Disability Justice Needs To Be a Part of Climate Justice

At least three of the people who died in the Los Angeles area fires last month were disabled individuals who physically could not escape without assistance. Their deaths were met with shockingly cruel comments online, blaming them for not leaving—even though they physically could not evacuate on their own. This is not an isolated incident. Disabled people are frequently left behind in disasters, their needs ignored by emergency systems that fail to account for the barriers they face.

These tragic events highlight a devastating truth: despite the fact that more than one in four Americans have a disability, disabled people are often forgotten in emergencies, and their preventable deaths are largely ignored. This has always been an issue, but with the increase in disasters caused by climate change and cuts to services by the Trump administration, it’s essential we understand and fight back.

A History of Abandonment

A study by the United Nations found that people with disabilities are two to four times more likely to die in disasters compared to the general population. This risk is even higher for those who experience multiple layers of marginalization and oppression—such as LGBTQ individuals, BIPOC communities, and those from low-income backgrounds. In fact, these communities are also more likely to have a disability compared to the general population. For example, 40% of transgender adults and 36% of lesbian and bisexual women report having a disability.

During Hurricane Katrina, thirty-four residents of a nursing home in Violet, Louisiana, perished in the floodwaters. Twenty-three people died in a Bellaire, Texas, nursing home during Hurricane Rita. According to a White House report, 71% of those who died in Louisiana during Katrina were over the age of sixty (and most elders naturally become disabled as part of the aging process). A National Council on Disabilities (NCD) report found that many disabled individuals who wanted to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Katrina had no way to do so: buses lacked wheelchair ramps, wait times were hours long in sweltering heat, and some were even turned away from emergency shelters due to their disabilities.

The 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, California, killed at least eighty-five people — most of whom were older and/or disabled. A state audit found that Butte County had failed to adequately prepare for the evacuation of people with disabilities, mirroring failures seen in other disasters across the country.

Why Disabled People Struggle to Evacuate

Evacuating during a disaster is not a simple task for many disabled people. Numerous systemic barriers prevent safe and timely evacuation, including:

• Inaccessible Shelters: Many shelters lack ramps, accessible restrooms, and even the most basic medical support. A 2023 report by the National Council on Disability found that many shelters failed to provide safe spaces for people with mobility impairments or severe medical conditions, forcing them to choose between staying in unsafe conditions or risking further harm by leaving.
• Public Transportation Limitations: Public transit, a lifeline for many disabled people, often shuts down or becomes limited during emergencies. A disabled individual may be left stranded when buses or trains are halted,
• Medical Equipment: Devices or medications requiring electricity, such as ventilators and power wheelchairs, can be difficult to evacuate with and may not be accommodated at a shelter.
• Health Risks: Respiratory viruses like COVID-19, RSV, and the flu spread rapidly in crowded shelters, posing a higher risk to immunocompromised individuals.
• Financial Barriers: Many disabled people live on low incomes and cannot afford transportation or alternative lodging.
• Communication Barriers: Emergency warnings are not always accessible to the deaf, blind, or cognitively disabled communities.
• Mobility Restrictions: Most buildings have non-functioning elevators during power outages, leaving those with mobility disabilities stranded.
• State-Dependent Medical Coverage: Medicaid and other medical coverage are often restricted by state, limiting evacuation options for disabled individuals who rely on medical care.
• Lack of Access to Caregivers: Caregivers may be unable to reach a disabled person to help or may be living in an area that was already evacuated.

The Consequences of Being Left Behind

The consequences of being left behind in a disaster are often devastating for disabled individuals. Those with medical conditions may lose access to life-sustaining medications, equipment, or treatments, leading to severe health complications. The loss of housing can also mean loss of access to accessible accommodations in that housing such as an accessible-entry tub, adjustable bed, or toilet grab bars. Others may be forced into institutional settings if community support systems break down, stripping them of their independence.

A study by the United Nations found that after disasters, 75% of disabled individuals lack access to basic disaster assistance like food and water. Similarly, following a disaster disabled people, compared to non-disabled people, have a five to ten times greater risk of experiencing food and water shortages, a lack of electricity, isolation, unsanitary conditions, fear of crime, and exposure to financial scams.

The trauma of being abandoned or struggling to survive in an environment that does not account for their needs can have long-term psychological impacts. These failures in disaster response not only endanger lives but also reinforce systemic neglect, making future emergencies even more perilous for disabled people.

Policy Failures and Neglect

Despite repeated tragedies, federal and state emergency plans consistently fail disabled people. A 2019 audit of California’s emergency planning found that counties lacked comprehensive plans for alerting, evacuating, and sheltering disabled residents. FEMA has issued best practices emphasizing the need for accessible transportation and shelters, but these remain largely ignored in the county plans.

In 2018, under the Trump administration, FEMA slashed the number of Disability Integration Advisors (DIAs) deployed to disaster zones from 60 to just five, drastically reducing the number of trained professionals available to ensure the needs of disabled people were met during disasters. Now, with a second Trump administration already attempting to slash staff and services at FEMA, the CDC, and other critical government agencies, these problems are likely to intensify.

The Path Forward

It doesn’t need to be this way. Disabled advocates have long been pushing for disability-inclusive solutions at both the federal and local levels, yet government response remains inadequate. The REAADI for Disasters Act would establish a National Commission on Disability Rights and Disasters, ensuring disabled voices are included in disaster planning. Passing the Disaster Relief Medicaid Act would allow Medicaid recipients to retain benefits when displaced across state lines due to disasters. The National Association of the Deaf recommends that emergency budgets should allocate at least 15% for disability accommodations. Governments must also improve emergency communications by ensuring all disaster warnings are available in accessible formats, including ASL interpreters and live captioning. Additionally, investing in community-led disaster response efforts, with disability-led organizations at the forefront, is crucial to effective and inclusive emergency planning.

In fact, a recent example in Guam shows that working with the disabled community directly saves lives. In May 2023, Typhoon Mawar devastated Guam with its strongest storm in over 20 years, leaving widespread destruction and knocking out power, water, and communication services. Despite the extensive damage, no lives were lost. To support disabled residents, FEMA teamed up with Guam’s Department of Integrated Services for Individuals with Disabilities, focusing on addressing mobility needs, medical equipment reliance, and access to essential aid. They provided assistance through home visits, aid distribution, and recovery centers. Although many villages suffered severe damage, these efforts helped protect the island’s most vulnerable communities.

In the face of government neglect, disabled communities have long taken matters into their own hands, relying on mutual aid to fill the gaps. Grassroots networks provide real-time support, offering everything from evacuation assistance to access to life-sustaining medical equipment. Unlike traditional emergency response systems, which often fail to prioritize accessibility, mutual aid operates on principles of solidarity and collective care, ensuring that disabled individuals are not left behind. Digital platforms and social media have further strengthened these networks, allowing disabled people to share resources, request help, and organize in ways that bypass bureaucratic red tape.

During the 2021 Texas winter storm, when many disabled residents were trapped in freezing conditions without power, disability-led mutual aid groups coordinated heating supplies, accessible transportation, and emergency food deliveries when state agencies failed to respond adequately. In California community-led efforts, such as the Disability Justice Culture Club and MaskBlocLA, have organized supply distributions, coordinated accessible transportation, and shared life-saving information tailored to disabled needs and the disabled community

“As a disabled community organizer I try to find things that I can do, sometimes in partnership with others, and things that I want to do that addresses a need,” said disability justice leader and founder of Disability Visibility Project Alice Wong. “When the wildfires broke out in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, it became very clear that the city, state, and federal government was not rapidly responding to needs on the ground. Even though disabled people have been advocating for mask wearing in public since the beginning of the pandemic, and hey, we’re still in a pandemic, a rapidly spreading wildfire with smoke clogging the skies is a public health hazard.”

On January 23, MaskBlocLA (MBLA) posted an update to their social media saying that they had distributed 281,690 masks to the community so far. “The need for masks at this moment remains more important than ever in this city since the air we breathe is toxic,” they described in their post. “The fires that burn through our neighborhoods release toxic material and particulates into the air that can linger for weeks to months and will continue to have both short-term and long-term health impacts. It’s been a race against time to get masks into the hands of community members and onto faces to minimize the acute and long term effects of breathing in this air. Over the past two weeks, MBLA has worked to distro masks at schools, workplaces, grocery stores, community centers and places of worship all over LA, which has been crucial in ensuring that BIPOC communities, disabled/immunocompromised people, unhoused community members, and children and elders have access to PPE. The same communities most harmed by COVID are the same ones most harmed by climate crisis.”

Wong launched a community fundraiser to help bring masks to Los Angeles communities affected by dangerous air quality by supporting the existing community-led effort of MaskBlocLA. “On Twitter I learned that mutual aid groups who were already in place, often made up by disabled and queer volunteers, have been distributing masks as fast as possible. So I decided to post on Instagram and my other accounts an offer for a signed copy of my latest anthology, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, for every one hundred dollar donation to Mask Bloc LA, a mutual aid group that distributes masks for the most impacted people. After a few posts I raised over five thousand dollars. Many organizations have been saying money is the most useful thing people can donate and in my small way I was able to raise an amount that I wouldn’t have been able to donate as an individual. It was an all out community effort that was manageable for me and I am so thankful and proud of the communities I belong to in these online trash heaps also known as social media. Community care is powerful and this was just one example of it in action.”

Disabled people are not dying in disasters due to personal negligence or an unwillingness to leave — they are dying because emergency systems are not built with them in mind. Until disaster preparedness prioritizes accessibility, these preventable tragedies will persist. The question is not whether another disaster will strike, but whether we will finally ensure disabled lives are protected when it does. As climate crises escalate, the fight for better policies and the expansion of disability-led mutual aid must go hand in hand. While systemic change is essential for true disaster preparedness, the ongoing failures of government planning mean that disabled communities must continue filling the gaps themselves, working to protect people who are often abandoned in times of crisis.

