Social Movements & the Law

"On August 26, 1920, these words became part of the United States Constitution as its Nineteenth Amendment. The requisite thirty- six states had ratified the amendment in the year since its enactment by Congress on June 4, 1919. A revolution in women's rights, spanning over seventy years, came to a quiet conclusion as Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the measure into law in the privacy of his home at eight o'clock in the morning.1 None of the prominent suffrage leaders of the day, including the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) president, Carrie Chapman Catt; or the National Woman's Party (NWP) chair, Alice Paul, were at the signing.2 Catt was later invited to go to the State Department to see the proclamation, but no similar invitation was extended to the more militant Paul. Paul had been a thorn in the side of President Woodrow Wilson, with her White House picketing and willingness to be imprisoned for the vote.3 Ratification was followed by ten years of litigation- most of it in state courts- during which the meaning and scope of the Nineteenth Amendment was contested. In its most literal sense, the Nineteenth Amendment did not confer a "right" to vote per se. Rather, it simply prohibited the states or the federal government from using sex as a criterion for voter eligibility.4 In other words, its ratification meant that state and federal impediments to voting based on sex were now unconstitutional. It did not mean that all women in the United States could vote.5 As a matter of law, the Nineteenth Amendment meant that states could not prevent African American women from voting based solely on their sex. Yet vast numbers of African American women were prevented from voting in the November 1920 presidential election that followed on the heels of ratification.6 They faced the same impediments- poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and physical intimidation- used to prevent their male counterparts from voting after ratificat ion of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.7 Those amendments conferred citizenship on previously enslaved persons and barred state or federal restrictions on voting based on race, color, and previous condition of servitude"--

"Gendered Citizenship outlines how the original conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) altered the nature of American Citizenship, creating justification for sex-specific treatment and rights that still exist today"--

Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA is the most profound and sensitive discussion to date of the way in which women responded to feminism. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Mathews and De Hart explore the fate of the ERA in North Carolina--one of the three states targeted by both sides as essential to ratification--to reveal the dynamics that stunned supporters across America. The authors insightfully link public discourse and private feelings, placing arguments used throughout the nation in the personal contexts of women who pleaded their cases for and against equality. Beginning

"What is the price of living an authentic life? Ellen Krug knows . As a man named, "Ed," she had everything anyone could ever want: a soul mate's love, two beautiful daughters, a house in the best neighborhood, a successful trial lawyer's career -- a Grand Plan life so picture-pefect it inspired a beautiful pastel drawing. But there was a problem: "Ed" was a woman born into a male body. Finding inner peace meant Ed would have to become Ellen. It also meant losing that picture-perfect life. How could anyone make that choice, pay that kind of price? Then again, how could anyone not? Through what became a "gender journey," Ellen Krug discovered her true self and the honesty it takes to make life-changing decisions. Getting to Ellen is more than one person's story about some things lost and others gained. It's a glimpse into the life choices that all of us make -- whether or not we're transgender."

This unique book analyses the impact of international human rights on the concept of gender, demonstrating that gender emerged in the medical study of sexuality and has a complex and broad meaning beyond the sex and gender binaries often assumed by human rights law. The book illustrates which dynamics within the field of human rights hinder the expansion of the concept of gender beyond binaries and which strategies and mechanisms allow and facilitate such an expansion.

"In a landmark book, an extraordinary young woman recounts her coming-of-age as a transgender teen--a deeply personal and empowering portrait of self-revelation, adversity, and heroism. In 2011, Marie Claire magazine published a profile of Janet Mock in which she publicly stepped forward for the first time as a trans woman. Since then, Mock has gone from covering the red carpet for People.com to advocating for all those who live within the shadows of society. Redefining Realness offers a bold new perspective on being young, multiracial, economically challenged, and transgender in America. Welcomed into the world as her parents' firstborn son, Mock set out early on to be her own person--no simple feat for a young person like herself. She struggled as the smart, determined child in a deeply loving, yet ill-equipped family that lacked money, education, and resources. Mock had to navigate her way through her teen years without parental guidance but luckily with a few close friends and mentors she overcame extremely daunting hurdles. This powerful memoir follows Mock's quest for identity, from her early gender conviction to a turbulent adolescence in Honolulu that found her transitioning through the halls of her school, self-medicating with hormones at fifteen, and flying across the world for sex reassignment surgery at just eighteen. Ever resilient, Mock emerged with a scholarship to college and moved to New York City, where she earned her masters degree, basked in the success of an enviable career, and told no one about her past. It wasn't until Mock fell for a man who called her the woman of his dreams that she felt ready to finally tell her story, becoming a fierce advocate for girls like herself. A profound statement of affirmation from a courageous woman, Redefining Realness shows as never before what it means to be a woman today and how to be yourself when you don't fit the mold created for you"--

Written about lawyers, but relevant to people in various professions, this book shows how individuals can act according to their personal qualities and attributes, rather than according to expectations based on gender. It prescribes several models to help firms and individuals achieve a workplace free of gender bias for both men and women.

