arizona State University. "They've been inspired by role model like LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick."

Jackson cites jocks turned change agents like Kain Colter, the quarterback who led the ultimately unsuccessful movement to unionize his team; Oklahoma's Eric Striker, who spoke out when a racist fraternity video came to light on his campus, and who engaged the "shut up and play" backlash in the pages of Sports Illustrated: "As a young man I thought, I'm gonna change the world, but I didn't know how. Now I have a platform and a voice people want to hear. Why would I stop talking?"; and Nigel Hayes, who, as a University of Wisconsin basketball star, called attention to NCAA exploitation by carrying a sign that read "Broke College Athlete Anything Helps" and who wrote a public letter critiquing his university on race relations: "We shouldn't be commodified for mere entertainment, but respected as individuals with the ideas and the ability to contribute to society."

There there are those athletes who will likely never show up on Sportscenter. Hartmann cities the case of Olivia House, a sophomore soccer player at Division III Augsburg University in Minneapolis, who knelt during the anthem before her games last season after seeing Megan Rapinoe of the U.S. women's national team do the same. "The parents of some of her teammates were upset, and they spoke to their kids, and that led to conversations within families and on the team about real issues," says Hartmann. "It didn't change the system, but it created awareness and started a dialogue."

Which is, after all, what movements do. The more athletes at all levels feel emboldened to make their voices heard on a wide range of issues, the likelier it is that the days of "Republicans buy sneakers, too" will be in our cultural rear view mirror. Some have called that Jordan quote apocryphal, but I asked him in the pages of GQ magazine in 2007 if he regretted it and he said: "No, I privately supported [the challenger to Sen. Jesse Helms] Harvey Gantt...But if you asked me the pros and cons of Harvey Gantt, I'd have been lying to say one thing...I'd only be setting myself up for someone to scrutinize my opinions, which were limited, because I never channeled much energy into it."

Though he has been pilloried for the comment, in this explanation Jordan makes a compelling point: The call for athletes to speak out just might be a type of media set-up. Which is why today's generation of athlete activists have taken the work ethic they practiced in their sport and applied it to their activism. Two years ago, Malcolm Jenkins, the All-Pro safety for the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles was, like Jordan, focused on excelling in his sport. But then he saw the news reports of the killings by police of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana.

"I thought, 'That could have been me, or my brothers, or my cousins, or one of the kids my foundation serves,'" he says. "I looked at myself in the mirror and asked, am I doing enough?"

So he got to work. He read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, was transfixed by Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary 13th, interviewed inmates and the formerly incarcerated, picked the brains of community leaders, and went on ride-alongs with the police in Philadelphia's most dangerous neighborhoods. Jenkins decided he wasn't just going to symbolically protest; he was also going to advocate for substantive criminal justice reform.

When, last season, Jenkins' teammate Chris Long, who is white, put his arm around Jenkins during his raised fist national anthem protest, and when the two lobbied state officials together in support of a Clean Slate Bill that would seal old, non-violent misdemeanor offenses so those re-entering the work force could better find meaningful employment, it sent an important message: "Civil rights and criminal justice reform is not a black or white issue. It's an American issue," Jenkins says.

The backlash, Jenkins reports, has been minimal. In part, that's because he was savvy enough to understand what Jordan was getting at: He made himself an expert on a public policy issue. Of course, winning has also likely contributed to the resonance of his message.

But Jenkins is politically astute enough to know that, when the backlash comes, it's usually in the form of: You're a millionaire athlete, what do you have to complain about? Shut up and play! Like so many others of today's athlete activists, Jenkins flips that script, and argues that to whom much is given, even more is required. We have a patriotic duty to use our platform to better society, he says. And, somewhere up there, Ali is shuffling in celebration.
Larry Platt is the co-founder and editor of The Philadelphia Citizen, a nonprofit solutions-reporting news site, and is co-author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Every Day I Fight, the story of ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott's epic battle with cancer. He has written for GQ, the New York Times Magazine, New York, Men's Journal, Playboy, and Salon.com, among other publications, and can be reached at larryplatt.net
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