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The Queer Feminist Case for Palestine

feature image by Anadolu / Contributor via Getty Images

Have you noticed the movement in solidarity with Gaza and Palestine is often led by women, queers, and non-binary people? It first caught my attention in 2012 when I lived in Melbourne, Australia, protesting a previous round of deadly Israeli military aggression in the Gaza Strip. Thirteen years later, it was true again on the streets of Berlin, Germany, in the months after October 7, and, in the United States today, it is true again from Oakland to Miami.

It would be easy for women and queer people to protest the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza on the grounds that they are represented among the casualties, which have now soared past 26,000, though most observers estimate the real number to be much higher when accounting for Palestinians who remain under the rubble from Israeli bombings. Statistically, there are queer people among the 62,861 Palestinians injured since October 7, and women are undoubtedly playing a big role in the caretaking responsibilities of the orphans and newly disabled people in Gaza who live under air, sea, and land blockade, with no avenue for escape. Women in Gaza are having c-sections without painkillers, and Palestinian girls are forced to use tent scraps, cut up parts of towels, and old clothes in the absence of period products.

As a feminist, it angers me to witness a nuclear-armed superpower strangle a besieged parcel of land and force its displaced civilian population into a catastrophe of famine. It is infuriating to witness the wholesale destruction of Palestinian universities, graveyards, schools, municipal buildings, and apartment blocks. It feels maddening to follow citizen journalists on social media and feel helpless as they get hounded by drones or eradicated, often alongside their families, by Israeli weaponry that American taxpayers directly fund.

Yet, my outrage at the unjust massacre of Palestinians is not because there are women and queer people among the martyrs. I find it insulting to our collective capacity for solidarity to suggest my investment in the freedom of another people need only be for selfish reasons. Though there are plenty of queer people in Gaza, we organize against Israeli occupation and apartheid not because they exist but rather due to a deeper thread of queer and feminist solidarity that extends beyond identitarian constructs and requires a more sophisticated notion of queerness and feminism than the LGBTIQA acronym and/or womanhood alone can command. Many organizations during the Civil Rights movement understood this notion of solidarity well, including the Black Women’s Liberation Committee, which later turned into the Third World Women’s Alliance to recognize the shared struggles facing all class-oppressed women of color. The Black feminist poet June Jordan wrote poems about resistance in Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Lebanon, Bosnia, and Palestine because she keenly believed in this expansiveness of solidarity.

Queerness and feminism are overlapping politics that demand an internationalist framework of solidarity whenever abuses of power impoverish a people’s capacity for liberation. When I say queer, I mean hostile to the military industrial complex that generates profit by manufacturing weapons designed to kill people. I mean I am opposed to the notion that any nation-state should ever be able to control the electricity grid, clean water supply, and borders of another sovereign territory, let alone a nation-state like Israel that was founded upon the killing of 15,000 Palestinians and the displacement of 750,000 others from their ancestral homes. My queerness involves an estranged and at times antagonistic relationship to normative power and, in this instance, the power dynamics are clear. Israel has played a role in preventing meaningful elections from taking place in Gaza to minimize the possibility of Palestinian statehood, and even the Times of Israel noted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s interest in propping up Hamas. My queerness instructs me to draw parallels between Israeli colonization and the colonization of much of the world by various empires driven by similar ethno-supremacist ideologies, and, more vehemently, it compels me to speak up and show out in defense of Palestinians without fear of professional consequences. The stakes are higher than any lost gigs or income.

As enumerated by the Palestinian Feminist Collective, feminists see daily acts of resistance as paving the path to a different future by disrupting the status quo wherein abuses of power are made possible. Since at least the 1930s, according to the collective, “Palestinians have regularly engaged in strikes, boycotts, and pickets as a grassroots means of resisting Zionist colonial settlement, land annexation, and labor disposability.” These feminists are asking those of us in the West who can influence the present genocide to join them in mutual struggle.

The first and most meaningful act of solidarity we can support is the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement for freedom, justice, and equality. Modeled off the successful campaign to apply economic pressure to end South Africa’s brutal system of apartheid in the 1990s, BDS calls international civil society organizations and people of conscience to boycott a select number of companies that are particularly complicit in Israeli occupation and settlement expansion. As consumers, we make active choices about the brands and companies we want to support. Targeted consumer boycotts are convincing retailers across the world to stop selling products from companies that profit from Israeli colonialism.

Hewlett Packard (HP) helps run the biometric ID system that Israel uses to restrict Palestinian movement. Siemens is complicit in apartheid Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise through its planned construction of the EuroAsia Interconnector, which will link Israel’s electricity grid with Europe’s, allowing illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land to benefit from Israel-EU trade. AXA invests in Israeli banks, which finance the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources. Do not buy insurance policies with AXA, or if you currently have an insurance policy with them, cancel it. Puma sponsors the Israel Football Association, which includes teams in Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Fruits, vegetables and wines from Israel are often wrongly labeled as “Produced in Israel” when they come from stolen Palestinian land. Boycott all produce from Israel in your supermarket and demand they are removed from shelves. Ahava cosmetics has its production site, visitor center, and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement. Sabra hummus is a joint venture between PepsiCo and the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that provides financial support to the Israeli army.

The divestment arm of BDS urges banks, local councils, churches, pension funds, and universities to withdraw investments from the state of Israel and all companies that sustain Israeli apartheid, and the sanctions element of BDS encourages the banning of business with Israel by ending military trade and free-trade agreements, as well as suspending Israel’s membership in international forums such as UN bodies, Eurovision, the Olympics, and FIFA. The broader objectives of this three-pronged economic campaign are to pressure Israel to end its occupation of Arab lands and dismantle the wall that currently fragments it, to recognize the fundamental rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, therein ending the conditions of apartheid, and to honor the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

The BDS committee also encourages supporters to reject organizations like Standing Together, which normalize the Israeli state and flatten the conflict to inter-group hatred. Moreover, in 2024, a broad coalition of cultural workers in Berlin announced a call to Strike Germany, which encourages international artists, academics, and cultural workers to withhold their labor from German state-funded organizations and institutions because of their complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and German censorship of legitimate criticism of Israel. The US campaign for Palestinian rights has prepared an action toolkit for helping to end the genocide, and collectives like Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) organize in cities across the United States and have released a statement of solidarity that can be signed.

Our collective consumption habits are an issue with crucial implications for queer people and feminists alike. Where we choose to spend money and invest our labor has a major impact on the international apparatus that sustains Israel and enables it to occupy and disenfranchise Palestinians. As people of principle and conscience, it is our responsibility to wholeheartedly join the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and of all people strangled under the boot of empire.

Los Angeles Gay Bar The Abbey Faces an Overdue Reckoning

Feature image by FG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images via Getty Images

This piece contains frequent reference to sexual assault.

I went to The Abbey for the first time in early 2019, a couple months after moving to Los Angeles.

New to the city and looking for queer community — and, let’s be honest, some post-breakup partying — I typed in lesbian bar on Yelp. I followed a mostly empty page advertising “Girl Bar” that ended up just being a defunct offshoot of The Abbey. Already there, I got a drink and did my best to talk to the few queer women amidst the crowd of cis gay men and straight people.

During my first year in LA, this was always the role The Abbey played. Nowhere else to go? Well, fine, let’s go to The Abbey. There are better gay bars on that very block, but with its size, lack of cover charge, and mix of genders — even if many were straight — it was a natural place for desperate queer women with limited options to end up.

But, from the beginning, I’d heard the rumors.

Spoken about with a regretful shrug, like the bar was a predatory actor still winning awards, people passed along warnings about The Abbey. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been drugged.

Open secrets — even ones that reference multiple lawsuits — are only so effective. That’s why it’s both upsetting and a relief to read the recent report on these incidents by Kate Sosin and Steven Blum for The 19th.

“More than 70 people interviewed by The 19th over the course of three years reported going to The Abbey… and experiencing disorientation to varying degrees or losing consciousness,” they write.

The piece goes on to highlight several of these incidents including Yvette Lopez who sued The Abbey in 2013, claiming she was drugged by an employee and then sexually assaulted, and Haely White, an actor and comedian who was sued by The Abbey after posting on Instagram in 2021 about being drugged. (Lopez settled; White is still fighting, “buried in legal fees.”)

It’s notable that most of the women who were drugged at The Abbey are queer. Since many of these incidents took place, bars like The Ruby Fruit and Honey’s have opened, but for years Los Angeles was completely devoid of lesbian bars. There are more dire consequences than boring nights when a lack of spaces exist for queer women and trans people.

This is emphasized by the fact that White was outed by The Abbey when they released a message exchange of White explaining she was on a date with a woman, even though she’s married to a man. “I was framed as a liar,” White said. The truth was her husband knew about the date — they weren’t monogamous even if she wasn’t ready to come out publicly.

Lopez also faced skepticism about her queerness — this time from detectives. She eventually dropped her case, because it was retraumatizing with victim blaming and detectives questioning whether she was, in fact, a lesbian.

Incidents such as these are allowed to continue for so many years, because there is an incentive not to report. Many of the individuals who spoke to the police or even just to management at The Abbey were dismissed or worse. Even White has faced emotional and financial consequences just for posting on Instagram.

In response to one incident when a woman did not report, the piece states: The Abbey said it had no record of this incident and went on to say that “anyone who believes they are a victim of a crime should report it to the police.”

It’s astounding to see this requirement of law enforcement stated by a gay bar. There’s an immense ignorance to queer history and queer present in this demand. I’m not surprised, but I am sick to witness this politic stated so brazenly.

The last time I went to The Abbey, I didn’t go inside. It was June 2020, the day of West Hollywood Pride, and I was at a protest. I asked if I could use their bathroom and was informed only patrons having brunch were allowed to use their facilities. The peak of a pandemic, amidst protests against police brutality, and they wouldn’t let a trans woman take a piss.

I hope this excellent reporting and the brave women who have come forward result in The Abbey experiencing a long overdue reckoning. I also hope there continue to be more spaces available for queer and trans people where we can dance and get drunk and do drugs while also feeling a greater amount of safety and care.

It’s impossible to create a completely safe space, but The Abbey is, at best, complicit and, at worst, entirely responsible for over a decade of harm.