What is gender identity justice, why does it matter, and what are the implications for not doing this work in today's schools? This premiere book in the new Teachers College Press series School : Questions carefully walks readers through both theory and practice to equip them with the skills needed to bring gender identity justice into classrooms, schools, and ultimately society. The text looks into the root causes and ways to change the conditions that have created gender identity injustice. It opens up spaces where evolving, indeterminate gender identities will be understood and recognized as asset-based, rich sources for learning literacy and literacy learning. As educators take up the strategies mapped out across this text, they will learn how to foster school environments that aid all students in becoming agents for social change. This text is the first of its kind to address gender identity in teacher education with pathways to take up the work in communities and beyond. Book Features: Provides concrete strategies for supporting students with complex gender identities. Cuts across all disciplines and academic levels. Offers an innovative theory of trans*+ for education. Includes a glossary, definitions, and useful charts and illustrations. Unpacks the dangers of cisgender assumptions in schools. Introduces new vocabulary about gender identity.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, its primary target was the outright exclusion of women from particular jobs. Over time, the Act's scope of protection has expanded to prevent not only discrimination based on sex but also discrimination based on expression of gender identity. Kimberly Yuracko uses specific court decisions to identify the varied principles that underlie this expansion. Filling a significant gap in law literature, this timely book clarifies an issue of increasing concern to scholars interested in gender issues and the law.

"Today's debates about transgender inclusion and public restrooms may seem unmistakably contemporary, but they have a surprisingly long and storied history in the United States-one that concerns more than mere "potty politics." Alexander K. Davis takes readers behind the scenes of two hundred years' worth of conflicts over the existence, separation, and equity of gendered public restrooms, documenting at each step how bathrooms have been entangled with bigger cultural matters: the importance of the public good, the reach of institutional inclusion, the nature of gender difference, and, above all, the myriad privileges of social status. Chronicling the debut of nineteenth-century "comfort stations," twentieth-century mandates requiring separate-but-equal men's and women's rooms, and twenty-first-century uproar over laws like North Carolina's "bathroom bill," Davis reveals how public restrooms are far from marginal or unimportant social spaces. Instead, they are-and always have been-consequential sites in which ideology, institutions, and inequality collide"--

In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that are raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes the assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require."--Page 4 of cover.

Transgender Persons and the Law, 2nd Edition further solidifies the ABA s position as the forerunner and champion of combatting transgender discrimination and safeguarding the legal rights of all transgender individuals. This new edition is an excellent resource for lawyers as well as lay-activists engaged in transgender human and civil rights albeit in the courts or in legislative lobbying.The following areas of the law are thoroughly explained in the book: . What is transgendered'. Identification documents. Public facilities. Housing concerns. Military and veterans issues. Family law. School matters. Health care. Personal safety concerns. Keeping and securing employment. Immigration problems. Criminal imprisonment disputes Transgender Persons and the Law, 2nd Edition includes the latest regulations and policy statements (including the looming Executive Order by President Obama on LGBT discrimination by federal contractors) regarding transgenderism in addition to new cases that have been brought before the courts since the publication of the first edition of this book in summer 2013. As a bonus, the book includes a link to an online database that features a complete set of legal forms for all fifty states and the District of Columbia for name changes and for those jurisdictions that allow it, changes to birth certificates."

This book brings together international experts to discuss questions and challenges relating to the legal articulation of the emerging right to gender self-determination and its consequences for law and society, such as the future of sex/gender registration and the protection of trans persons against discrimination.;Over the last decade, trans rights and gender variation as legal and a human rights issues have been high on the international and national agendas. Improved registration of and attention for gender variation and gender incongruence is accompanied by attention for the often far-reaching requirements that trans persons have to comply with in order to obtain legal recognition of their actual gender identity. A small but rapidly growing number of (mostly European and South American) States have recently reformed their legal frameworks of gender recognition by allowing trans persons to change their official sex registration on the basis of gender self-determination. Against that background, this book brings together international experts to discuss questions and challenges relating to the legal articulation of the emerging right to gender self-determination and its consequences for law and society, such as the future of sex/gender registration and the protection of trans persons against discrimination. Given the importance of State practice for the development of the right to gender self-determination and its implementation in law, particular attention is given to the national contexts of Belgium, Germany and Norway. These three countries may be perceived as world leaders in protecting trans rights, and therefore noteworthy 'laboratories' for future State practice.

The story of Christine Jorgensen, Americas first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives-ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials--early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films--Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the father of American gynecology, to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of cross dressing and canonical black literary works that express black mens access to the female within, he concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience.

"A poignant narrative of one mom's struggle to support her transgender daughter-showing how any parent can forge a deeper bond with their child by truly listening"--

"In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. What happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive rethinking of our understanding of gendered embodiment? How did a stigmatized identity become so central to US and European articulations of self? And how have people responded to the new definitions and understanding of sex and the gendered body? In Trans*, Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future"--Provided by publisher.

