sexgenderbody

genderedintelligence:

This is a list of Trans Day of Remembrance events we’ve come across, with links to more details. If you’re holding or attending an event we haven’t listed here, please let us know so we can add it to the list.

Bangor (Wales) - Tuesday 20th November - 6pm

Bath - Sunday 18th November - 6pm  

Belfast - Tuesday 20th November - 12.30pm

Birmingham (University of Birmingham) - Tuesday 20th November 7pm

Brighton - Sunday 25th November - 3pm

Bristol (TransBristol) - Tuesday 20th November - 6pm

Bristol (University of Bristol) - Tuesday 20th November - 9.45pm

Cambridge - Tuesday 20th November - 2pm

Cardiff - Tuesday 20th November - 6pm

Coventry (University of Warwick) - Tuesday 20th November - 7pm 

Cumbria (Barrow-in-Furness) - Tuesday 20th November 6pm

Edinburgh (Scottish Transgender Alliance) - Tuesday 20th November 11am

Edinburgh (Our Tribe) - Saturday 24th November 7pm

Liverpool - Sunday 18th November - 6pm

London (Central) - Tuesday 20th November - 7pm

London (Croydon) - Saturday 17th November - 8pm

Manchester - Sunday 25th November - 3.45pm

Milton Keynes - Tuesday 20th November - 6pm

Sheffield - Tuesday 20th November - 5.30pm

Swansea - Tuesday 20th November - 10am

Southampton - Tuesday 20th November - 7.30pm

Edited to add two events in Swansea and Cardiff :)

Lizzie Miller is considered too large to model plus-size clothes. Is the reaction that followed the publication of this picture going to change that?

‘It’s a photo that measures all of three by three inches,” gushes Cindi Leive, editor of US Glamour in a post on the magazine’s blog, “but the letters about it started to flood my inbox literally the day Glamour hit newsstands.” The picture in question, illustrating a story about body confidence, has generated more than 700 comments on the site, and featured on the US Today morning TV programme. What does it show? A beautiful, creamy-skinned naked model … with a small roll of stomach fat.

Lizzie Miller, the 20-year-old model in question, agrees that it’s astonishing that, at 5ft 11in and 12.5 stone she’s considered a “plus size” model. “It’s sad,” she says. “In the industry anything over size six is considered a plus-size.” Miller, who is around a US size 12-14 (that is, either average or slightly below average) lost about 60lb when she was 13 but today she is considered too large to model for plus-size lines Marina Rinaldi (she says, “they like girls who are an 8-10”) or Elena Miro. She says that the overwhelming reaction to the tiny photograph, buried on page 194 of Glamour magazine “shows that the world is hungry to see pictures of normal women.”

One wouldn’t have thought this would be news. As Miller says, “pretty much every picture in a magazine or ad is airbrushed … I don’t think the public understands how much smoke and mirrors are involved in making women look like that.”

So does the reaction to this picture mean that the tide is turning? Hardly. Even after the deluge of emails, Leive hasn’t made a commitment to using average-sized women in fashion shoots, saying only that the magazine wants to celebrate “all kinds of beauty”. The outcome for Miller, though, has been more positive. She has received more offers of work since the picture was published. And her model agency, Wilhelmina, has told her that she mustn’t lose any weight.

• EACH is a free actionline for young people experiencing homophobic or transphobic bullying.
  Telephone: 0808 1000 143
  Website: http://eachaction.org.uk

• Childline is a free confidential helpline for young people. They offer advice and support 24 hours a day.
  Telephone: 0800 1111
  Website: http://www.childline.org.uk

• TransLondon is a discussion group online and welcomes all regardless of their current status, identity or identities.
  Website: http://www.translondon.org.uk

• Albert-Kennedy trust support young LGBT people who are homeless.
  Telephone: -London 0207 831 6562, -Manchester 0161 228 3308
  Website: http://www.akt.org.uk

• Gendered intelligence is a community interest company aiming to support young transgender people.
  Website: http://genderedintelligence.co.uk

• Mermaids is a support group for young transgender people and their families.
  Telephone: 0208 123 4819
  Website: http://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk

• The Beaumont Society is a self help body run by and for those who cross-dress or are trans.
  Website: http://www.beaumontsociety.org.uk

Please reblog and add to this list; it might really help someone out there who really needs it :)

If poor urban people of color rioted in the areas they live in, in cities in the US, in a serious huge way, what fraction of property destroyed would be their own? What fraction of people rioting would be destroying property of their own, their friends and families, people they’d ever even met? A tenth? A hundredth? What must that look like in the UK right now—whose property is being destroyed?

I’m wondering this because of the argument that people are destroying “their own neighborhood,” which has always come off to me as being steeped in a middle-class misunderstanding of other people’s poverty. Who owns the house they live in? In New Haven, almost all the houses in the POC neighborhoods are subdivided to be rented as separate floors. I literally know 3 couples in the city who own the house they live in; 2 of those couples are either my past or present landlords. If my block rioted, for the most part we would not be destroying our own property.

Are the riots destroying more than the police do? (They’re the only ones within this story who have killed someone.) Are they destroying more than unemployment and hunger do? Are they destroying more than developers would; are they doing the developers’ work for them anyway? What about the community being destroyed when people are evicted, when people hide out or move away because of racism or xenophobia, when people are convicted of crimes and locked up under a penal system built on oppression, when people are taught collective self-loathing in school, when people are forbidden to speak their own languages?

And what does that mean, “their own neighborhood?” What does ownership of the place you live mean, if you don’t even have the money or skin color to own it? What does ownership mean if you live in public housing and know that, any day now, the city can sign it over to real estate holders who will tear it down and build condos with no remorse? What does ownership mean when there is no longer a place to get sufficiently healthy food in your neighborhood, or there is but the only people who shop there come from other parts of town, or there is but only because the white people moving in aren’t being ignored the way your family was for generations?

How can you force ownership, from afar, onto communities that have been made this deeply alienated from where they are and how they relate to the people and places around them, if they have never before been allowed or encouraged to own anything, property or otherwise?

If you loot a shoe store of a company run by a white man overseas that makes billions of dollars, that cuts costs by using sweatshop labor of people of color and then marketing them back to a different demographic of people of color; if you steal a pair of pants from a clothing store that won’t hire people of color from the neighborhood and follows them around the store when they come in; if you break the window of a multi-billion dollar fast food chain restaurant whose $1 meals are, on a bad day, all you have money and time to feed your kids, knowing that the food you are feeding them is damn near toxic but having no alternatives; are you doing anything to your real community? Will you ever meet the people who actually own all of that?