How Bluestockings Bookstore Is Fighting To Keep Serving Houseless, LGBTQ, and Other Marginalized Communities

all photos courtesy of Bluestockings Cooperative

To have a bookstore is to have the opportunity to create magic. It’s the opportunity to give people the words and stories they need. At their best, bookstores are built around the values of listening, being listening to, care, being cared for, and community. Because to write, read, and share stories is to reach towards others, to reach something beyond yourself. To me, that’s about as close to magic as you can get.

When I think of bookstores which best embody that magic, NYC’s Bluestockings Cooperative comes to mind. The space is queer, trans, and worker-owned, meaning they work from a cooperative model, following the guiding principles and wisdom of Black communist and leftist organizing in Harlem as well as the Borinquen organizations of Loisaida. Instead of having bosses or managers, each employee is a worker as well as a partial owner within the cooperative.

Together, these worker-owners are continuing Bluestockings’ longstanding mission grounded in the principles of abolition feminism, solidarity, and transformative justice practices. Their mission operates in three parts: 1. distributing literature and resources about oppression, intersectionality, community organizing, and activism by sharing the stories of marginalized people, 2. maintaining a space in New York City for dialogue, education, and reflection where all people are respected, and 3. building connections, knowledge, and skills in their communities.

You’ll see this mission reflected directly in the space and its practices. Masks are required and available for those who didn’t bring their own. As long as people are wearing a mask and abiding by Bluestockings Safer Space Policy, they can spend as much time as they want in Bluestockings sitting, browsing, and using the wifi without having to make any kind of purchase. One of the many toxic byproducts of late-stage capitalism is that warm, safe, free, indoor spaces where people simply exist with access to wifi and restrooms are becoming more and more difficult to find. This is especially true in New York City, as Mayor Eric Adams recently cut millions from New York City’s library budget forcing them to close on Sundays.

The shelves are full of books centering queer voices, intersectional feminist voices, abolitionist voices, and voices calling for liberation from colonialism. Behind the main counter there’s a “free store” maintained through a donation system with shelf-stable food, hygiene products, and first aid supplies. Through a government program, Bluestockings is also able to provide Plan B. All anyone needs to do to access these resources is ask. According to worker-owner Al (they/them) who is responsible for building out their free store, “I’ve ordered and disturbed 2,496 Plan B doses to date. We take surveys on our free store and on average we service 75-100 community members who utilize the snacks and protein drinks as well as our sanitary products and hand warmers.”

In addition to its inventory choices and free store, Bluestockings practices care towards its community by providing free Narcan training and fentanyl test strips. Given that fentanyl (a powerful opioid up to 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin) cannot be detected by sight, taste, smell, or touch, fentanyl test strips can be life-saving. Naloxone (the brand name version of Narcan) is a medication that blocks opioids in the brain for 30-90 minutes and can reverse opioid overdoses. Bluestockings conducts free Narcan training sessions every Saturday afternoon. If people aren’t able to make it to those trainings, they can get a 15 minute individual training from any of the worker-owners (all of whom are certified) or schedule a larger group training. The Narcan kits and fentanyl test strips Bluestockings gives out come from an OOPP (Opioid Overdose Prevention Program) registered with the New York State Department of Health. Bluestockings has been able to give 1,050 Naloxone kits and at least 4,000 fentanyl test strips since November 2023.

I wish this were just a piece on how a longstanding queer bookstore and refuge is finding ways to continue practicing care and love for their community. Unfortunately, this is also a story of gentrification and white supremacist capitalism not caring about what’s right and medically safe.

Last winter, Bluestockings began receiving threats and complaints from neighbors about the unhoused people on the block, pressuring them to stop their community care programs (something they have absolutely no intention of doing). When asked to describe their interactions with the surrounding neighborhood, Al said, “The neighbors were violent toward us with slurs, hammers, and bb guns. We fought back with education, facts, and community support. What we do for our community is part of our mission statement. We show up. I didn’t know how invested I would be in the lives of our community or how they would impact me. That’s my Bluestockings highlight.”

Despite Bluestockings’ efforts to educate the surrounding neighborhood, they’ve mostly been met with shut doors, ignorance, and additional harassment when they stated their intentions of continuing their programming. Once neighbors realized they weren’t going to scare Bluestockings out of their values, they took it to the next level.

In May, a petition titled “Save Suffolk St.” began to circulate with the intention of getting City Council member Christopher Marte to assess Bluestockings’ ability to operate harm reduction programs. The petition reads: “While we support all that Bluestockings does for the LGBTQIA+ community, they are not equipped to service harm reduction and thus their unprofessional management has sadly brought illegal activity that has made our street unsafe.”

Not only is this petition feeding into the harmful belief that unhoused people are scary and unsafe to be around, it’s also just factually inaccurate to what Bluestockings does. Bluestockings is not operating as a facility providing comprehensive harm reduction services or a needle exchange program (though they do point people to local organizations who are able to offer those services). All they are doing is providing a safe place for people to sit down, access to kits, and information on additional resources.

The pressure from the neighborhood soon dominoed into action from their landlord, who this past October issued a 15-day notice to cure (the first step to a formal eviction process). Their violation was listed as, “unauthorized use of the premises as a medical facility” (again, untrue) and goes to state their practice of “permitting homeless individuals to use the basement restroom” and handing out food are creating a “hazardous condition” for residential tenants. These violation claims are not backed by any factual violations of the conduction of the OOPP Bluestockings is registered with. Nothing about these services is illegal or against the terms of their lease which allows Bluestockings to operate as a “bookstore/café/community center.”

Thankfully, Bluestockings was able to retain a pro bono lawyer who has assisted them in extending the window to cure during ongoing negotiations with their landlord’s lawyer. Ultimately, the goal of Bluestockings is to settle the situation outside of court and peacefully continue their community care programs. However, if they are not able to reach an agreement outside of court, they may pursue a Yellowstone injunction. This would put a pause on the eviction process while a judge evaluates the validity of the lease violations.

Until then, Bluestockings worker-owners continue to face verbal and physical harassment as they maintain their programs and policies. Worker-owners see the effect of their actions and their care reflected back to them every day. People come in and send messages letting Bluestockings know their programming helped them get through tough times, find housing, and/or get into recovery. When asked to share a bright Bluestockings moment, worker-owners told me about a local GSA who did a fundraiser at Bluestockings because they felt so welcomed and seen at the bookstore. Bluestockings’ programming with students gives those students a window into building queer community and living a full life as a queer professional. Sometimes, Bluestockings is the first place to provide them with that window. The value of this space where people can access necessary resources, experience safety and belonging, and exist in solidarity cannot be overstated.

The story of Bluestockings is not one which can be told in isolation from the racist, homophobic, transphobic book bans targeting schools and libraries all across the country. The worker-owners at Bluestockings are part of the larger tapestry of bookstore workers, librarians, and teachers continuing the fight to give everyone access to books and literary spaces. Ongoing community action and support is an essential part of making sure they aren’t fighting alone.

Some things you can do:

• Check out Daven McQueenss piece which breaks down how you can fight back against book bans.
• Support and share information about those working to distribute books to people who need them, like the Queer Liberation Library, which has hundreds of free queer narratives for those who may not be able access those titles physically and Firestorm Books, who are raising money to redistribute the 22,500 books removed from the Duval County School Systems to the children and young people of Florida. If you have another organization you love, be sure to drop it in the comments section!
• Get a library card and request the titles you’d like to see there. Not only does this help support authors and libraries, it also ensures books will be there waiting for people who need them. Added bonus: It’s really hot to have a library card!
• If you’re looking to support Bluestockings specifically and you’re affiliated with an organization purchasing books, please consider placing your bulk orders from Bluestockings Cooperative and using them as your official book supplier. You can also check out their membership program, which helps them pay rent and keep the space public and open to all. If you’re in New York, be sure to stop by and get a free Narcan training.

This Bookstore Is Giving Banned Books Back to the Florida Community They Were Removed From

When radical anarchist bookstore Firestorm Books in Asheville, North Carolina was entrusted with 22,500 books removed from the Duval County Public Schools system in Florida, they knew what they had to do: redistribute them back to the community they came from.

The books, which feature diverse characters and stories centering marginalized identities, were removed as a result of the DeSantis-backed push for widespread censorship and book bans. As a result, over 47 titles were flagged and expelled from the district, and over half of those centered LGBTQ+ characters or history. In addition to queer and trans titles, many of these books candidly explored racism, colonialism, and activism/organizing in accessible ways for kids.

According to Firestorm Books, in November 2022, a contractor tasked with the disposal of the more than 20,000 books removed by this ban contacted the bookstore and offered to ship them for free if they had a place to store them. If they couldn’t take them, the books were set to be destroyed.

Yes, that’s right. In case you think “book bans” are somehow a softer policy to “book burning,” make no mistake. Just because you don’t see the flames doesn’t mean there’s no fire. Book bans are every bit as fascist and violent as the historical practice of book burning. And book bans can lead to more hate and violence, normalizing the erasure of queer and trans life. Banning LGBTQ books, for example, further enables homophobic and transphobic hate groups to terrorize children at drag story hours.

But Firestorm, thankfully, took the books. And now they’re giving them back. Through a new project called Banned Books Back!, Firestorm plans to redistribute the confiscated books back to youth in Florida for free. Kids and their allies can fill out an encrypted form to request either picture books for ages 4-8 or chapter books for ages 8-12. Five to six books will be sent per ask, so each kid will receive a range of LGBTQ+ books, and the packages will also include zines and stickers, including one of a possum reading a book that reads TRASH FACISM NOT BOOKS.

The plans are to ship at least 2,000 packages and a total of 10,000 books directly to the youth who need them. The first phase focuses on Florida, but there are plans to open it up to more states facing rampant book banning (as a reminder: book bans happen in all regions). This is, of course, an enormous task, and Firestorm is currently raising $30,000 to cover the costs of the project, most of which will be used for shipping. They still have a long way to go to meet this goal.

The collective behind Firestorm knows this is just one small way to fight book bans. The real fight is much bigger.