"A timely second edition of the classic text on transgender history, with a new introduction and updated material throughout. Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture."--

In this extraordinary book, based on 150 in-depth interviews, Lori B. Girshick, a sociologist and social justice activist, brings together the voices of sex- and gender-diverse people who speak with absolute candor about their lives. Girshick presents transpeople speaking in their own voices about identity, coming out, passing, sexual orientation, relationship negotiations and the dynamics of attraction, homophobia (including internalized fears), and bullying. She exposes the guilt and the shame that "gender police" use in their attempts to exert control and points out the many ways transpeople are discriminated against in daily life, from filling out identification documents to gender-segregated bathrooms. By showing us a variety of descriptions of diverse real lives and providing a thorough exploration of the embodied experiences of gender variant people, Girshick demonstrates that there is nothing inherently binary about gender, and that the way each of us experiences our own gender is, in fact, normal and natural.

"This book examines the representation and misrepresentation of queer people in true crime, addressing their status as both victims and perpetrators in actual crime, as well as how the media portrays them. The chapters apply an intersectional perspective in examining criminal cases involving LGBTQ people, as well as the true crime media content surrounding the cases. The book illuminates how sexual orientation, gender, race, and other social locations impact the treatment of queer people in the criminal legal system as well as the mass media. Each chapter describes one or more high-profile criminal cases involving queer people (e.g., the murders of Brandon Teena and Kitty Genovese; serial killer Aileen Wuornos; the Pulse nightclub mass shooting). The authors examine how the case(s) are portrayed in the media via news, film, podcasts, documentaries, books, social media, and more. Each chapter discusses not only what is visible or emphasized by the media, but also what is invisible in the accounting or societal focus surrounding the case. Lesser known (but similar) cases are used in the book to call attention to how race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, social class, and/or other features influence the dominant narrative surrounding these cases. Each chapter addresses "teachable moments" from each case and its coverage, leaving readers with several considerations to take with them into the future. The book also provides media resources and supplemental materials, so that curious readers, including scholars, students, content creators, and advocates can examine the cases and media content further. The book will appeal to scholars and students of criminology, psychology, sociology, law, media studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies and people with an interest in true crime"--

A federal judge has struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing so-called “harmful” materials to minors.

Love, marriage… and a secret history of trauma. Anna Maria Tremonti has been keeping her past a secret for over 40 years. As one of Canada’s most respected journalists, she has a reputation for being fearless and hard-hitting. She’s reported from some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. But none were as immediately threatening as life at home. In her early 20s, she fell in love with a man who seemed worldly and charming. Behind closed doors he was incredibly violent. They were only married for a year but the consequences of the abuse have lasted a lifetime. This is the first time Anna Maria has told anyone—including family or close friends—the details of what she endured. Working with her therapist, she reveals the intimate details of a past she’s kept to herself for most of her life. The result is a profoundly intimate portrait of a powerful woman confronting the source of tremendous pain and trauma and, remarkably, freeing herself from a life-long sense of shame. Written and hosted by Anna Maria Tremonti (The Current), produced by Daemon Fairless (Hunting Warhead, Boys Like Me) and mixed by Mira Burt-Wintonick (Wiretap, Love Me, Sorry About The Kid).

Listen to Forgotten: Women of Juárez on Spotify.

A jury found the disgraced R&B star guilty of charges that included sexual exploitation of a child, racketeering and sex trafficking. He faces a possible sentence of 10 years to life in prison.

Legal scholar Mary Ziegler talks about the legal battles shaping reproductive rights across the U.S. — including the scope of abortion access and the fate of IVF. And we look ahead at two very different outcomes with the election. "I don't think in the past 50 years we've had an election where the stakes could be as high, simply because Roe v. Wade isn't there as a floor anymore," Ziegler says. Also, John Powers controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq's new novel, Annihilation. Subscribe to Fresh Air's weekly newsletter and get highlights from the show, gems from the archive, and staff recommendations.

A federal judge in Texas is expected to rule soon in a lawsuit that aims to block access to one of the two drugs typically used in medication abortions. Plaintiffs in the case are seeking a nationwide injunction, meaning the drug would become unavailable across the country.

We talk to people who wanted abortions right when the laws were changing in their states.

A federal appeals court will allow partial access to the abortion drug mifepristone while a high-profile federal case plays out, but with new limitations on how the drug can be dispensed.

Legal historian Mary Ziegler has chronicled the legal, political and cultural battles around abortion, and says the debate is far from over: "We're at a moment of almost unprecedented uncertainty in the United States when it comes to abortion," Zielger says. Her book is Roe: The History of a National Obsession.

Legal uncertainty reigns as Republican states rush to ban abortion procedures.

‎Show America Dissected, Ep Conceiving the Anti-Abortion Movement with Prof. Karissa Haugeberg - Aug 23, 2022