“We understand book bans as a symptom of authoritarian power, so it isn’t effective to focus solely on access to individual titles without addressing the underlying power relations,” the collective tells me. “Yes, we want kids in Florida to have these 22,500 books, but we also want to live in a world where there aren’t powerful adults imposing their worldviews through bans, punishment, and policing.”

Proponents of book bans push the false narrative that it’s about protecting children. But we all know they’re solely about protecting a dangerous status quo that does not include all children and in fact hurts a lot of kids and teens. Books don’t make kids unsafe. Guns do. Groups like Moms for Liberty do.

Banned Books Back! was conceived as a project within the overall struggle against fascism, “because we know that these titles were removed from schools by the same insurgent Far Right movement that’s seeking to crush liberatory possibility and erase us from public life,” the collective asserts. Indeed, in November 2023, I wrote about the direct connections between school-based restrictions like sports bans, rules about pronouns, and book bans as part of a larger project to push LGBTQ people out of the public sphere and further into the margins.

According to the Firestorm collective, effective resistance requires organizing our communities against white supremacy, patriarchy, and adult supremacy. That last one is crucial in my opinion since it’s so under-talked about. Current policies in Florida and beyond seek to restrict and control the lives of children in ways that do not actually serve them. Children are targeted specifically because they’re easy targets for authoritarianism and far-right conservatism. The Firestorm collective urges for organizing against all these threats simultaneously. “Yes, that includes handing out free books, but it also includes self-organizing access to abortion services and hormones, defending drag shows, bailing neighbors out of jail, and blocking the expansion of police power,” the collective says.

Banned Books Back! builds on a history of specifically queer activism. The project’s name is a nod to Bash Back!, the late aughts queer and trans liberation movement that started in Chicago and led to the formation of chapters throughout the country committed to political disruption. Bash Back! was an anarchist movement that critiqued the mainstream gay rights movement for prioritizing heteronormative assimilation. Bash Back! imagined more, imagined life where queer and trans people could be truly liberated.

“Like Bash Back!, we believe that the stakes are existential — the end game of the Far Right isn’t to shield their children from our stories, it’s to fully erase us as queer and trans people, along with anyone who doesn’t fit into a white supremacist, Christo-fascist world,” the Firestorm collective says. “And while many adults are still minimizing this as ‘polarized’ discourse, young people are experiencing the real world harms and consequences. We’re working to return these books as an act of solidarity with the kids from whom they were taken; and in doing so, hope to connect with, and contribute to, a broader antifascist struggle.”

Firestorm Books proves bookstores can be a crucial part of this fight. As public spaces with an emphasis on serving the communities they’re in, libraries have long been an important space for providing access to resources, education, and more, but libraries are also beholden to city and state laws, making them susceptible to policies like book bans. We’re seeing some creative, mutual aid-driven efforts and spaces pop up to fill some of these gaps, such as The Rolling Library in NYC, which I’ve written before. Through Banned Books Back!, Firestorm provides another model for what resource redistribution can look like.

In addition to Banned Books Back!, Firestorm regularly collects donated books to give to Asheville Prison Books and distributes books for free in the community with a focus on young readers. The collective tells me they’re passionate about solidarity, direct action, and experimentation. “Banned Books Back! gives us space for all three, and draws on our familiarity with the short-term infrastructural patterns used by mutual aid disaster relief organizers,” the collective says.

If you’re outside of Florida and you’ve been wondering how you can help with what’s happening down here — particularly when it comes to queer and trans youth — consider giving to Banned Books Back! Turn your outrage into action.

“It’s impossible for us to imagine the end of book bans without imagining the end of capitalism and the state,” the Firestorm collective says. “Without systemic change, we’ll continue to have a publishing industry that engages in the ‘soft censorship’ of deciding whose stories are worth telling, and we’ll continue to have millions of people in cages where book access is subject to extreme restrictions.”

The Most Important Movie of the Year Is a Documentary From 1976

Best Films of 2023 lists have been filled with art that grapples with the genocidal actions of powerful men. Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest attempt — with various degrees of success — to display the mundanity of large-scale violence. From the atomic bombs to the assassinations of Osage people to concentration camps, the killing is meticulously planned. And yet each film shows how little the perpetrators of this violence reckon with their actions — at least until it’s already been done.

Unfortunately, these works of history remain relevant. The same justifications of greed and fear have motivated Israel’s latest U.S.-backed escalation of violence against Palestinians. Meanwhile, here in the States our cruel immigration policies and prison system steal millions of lives. Few people carrying out these modern atrocities connect their actions with the actions of the past. People take what they want from history and rarely see themselves in the villains.

There is an undeniable power to Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest, but there’s also a limit to their depth. What do they reveal about the evils of men? They are artful, emotional documentation, and there is value in that. But the only film I saw this year that really confronted the perpetrators of this kind of violence was a four and a half hour documentary from 1976, Marcel Ophuls’ The Memory of Justice.

Unlike Ophuls’ more famous Holocaust documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, The Memory of Justice does not allow its continued relevance to remain subtext. It’s one thing to say we must study history so as not to repeat it — it’s another to place past and present side-by-side. In The Memory of Justice, Ophuls focuses on the Nuremberg trials and the continued reckoning within Germany. But he wisely acknowledges there is nothing uniquely evil about the Nazi regime. The film draws parallels between the Holocaust and the more recent horrors of the French occupation of Algeria and the American occupation of Vietnam.

The Nazis who Ophuls interviewed use the same excuses and justifications that people use today. One Nazi refuses to admit he was ever antisemitic. Another Nazi understates the suffering at the concentration camps because “at a camp you can walk around when you like and where you like.” Other Nazis claim to not have known the scope of the violence. Even Albert Speer who notably admitted responsibility and spent his life supposedly atoning is unwilling to admit the entirety of his role. His narrative of himself as the good Nazi, the apologetic Nazi, is just as self-serving as the Nazis who deny their guilt.

The film is very explicit about the atrocities of the Holocaust. It also questions why the Nuremberg trials focused on the German actions alone. What about the bombing of Dresden? What about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Only the losers of war are forced to answer for their crimes against humanity.

Calling political opponents Nazis is seen as cheap and dramatic. But this film highlights the validity of the comparison. The United States and France have carried out many holocausts, and have been led by people who acted like the Nazis. To truly reckon with the Holocaust is to remove the evil from its pedestal and recognize it as common.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers and revealed the extent of the U.S. evils in Vietnam, makes one of the film’s most frightening observations. He notes that within the Pentagon Papers there is no debate about ethics or legality, only practicality and effectiveness. Amorality is more frightening than immorality.

Showing evil on-screen — in narrative or documentary form — is not enough to stop it. But the clearest work, the most impactful work, uses history to confront the violence of today. We need more media like The Memory of Justice that excavates the past without allowing people to dismiss or misinterpret its relevance.

“No more genocide in my name,” a woman sings during a protest at Kent State. Watching this, my stomach dropped. I’ve heard that said so many times over the past few months as American Jews plead with our politicians to stop funding Israel’s violence. It’s easy to feel despair at this endless cycle. But there’s also inspiration to be found in the parallel history of resistance.

The Memory of Justice makes it clear that the greatest perpetrators of violence will never acknowledge their villainy. But we can acknowledge it for them. We can refuse the easy narratives of the powerful and fight for a world where human life — all human life — is valued. We can fight for a world of true justice.

The Memory of Justice is not currently available to stream.

“Queer People Are No Friends to Israeli Apartheid”: LGBTQ+ Artists Sign Open Letter for Palestine

feature image photo by SAJJAD HUSSAIN / Contributor via Getty Images

Over 240 LGBTQ+ artists across arts and culture industries have signed an open letter, as Them initially reported, calling for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine and condemning Israel for the ongoing genocide as well as the pinkwashing propaganda campaigns that have been used to bolster oppression of Palestinians. The letter also crucially includes a commitment to boycotting Israel. As the letter puts it:

Today, we demonstrate our solidarity with Palestinians by pledging not to perform or participate in public events in Israel until Palestinians are free. We believe that showing our work in Israel would dishonor the radical histories of queer activism and self-expression, which stand opposed to violent systems like apartheid and military occupation. Palestinians remind us that none of us are free until we are all free. That “queer liberation is fundamentally tied to the dreams of Palestinian liberation: self-determination, dignity, and the end of all systems of oppression.” We will continue to speak out for Palestine, to educate ourselves, and to uplift Palestinian voices.

Open letters and statements of course can be meaningful on their own, but it’s the ones that have commitments to action — such as the stated boycott of events in Israel in this Queer Artists for Palestine letter — that carry the most weight. In history, we saw how the cultural and academic boycott of South Africa moved the needle on ending apartheid. A cultural boycott is similarly an arm of the BDS movement. “Israel celebrates visits by international artists as a sign of support for its policies,” as the BDS website explains.

Among the signatories are Indya Moore and Kehlani, who have been seen at many protests and actions over the past couple months. Moore was arrested last month as part of a Jewish Voice for Peace sit-in at Grand Central station in New York City alongside Cecilia Gentili, who is also a signatory.

The letter comes from artists across the music, performance, film/television, and literature industries. All three members of the band MUNA and all three members of boygenius also signed on along with several past cast members of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Authors and poets include Michelle Tea, Fariha Róisín, Zeba Blay, and more.

Fatimah Asghar, whose brilliant essay on the links between queer liberation and Palestinian liberation was republished today on Autostraddle, is also a signatory. I recommend reading their essay in full and holding it in mind when reading through the open letter and its list of names, because it really gets to the heart of why a specifically queer call to solidarity and action is not only necessary but a part of queerness itself. As Asghar puts it: “It is our duty as queer people to show up, and to show what being queer really means.”

Being queer means standing against oppression, against the dehumanization of a people, and certainly against genocide.

Florida Teachers Fight Anti-LGBTQ Policies As the State Punishes Schools That Dare To Resist

feature image photo by Anadolu / Contributor via Getty Images

I strongly believe that any media outlets frequently covering the anti-LGBTQ policies running rampant across the U.S. must also couple that coverage with stories about resistance to those efforts. Resistance is happening in myriad ways, both in more systemic maneuvers such as utilizing the courts to challenge policies as well as in more community-driven approaches to direct action and protest. Yesterday, three teachers went the former path by filing a lawsuit against the state of Florida over its law which bans public school teachers from sharing preferred titles or pronouns with students.

The group of teachers, represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, includes AV Vary, the nonbinary teacher at statewide online public school Florida Virtual School who was fired last month for using the honorific Mx. The complaint asserts that the pronouns law discriminates against transgender and nonbinary school employees and violates their constitutional rights

This move builds on some efforts already made by Florida teachers in response to the Ron DeSantis-led attacks on LGBTQ people, which has targeted education in particular. Teachers are losing jobs throughout the state as a direct result of these policies. While the conditions that have made this lawsuit necessary and urgent are disheartening and I wish these teachers didn’t have to fight for their right to be themselves in the workplace, there is a small bit of hope in the fact that some teachers are pushing back rather than getting out. There’s a massive teacher shortage in the state right now, and while I don’t fault anyone for leaving to find work in safer, more supportive states, it’s so important that there are some people staying and fighting the policies. The fact of the matter is not everyone can leave. While I understand the impulse behind campaigns outside of Florida to welcome teachers considering leaving, what teachers need in this state is actually more material support, more people willing to take a stand against these policies who are here and committed to staying here.

It’s not just teachers and school employees who are trying to fight these anti-LGBTQ policies; it’s the students, too. When the staff at a Florida high school ignored the state’s trans sports ban, hundreds of students walked out in support of the staff and the trans girl who was allowed by them to play on the girls’ volleyball team. And one walkout wasn’t enough; students did so twice. Despite these brave acts of solidarity on the part of the students, the Florida High School Athletic Association has hit the high school with a massive fine in what is the first instance of a school being penalized for not following the new state guidelines but sadly will likely not be the last. It sets a scary precedent and is likely intended to quell further resistance, which means it’s more important than ever to keep pushing back, to not give in to fear. The more schools that flout the rules, the more difficult they will become to enforce.

And unfortunately we can’t only think of these as problems facing public schools. They’re touching the entire education system here. Earlier this year, the state expanded its private school voucher program, which means more state funds are being funneled toward private schools, so curriculum and sports restrictions on schools that receive state funding can be enforced beyond public schools. We’ve also already seen how the voucher program actively harms LGBTQ students by allowing private schools that explicitly forbid queer and trans students to still receive state funding. And voucher programs, despite what proponents claim, do not actually help lower income students. So the impact of anti-LGBTQ education policies in the state are huge; LGBTQ students and educators face the possibility of punishment and reprimand for violating these state-enforced regulations in public and private schools, and pushback will have to come from both sectors.

All of DeSantis’ efforts to silence and oppressively legislate students and educators in the state are connected and should be confronted simultaneously. As he’s busy trying to get pro-Palestine groups on campuses shut down, we’re seeing ripple effects throughout the education system: A math tutor at an elite South Florida private school was fired due to posts on her personal social media account in support of Palestine, and then her kid was expelled from the school, too.

If you live outside of Florida, you might be wondering how this impacts you. Well, first of all, DeSantis’ policies have already started seeping into other states. Second of all, another Trump presidency could mean an expansion of a lot of these policies at the federal level. Third, we should all care about policies that impact LGBTQ people outside of our personal communities.

I spoke with Autostraddle writer and Florida educator Stef Rubino while writing this story, and they had some powerful words to share:

“People look at Florida and they think this problem will stay contained here. We’re seeing everything from attacks on curriculum to attacks on people’s identities to attacks on people speaking out against the genocide in Palestine here, but it’s spreading and will continue if we don’t change the way we’re fighting back against these injustices. Legislation and lawsuits can’t be the end of it. We have to stand up and do something in our everyday lives as well. And we need to get organized. Those of us on the left have very little chance of succeeding in the battle against these oppressive forces if we don’t actually come up with material strategies to make sure these things stop happening.”

Susan Sarandon, Melissa Barrera, and the Troubling Pattern of Punishment for Advocating for Palestine

feature image photo of Susan Sarandon by John Nacion / Contributor via Getty Images; photo of Melissa Barrera by Michael Buckner / Contributor via Getty Images

We’re continuing to see people punished for speaking out against Israel, genocide, and the mass killings of Palestinian civilians. Today,The Hollywood Reporter reported that bisexual actress Susan Sarandon was dropped by her talent agency, United Talent Agency (UTA), for speaking at a pro-Palestine protest.

At a rally in New York City’s Union Square on November 17, Sarandon gave a speech in which she empathized with Jewish Americans’ fears of the rise of antisemitism while also noting that this is how Muslims in America feel all the time. This is not the first time Sarandon has spoken up for social justice. She’s been critical of cops in the past, stands with trans people, and was critical of Hillary Clinton’s murky record on LGBTQ rights. She has been antiwar for over two decades.

It’s unclear where exactly UTA draws the line when it comes to its clients’ politics. The talent agency represents a wide swath of clients across the ideological spectrum, including people who have spoken out in support of Palestine in various capacities. They also rep vocal Zionists, including stars like Mayim Bialik as well as Sarah Silverman, who said on her podcast in 2021 that she supports Zionism and who made a now-deleted post on Instagram attempting to justify Israel’s decision to cut off electricity and water in Gaza.

just 3 weeks ago, sarah silverman called for israel to turn off water and electricity in gaza while it continued to be bombed and blamed her hateful post on weed. if you work at the daily show — take a stand. do not work with this woman. now is the time to make a moral choice https://t.co/Zr9pEdKU1V

— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) November 7, 2023

Sarandon has since offered an apology on Instagram, apologizing for the specific wording she used while reiterating what her real meaning was:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Susan Sarandon (@susansarandon)

So far, there has been no update as to her representation.

In addition to Sarandon being dropped by UTA, news also broke that Spyglass had quietly fired Melissa Barrera from the next Scream movie for her pro-Palestine social media posts. Barrera has been vocal in her naming of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as a genocide and in her opposition to Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people. A Variety report on talent agency shakeups over employees taking pro-Palestine stands attempts to suggest Barrera played into an antisemitic trope about media control, but that really takes her post about media bias and social media algorithms completely out of context. Even if Variety is trying to say it’s what sources said about Barrera’s posts, there should at least be an addendum that includes the full text of Barrera’s post. The insinuation that Barrera is spreading an antisemitic trope is an absurd reach and one that conflates being critical of Israel with antisemitism.

the slashfilm article says melissa barrera was fired from scream 7 for leaning into "an antisemitic trope that jews control the media" and i have to assume it's referring to this instagram story. this is quite blatantly misconstruing what she said. pic.twitter.com/BHXNzqW64b

— jeremy (@jeremylovesyall) November 21, 2023

That same Variety report details the forced resignation of top Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Maha Dakhil, who came under fire for posting about witnessing genocide on her Instagram story. Dakhil was seemingly asked to issue a public apology and step out of her role on the agency’s internal board, but thanks in part to advocacy by her client Tom Cruise, was allowed to remain at CAA as an agent.

The report also notes some agents at UTA have apparently called for writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to be dropped for being a signatory on the open letter from participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature calling on “the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine.” Even though the agency decided to drop Sarandon, Coates is still represented there for now.

https://twitter.com/MariahRoseFaith/status/1727088213167337673

In anonymous accounts, a Middle Eastern actor told Vulture recently that what happened to Dakhil “scared the shit out of us.” The actor goes on to say: “I’m very careful not to use words like genocide, occupation, colonialism, open-air prisons — despite believing they do accurately describe what’s happening in Gaza.”

Journalists are being fired or forced to resign for speaking out against genocide. Sarandon was dropped for making statements that align with what her politics have been all along.

Meanwhile, the media bias Melissa Barrera was actually talking about in her post that apparently others have decided to erroneously label “antisemitic” is very much alive, and shadowbanning of pro-Palestine content has forced a lot of Instagram users to employ “algospeak.” Even Variety‘s biased reporting on Barrera’s posts is evidence of that exact media partiality she’s openly criticizing!

I’m curious to see if there will be ripple effects to Spyglass’ decision and if more actors will speak up or choose silence. Queer singer Kehlani has been bold in her demand for more celebrities to speak up. Sarandon, Barrera, and Barrera’s Scream co-star Jenna Ortega all signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire, which shouldn’t be considered controversial. Ortega has also posted on her own social media account in support of Palestine.

News of Ortega’s departure from Scream VII dropped one day after the Barrera news broke, but Variety is reporting it has nothing to do with the Barrera decision but rather her filming schedule for the upcoming season of Wednesday. The timing is…odd. And if Ortega’s participation was in question well before Barrera’s firing — the narrative the trades are going with — it seems like it would have been announced before now. I’m interested to see if Ortega speaks to the decision at any point.

In an official statement about Barrera’s firing, Spyglass said:

“Spyglass’ stance is unequivocally clear: We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”

There are no specific references in the statement to posts made by Barrera. Also, the statement reads as tacit genocide denial. Scream VII‘s director Christopher Landon also made a “statement” on Twitter that has since been deleted but read, vaguely: “Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make.”

To make matters even murkier, a new Hollywood Reporter story has come out citing sources who say the firing was not made in response to that specific social media post about shadowbanning but rather came a full month before the news broke, when Barrera began posting in solidarity with Palestine. “Before her firing, sources say her deal to return as Sam Carpenter, the lead character she introduced in 2022’s Scream, had been finalized,” THR notes. The same story claims Ortega’s deal had not been in place and that her departure had to do with salary negotiations rather than the original story of scheduling conflicts. The timing of the Ortega announcement, however, still seems odd.

Barrera has continued amplifying reports and images about the violence in Gaza since news of her firing broke and has yet to shift the focus to herself, which is definitely the right way to show solidarity, especially as a celebrity. In fact, 1,300 actors have now signed an open letter accusing various institutions of censoring and punishing artists who have spoken in support of Palestine, and while the letter lists Barrera’s firing as an example, I haven’t seen Barrera post about the letter herself, as she continues to center the genocide rather than Hollywood.

Over half a century after the Hollywood Blacklist torpedoed the careers of actors and other creatives for any association with the Community Party, we’re now seeing people in the film and television industry being punished for criticizing Israel and standing in solidarity with Palestine.

This story was originally published on November 21, 2023 and has been updated.

Julianna Margulies Sure As Hell Has No Business Speaking for LGBTQ People

Noted Good Wife and zealous Zionist Julianna Margulies recently appeared on “The Back Room with Andy Ostroy,” a podcast in which a man speaks to famous people about stuff, and oh boy did Julianna Marguiles have some stuff to say. Most curious to all of us here at this website, she at one point introduced her right to speak about her disdain for anti-Zionism in LGBTQ+ communities like so: “As someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show, I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew.” First of all, no she isn’t. Second of all — why is she speaking on behalf of lesbian Jewish journalists when the option existed and continues to exist for her to not speak at all?

As an actual lesbian Jewish journalist, listening to her share her bigoted ideas on this 50-minute podcast was excruciating. Julianna displays appalling racism and manages to endorse every single illogical and frustrating point made on behalf of these identities in recent months by alleged allies and community members, after opening the dialogue with: “I hate religion by the way, I think it’s fucked up the entire world, so I’m not a religious person.”

An initial attempt to discuss her character on The Morning Show quickly derails into something else altogether, as she recalls wishing she’d advocated for her character to wear a Star of David necklace rather than a cross. (This is a good point, we need more queer Jewish representation on television, but not on Julianna’s neck, thank you.) She then proposes the following storyline for Season Four:

“I would love in season four for Laura Peterson to go to Columbia and teach a class to the LGBTQ filmmakers there, or journalists, and teach a class and give them an earful about Hamas. That’s what I would love.”

It’s difficult to imagine anything worse than The Morning Show’s actual Season Three lesbian storylines, but Margulies dares to dream! She’s very upset at the LGBTQ+ community, who she so valiantly represented on television through her character Laura Peterson (a lady with a big house in Montana who dumps her hot girlfriend for, essentially, not calling the cops). Margulies continues:

“It’s those kids who are spewing this antisemitic hate, that have no idea if they stepped foot in an Islamic country — these people who want us to call them they/them, or whatever they want us to call them, which I have respectfully made a point of doing — it’s those people that will be the first people beheaded and their heads played with like a soccer ball. And that’s who they’re supporting? Terrorists who don’t want women to have their rights? LGBTQ people get executed.”

Kayla has written recently about what’s wrong with that way of thinking, and it’s safe to say any allegedly “respectful” utilization of they/them pronouns has been negated by this contextualization, and then she plows forward with an inaccurate anecdote about a “No Jews Allowed” sign at a screening hosted by a “Black lesbian group” at Columbia (it was actually a QPOC-lead group for queer women and non-binary people, and there were no “No Jews Allowed” signs), in which she shows her ass once again with repulsive, unabashed racism:

“Because I wanna say to them, ‘You f—ing idiots. You don’t exist. You’re even lower than the Jews. A. You’re Black, and B. You’re gay and you’re turning your back against the people who support you?’ Because Jews, they rally around everybody.”

The host and Juliana pontificate extensively about why it is that young people “endorse Hamas.” This is a consistent error throughout Juliana’s discourse — 1) Conflating Jews with Zionists and 2) conflating Palestinians with Hamas.

She expresses disdain for people who are tearing down signs for hostages kidnapped by Hamas, which is a valid action to feel disdain towards. But everything else she says on this podcast is completely bonkers. Her and Andy assert, with unearned confidence, that the U.S. would never stand for Black people to be treated how Jews are being treated right now (this is very very objectively false) and that people on a college campus would be persecuted for using the wrong pronouns but applauded for hating Jews.

This is a full hour of two grown adults with full access to the internet and the library asking each other “why do the kids support Hamas?” and answering it, over and over, with “because they hate Jews.”

Here’s a better question: Why do the kids support the people of Palestine?
Here’s a better answer: Because they hate genocide.

Look, Juliana saw a documentary. She thinks it’s okay for IDF to bomb hospitals because Hamas is operating out of hospitals. (Although, as someone who played a nurse on television, maybe she is qualified to speak on behalf of hospitals.) Here’s the thing: it’s never okay to bomb hospitals. Literally never! It is literally never okay to kill innocent civilians. Nothing that has ever happened to anyone, including everything that has ever happened to us the Jewish people, makes that okay. Despite centuries of oppression and expulsion and extermination, despite the Spanish Inquisition and the Russian Pogroms and the Holocaust and the October 7 attack  — literally nothing, absolutely nothing at all, justifies indiscriminately killing of over 15,000 innocent Palestinians and continuing to create endless loops of intergenerational trauma and piling wrongs on wrongs and never getting to a right. It is far more coherent to condemn both Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 and Israel’s occupation and carpet-bombing of Palestine than it is to condemn the former but not the latter. Never again means never again for anyone.

Susan Sarandon was dropped by UTA last week for saying a sentence in a Free Palestine rally that could’ve been interpreted in a variety of ways because someone decided there was in fact only one objective way to hear it, and that way was “anti-semitic rant.” (UTA represents a lot of great people, but they also represent Megan McCain, a handful of Fox News anchors, and didn’t dump Bill O’Reily until after his big sexual harassment settlement was revealed.)

But on this podcast, Julianna Marguiles says objectively bigoted things about Black people, queer people, Palestinian people and Islamic people. She So far, she’s still on the client list at CAA and was given a chance to issue an apology. If she’s feeling persecuted presently I suspect it’s not because she’s Jewish, but because she is saying hateful, bigoted things on a regular basis. USA Today gave her a whole-ass column last week to share her little ideas. Meanwhile, the United States stands firmly with Israel and in 2022, funnelled $3 billion dollars into Israel’s massively powerful military. Actors and journalists are losing their jobs, and artists are losing their funding and jobs and artistic freedom, for supporting Palestine.

Like Amy Schumer, Margulies takes time to present a very mercenary vision of activism:

“The fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says that they’re just ig-ig [word fumbles] -—they just don’t know, or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews. But when you’ve been marginalized so much as a community, the way I feel we have, isn’t that when you step up?”

There’s so much to unpack here. Her repeated insistence that various groups are only advocating for Palestine because they are brainwashed idiots is offensive as fuck, and in this specific case, dangerously racist. She also doesn’t seem to know that Black Jewish people exist? Finally, as perhaps most clearly articulated by the levels of Tzedakah (the Hebrew term for charitable giving that is integral to the Jewish faith), it is best to give without expecting anything in return, not even a “thank you,” not even anybody even knowing you helped at all. If you’re only giving in hopes of getting something in return, you’re better off not doing giving in the first place.

Which brings me to Margulies’ next bit, in which she wants us all to know that she herself did activism and in fact she was right on top of that instagram black square thing! Also, she threw the first brick at Black Lives Matter:

“I’m the first person to march in Black Lives Matter. When that happened to George Floyd I put a black screen on my instagram, like I ran to support my Black brothers and sisters. When lgbtq+ people are being attacked, I run, I made a commercial for same-sex marriages with my husband in 2012.”

She is right that the Jewish people have a long, storied history in social justice communities — in fact, a great deal of anti-semitism in this country is because of Jewish ties to various civil rights movements. In line with that tradition, Jewish Voice For Peace is one of the primary activist organizations supporting the movement for a free Palestine, a movement that has welcomed Jewish supporters. Jewish queer people are turning out to call for a ceasefire and support a free Palestine, not out of ignorance or a lack of education, but its opposite.

We also don’t have to deny that antisemitism is on the rise or stop advocating for Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza in order to put energy towards Palestinian liberation and fight for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Zionism also benefits anti-semites, including historically the American and European leaders who supported anti-semitic policy, refused Jewish immigrants and either participated in or looked away from the Holocaust. Now they can support Israel instead of actually supporting Jewish people, and conveniently enough this approach also provides them with a political ally in the Middle East.

What’s actually shocking is that anyone who can do basic math or understand the tragedy of death, displacement, torture and starvation can look at what’s been happening in Gaza and rather than use their platform to advocate for a ceasefire and an end to apartheid and occupation, to instead use it, as Jullianna does, to complain about the WGA’s failure to immediately issue a statement condemning Hamas, because statements fix everything I guess. Zionism is not reflective of core Jewish values or traditions, and the virulent, unchecked racism we’ve seen from Zionist Jewish celebrities like Julianna makes that even clearer.

Aligning with Zionism doesn’t make Julianna Margulies more closely aligned with Jewish values, and Margulies using her experience playing a lesbian on television as an entry point to saying the most racist batshit stuff ever is disgraceful.

So. In between all of the social media posts about Margulies Big Podcast Adventure, I saw a reel from nonbinary model/activist Rain Dove that I wanted to share here because I think this story is better than anything else I could say about Julianna Margulies.

After being inundated with DMs from followers telling Rain Dove, who’d been working to funnel money towards various humanitarian causes in the region, that they’d be killed if they set foot in Palestine, Dove assembled a team of locals and others and went to Palestine to distribute cash and physical aid to Gazan Palestinians in need. Dove survived, they felt welcome, they met and worked with loads of other LGBTQ+ people, they were shocked by the horrifying conditions in the region. “This propaganda that LGBTQ+ people must not call for humanitarian aid or rights for Palestinian people simply because of conservative values is unethical and wrong,” wrote Dove upon their return. “Every human — EVERY HUMAN deserves the right to food shelter water physical safety and freedom of movement. And I mean EVERY. So don’t get it twisted.”

Cynthia Nixon Joins Hunger Strike for Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza

On Monday morning, a coalition of more than one dozen local elected officials and activists from Jewish Voice for Peace, the Campaign for Palestinian Rights, If Not Now, Dream Defenders, the Adalah Justice Project, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) gathered in front of the White House. The representative group — which included activists, state law makers, and Tony and Emmy award winning actress Cynthia Nixon, an active member of  DSA, former New York gubernatorial candidate — gathered together to announce a five-day hunger strike for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The strikers will continue to gather outside the White House daily between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. until Friday. They include Delaware State Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton, New York Rep. Zohran Mamdani, Oklahoma Rep. Mauree Turner (who is queer), Virginia Rep. Sam Rasoul, and Michigan Rep. Abraham Aiyash. Reps. Zohran Mamdani and Madinah Wilson-Anton are among the half dozen participants who have committed to avoiding food for the entire five days. The rest will fast for less than five days, though each taking daily shifts.

According to reporting from Time, when Delaware lawmaker Winston-Anton was invited by Mamdani to take part in the hunger strike, she started to cry. Though vocal on social media and various protests, she said that she still felt helpless, “I wanted to do something else but I just didn’t know what.” (A sentiment that I believe is shared by so many right now.)

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

When interviewed by The Cut, Nixon shared that “one of the things we’re doing with our hunger strike is calling out to President Biden, who has experienced such devastating personal loss in his own life — though he has been strangely and disturbingly insensitive through the tremendous suffering and killing in Gaza right now. He is known for his empathy. It’s one of his strengths as a leader, so we’re imploring that he listen to the will of the American people, 70 percent of whom want there to be a cease-fire.”

This was echoed by New York Rep. Zohran Mamdani, who noted that in a recent poll conducted by Data for Progress, roughly two-thirds of U.S. voters say they either “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with a permanent ceasefire. A similar Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 68% of respondents agreed with the statement “Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate.”

Nixon described the public attitude and crossroads succinctly, “we’re at a watershed moment where politicians have not caught up yet. I’m very encouraged by the number of Congress members who have now signed on for a ceasefire, but the number is certainly not yet reflective of what the American people want.”

Mamdani, who invited Nixon to participate in the demonstration, told The Guardian, “We are taking this action of hunger striking to showcase the actions of President Biden, It’s President Biden’s actions that are leading to the bombing of Palestinians, the starving of Palestinians. So we are starving ourselves to make visible what is so often erased, which is the Palestinian experience.”

While Israel and Hamas have declared a four-day temporary ceasefire that began November 28th and has since been extended for an additional two days, to allow for the release of more hostages and prisoners. There is significant worry that once the the “temporary” pause closes, violence that is already untenable will only increase (According to reporting from Aljazeera, Israeli officials have already suggested that the bombing in Gaza will resume with an even greater intensity once the temporary truce expires). This is on top of an already existing blockade by Israel making it near impossible for Palestinians to find food and clean water, a situation the UN World Food Programme has said leaves Gaza’s civilians facing the “immediate possibility of starvation.” Oxfam has described the starvation as a “weapon of war.”

This hunger strike in front of the White House is not meant to be poetic politics or symbolism; no one engages in hunger to be pretty. The very real starvation faced by civilians in Gaza can be hard to grapple with or face from within the various privileges of the United States. The activists of behind this work hope that whatever “shock value” of their demonstration will help put personal faces on a movement for freedom. As Nixon explained to The Cut, “it’s happening the week after Thanksgiving, a time when people get very distracted and caught up in the holidays.”

Nixon, who was one of more than 260 artists who previously signed an open letter calling on President Biden and Congress to commit to a ceasefire, went on to say “None of this is normal. None of this is routine and none of this can be allowed to continue.”

For Nixon, who has been involved in grassroots activism for decades, the call for a ceasefire is personal. A family friend, Thane Aboushi (previous candidate for Manhattan district attorney) is a Palestinian New Yorker who by chance found herself in Israel the night before the attack on October 7, causing fear for her safety and that of her family. But also, Nixon’s eldest son, who is Jewish and lives in Chicago, encouraged her to leverage her celebrity and privilege to do something:

“Two of my three children are Jewish. My oldest son in particular is extremely involved in the movement for justice for Palestinians and has been very active in Chicago, where he lives and was arrested for his protest about a week and a half ago.

When this was starting, we spent a lot of time on the phone with him. He was doing everything he could in terms of protests, speeches, speaking in articles. He said to my wife and me point-blank, ‘You have a much bigger megaphone than I do. And I just implore you at this moment to do everything you can to bring attention to this.’ His Jewish identity is very central to him. He’s the grandson of two Holocaust survivors. He said, for him, ‘never again’ means never again for everyone.”

Of course, Cynthia Nixon’s decision to join the hunger strike comes at a time when other actors in Hollywood have recently been made to face public punishment for advocating for Palestine. Most notably, Susan Sarandon was recently dropped by her talent agency, United Talent Agency (UTA), for speaking at a pro-Palestine protest. Scream star Melissa Barrera was fired from the franchise’s upcoming movie for her pro-Palestine social media posts. While Cynthia Nixon noted a need to be cautious in selecting her words, her belief remained steadfast: “This is a terrible time for Palestinians and Israelis. It’s a particularly terrifying moment for Muslims and Jews in America and across the world, where we’re seeing so much Islamophobia and antisemitism and attacks. That said, I feel we can’t be living in a world where saying the mass slaughter of civilians is wrong. That can’t be a thing we’re not allowed to say.”

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While Nixon will only be participating in the strike in front of the White House on Monday and Tuesday (today), her understanding of her role in the protest is what’s stayed with me the most. One of the things that we most think about when reporting on celebrity involvement in the fight for Palestinian human rights and freedoms is, how do we keep the story about what’s the actual story? I wavered on covering Cynthia Nixon’s involvement at all, worried that it would overshadow the work of countless activists who have come together to make this hunger strike even possible. For that, Nixon said it simply and to the point, “We’re a group of people who have a megaphone, a large platform.”

There have been so many headlines today on variations of “Cynthia Nixon joins hunger strike for ceasefire in Gaza” — and its shined a brighter light on these protests than maybe would have otherwise been able to be achieved. And now she’s happy to step aside and put the bright light and loud noise of her microphone on the activists who need it most. I hope we all remember to do the same.

Don’t Say Gay Was Never About Children — But We Already Knew That

feature image photo by Anadolu / Contributor via Getty Images

Last week, Florida House of Representatives Republican Ryan Chamberlin introduced House Bill 599, a modern-day attempt to stymie LGBTQ presence in government work. The bill would make it official state policy “that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” It specifically targets local and state government employees, contractors, and nonprofits that receive funding from the state. Essentially extending Ron DeSantis’ now much-derided “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of gender identity and sexuality in public school settings, the bill forbids tax-exempt nonprofits or employers that receive state funds from requiring any sensitivity training or presentations on gender identity and expression and sexuality. It also would forbid trans employees from sharing their pronouns and prohibits other employees from having to use anyone’s pronouns if those pronouns “do not correspond to his or her sex” as outlined by the bill. Employers would also be forbidden from asking employees their pronouns.

“Don’t Say Gay,” according to its supporters, was allegedly about “protecting children.” But anyone paying attention knows that isn’t the case. Children are just easy targets. Children are just an easy way to test fascistic policies. We see this with transphobic sports bans for school-aged children that have now ripple effected into the broader sports world and society at large. We even see this in the way Israeli soldiers target Palestinian children as a means of reinforcing occupation and control. When spun insidiously as the “Parental Rights in Education bill” and by preying on parents’ fears, it was actually quite easy for DeSantis to push through his agenda to eliminate conversations about sexuality and gender identity in schools, confusing teachers along the way and eventually pushing out many LGBTQ+ instructors. That’s the real goal: a purge of LGBTQ people — and trans folks in particular — from public society. Schools were the first target, and the policy then paved the way for Chamberlin to introduce “Don’t Say Gay”: Workplace Redux.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law Executive Order 10450, which formalized a policy already informally well underway in the federal government. Known as the Lavender Scare, a moral panic about lesbians and gay men working as federal government employees took over the nation in the 1950s, and Executive Order 10450 made it so people working for the government who were gay or suspected of being gay could be interrogated, removed from their positions, and banned from applying to other government jobs. This was all under the shoddy logic that gay people were particularly vulnerable to blackmail and therefore could pose a potential security risk. They were also seen as a cultural risk in that queerness was seen as an entry point to more radical politics and more radical constructions of society.

Shortly after, in 1956, the Florida Legislature established the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (known more commonly as the Johns Committee after its chairman, state Senator Charley Johns), which sought to “investigate” civil rights movement groups for suspected communist connections. The Johns Committee essentially harnessed the combined powers of racism, anti-leftism, and homophobia to dismantle civil liberties in the public sphere in Florida. Initially, the committee set its sights on the NAACP, trying to paint the organization as communist and therefore anti-American. Then, the committee found a new target: gays.

Stacy Braukman, who wrote Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965, said in an interview with Spectrum South that this shift from targeting political and racial groups to homosexuals remains a little ambiguous, but “it was just an easy thing to do, since gays and lesbians were so vulnerable.” The federal government was already expelling people accused of sexual “perversion” (read: being gay) under the guise of “security” and, also, “protecting children.” The Johns Committee made exposing and expelling queer people from the public sphere its new mission, focusing in particular on public education institutions. Collaborating with cops, the committee surveilled and interrogated activists and university students, professors, faculty, and administrators. Students and faculty alike were targets, often pushed out of institutions like the University of Florida. This was already common practice in 1958, but in 1961, the committee was officially charged with the task of determining “the extent of infiltration into agencies supported by state funds by practicing homosexuals.”

In 1964, the Johns Committee published a homophobic pamphlet called “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida” that eventually became known as “the purple pamphlet.” It asserted: “The homosexuals are organized…The homosexuals will win every battle that is fought unless we band together…If we don’t act soon, we will wake up some morning and find they are too big to fight. They may be already.” The pamphlet, however, had the opposite of its intended effect, spurring backlash that eventually led to the committee’s defending and disbandment.

It’s not a perfect comparison, but the Florida legislature, under DeSantis’ gubernatorial leadership, is basically introducing a new Lavender Scare to the public sphere. Essentially outlawing LGBTQ nonprofits in the state caters to the fears outlined in that 1964 pamphlet: that we are organized and ready to fight.

I hear all the time from people — usually well meaning allies but also sometimes gay liberals — some version of at least it’s not as bad as it was back then. Yeah, sure, maybe for financially comfortable cis white gays. As for everyone else, especially trans people, these attempts at legislative overreach are just as alarming than what was happening in the 1950s, if not more so. The Johns Committee leaned on anti-communist rhetoric to push its agenda and convince the public that any deviation from heteronormativity was inherently un-American. It was never really about security. Neither was the larger Lavender Scare happening around the country. Accusations of communism made it easier for people to sell the idea of removing homosexuals from the government. But it was always just about pushing queer people to the margins. Just like “Don’t Say Gay” isn’t really about protecting children but rather pushing out queer and trans educators, public servants, and organizers and making it harder for queer and trans kids to access community and understanding about their identities.

And now, Chamberlin’s new bill attempting to codify a cis gender binary as the norm doesn’t even make any pretense at being about anything other than punishing and subjugating trans and gender-nonconforming people while also making it potentially impossible for LGBTQ+ nonprofits to operate in the state. There is no political movement queer folks are being pinned to as a way to prove the “danger” they pose. The state no longer needs to cry communism to convince people queerness and transness don’t belong in the public sphere; they can just call us wrong and call it a day. All these legislative attempts to push LGBTQ folks even further to the margins build on each other.

Don’t, especially if you live outside Florida, write this off as a lost cause. Even if there’s a strong likelihood this will pass in the current legislature, that defeatist mentality doesn’t tangibly help the Floridians who will need it most if it does. The legislative session starts on January 9, and representatives like Anna Eskamani of my district are already rallying for people to push back on proposed bills like this one. The implications for LGBTQ+ nonprofits in the state — like the beloved Zebra Youth where I live and where my fiancée and I are raising money for at our wedding in a few months — are nothing short of devastating. If you’re outside Florida and you subscribe to a narrow definition of this place, perhaps you define this state by its oppressive politicians and hate groups, but I for one cannot imagine this place without these LGBTQ organizations or without the people who support and benefit from them. We have to become as organized as that pamphlet warned we were. And just like the Johns Committee was a microcosm of a larger national movement to place queerness at odds with citizenship, this battle is not happening in a vacuum. When things happen here, they have a tendency to ripple effect outward and connect back to things happening at the national level. Florida could once again become the test site for similar legislation in other states to follow.

None of this came out of the ether. Restricting queer and trans public life has long been a method of societal control wielded by governments. It’s not enough to say history is repeating itself; we have to look back and understand exactly how and why it is. People didn’t just accept the Johns Committee; there has always been resistance in the face of oppression. Early on in the committee’s terror, librarian and activist Ruth Perry, working as the secretary for Miami’s NAACP, refused to cooperate with the committee during legal proceedings despite threats to her life. While many other organizations avoided direct confrontation with the committee, the Tampa branch of the American Association of University Women condemned and worked against the committee consistently, an important chapter of women-led activism in the South left out of history books all too frequently.

And of course, there was always student dissent to the committee, even though it can be hard to find documentation of it as dominant history has a tendency to obscure or downplay the significance of student activism. But in reading through the archives of The Tampa Tribune (a former daily newspaper in Tampa that was bought by the Tampa Bay Times in 2016), I found lots of evidence pointing toward organized efforts by University of South Florida students to fight the committee. In a 1962 letter to the Tribune, students of one of the residence halls at USF (one of the universities consistently targeted by the committee’s hearings) lament the lack of community pushback outside of campus against the committee’s investigation tactics. “We wonder if most of the people in the community realize how many students are protesting the methods used in this investigation?” the letter reads. Specific books and curriculum were being investigated by the committee (sound familiar?!), and students called to question what exactly was being challenged, writing that they do not feel persecuted of their religious or political beliefs by these teachings but rather that “required readings have challenged us to evaluate our present beliefs and ideas,” which is what education should be all about. To understand the power and influence of student dissent and campus movements, look no further than the Florida legislature’s attempts to curtail them today.

So while a new Lavender Scare is well underway and bills like this latest proposed one coming out of Florida date back to the mid 20th century, a pattern of resistance to those efforts goes way back in history, too. We must hold onto that.

Indigenous Resistance Movements From the 20th and 21st Centuries We Can Learn From

feature image by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

Over the last month, I’ve noticed a pretty disturbing trend in the way people are talking about what is happening in Palestine and the global response to the occupation. From what I’ve seen on social media, both liberals and conservatives who are in favor of Israel’s response to the events of October 7 have attempted to “call out” people in the U.S. over and over again for also being settlers on occupied land. Many of the criticisms of the ongoing resistance movement for Palestinian liberation here in the U.S. seem to hinge on this fact and appear to be making the claim that there hasn’t been a robust resistance movement against the U.S. government’s occupation of this land and its treatment of the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island.

I’m not here to argue with them, because I don’t think we should be expending our energy arguing with genocide deniers under any circumstances, but the teacher in me is always instantly activated when people try to make claims about a past they don’t fully understand. It was yet another reminder about the lack of education many people have in regards to decolonial movements and actions here and abroad. I could point to a lot of different reasons why this happens, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me every day that people seem to have this idea that struggles against occupation and colonization are fixed in a very distant past that no longer has much bearing on the present. Not only is thinking of history’s impact on the present as minimal one of the most ignorant understandings of how the world works, but it also assumes there have not been more contemporary examples of resistance for us to learn from.

Unlike what some of these people might have us believe, there is a lengthy and robust history of resistance against occupation and colonialism led by Indigenous people here in the U.S. And I can’t think of a better time than Thanksgiving to reflect on it. The Thanksgiving story, like a lot of the narratives we learn about our history as Americans, is more often than not completely misconstrued, and that misconstruction is often wielded around as a weapon to try to convince us that the early colonists’ and the U.S. government’s treatment of Indigenous people here was “not that bad.” The many distorted narratives of the Thanksgiving story make the claim that the colonists were welcome with open arms and no questions asked, but the truth of the Thanksgiving story is actually much more complicated than that, as is every other narrative about this country we’ve ever been told.

Many Indigenous people have worked hard to try to correct this image that most Americans have of Thanksgiving and the relationships between their ancestors and the early colonists, and I’ve noticed throughout my career as an educator that more and more teachers have also answered the call to present a truer, more nuanced depiction of not only the Thanksgiving story but of the history of the genocide and displacement of Indigenous people in the U.S., as well. There’s no doubt in my mind that this has been an imperative step in the right direction for helping young people develop a better understanding of this country, themselves, and their place in it, but I can see that some people are missing an important aspect of the story of settler colonialism here. Although it’s absolutely necessary to discuss it, it’s not enough to depict the tragedies that were inflicted on Indigenous people and not show them as groups of people with their own agency and their own abilities to not only defend themselves from the colonist’s advancements on their land but also fight back against occupation.

Growing up in Florida in the 1990s, we learned early in our education about the great Seminole Wars of the 1800s. These were presented to us and taught to us as wars in the usual sense where two sides who have grievances against one another take up arms to solve those grievances, but the truth is much more complex than that. All three of the “wars” began as a result of Seminole resistance to the colonists’ and, eventually, the U.S. government’s attempt to occupy more and more Seminole land in various ways. First, as a response to the amount of unauthorized slave raids being conducted in Northern Florida Seminole territory. Second, as a response to President Andrew Jackson’s forceful insistence that the Seminoles leave Florida under the rules of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. And finally, as a response to the growth of colonial towns on the west coast of Florida. In the elementary, middle, and secondary school classrooms I was in as a kid, we were never given a full understanding of this story. Even if we felt it, there was no one to confirm our suspicions that the colonists and the resulting occupation of these lands were wrong, and there was certainly no one trying to make us understand that these weren’t just wars — they were struggles against that ongoing occupation.

The truth is that while many Nations were coerced into signing treaties or willfully did so and that while some Nations worked with the early colonists to ensure their own survival or just because they felt it was the most beneficial thing to do, Indigenous people in the U.S. never stopped resisting settler colonialism, white supremacy, and occupation. You can see they’ve done this in a variety of ways — through the preservation of the cultures and languages, through their art, through their fight for representation and visibility — but the stories of active resistance through direct action and violence in the 20th century, in particular, are much more obscured. But to fully understand the response to colonialism in the U.S. and to understand our potential for eventually dismantling this system, we have to become familiar with the people who have already done and are doing that work. We have to study up.

This is an examination and a celebration of the contemporary resistance history people want to claim doesn’t exist. Although the success rates of these movements vary, I think looking back on them can help us understand what we’re up against when we’re fighting against settler colonial and imperial powers and can help give us some ideas for new tactics and strategies we can utilize in the fight.

Occupation of Alcatraz Island, November 1969

Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Although this particular action seems very well-known to me, it still feels as if it should be on this list. By the mid-1960s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) began to take more organized shape under the leadership of Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, and George Mitchell, and their organization began to inspire a new generation of Indigenous organizers willing to put themselves on the line to fight for Indigenous civil rights and restoration of land to Indigenous communities.

The occupation of Alcatraz Island that occurred in 1969 was actually preceded by a much shorter occupation of the island that happened in 1964. At that time, a group of Sioux activists had discovered Alcatraz was going to be vacated by the U.S. government, which according to the Treaty of Fort Laramie meant that the land should be returned to the original Nations who occupied the land prior to the U.S. government’s occupation of it. A group of Sioux activists staged a short takeover of Alcatraz in 1964 with the intention of turning the island into a cultural center for Indigenous people, but their plans quickly got more complicated as developers in the surrounding Bay Area got involved in appealing to the U.S. government for the land. As a result, a group of Indigenous organizers from all over the country came together under the group name Indians of All Tribes to plan and execute a larger takeover of Alcatraz in November 1969.

The takeover was led by Richard Oakes and LaNada Means but included over 89 other Indigenous organizers and activists who managed to set up camp on the island. Eventually, the takeover grew to include over 400 Indigenous people from different Nations all over the U.S. and, together, they created ways to sustain themselves and the community of people living there for the majority of the 19 months they were there. Pressure from the U.S. government, including the cutting off of fresh water, electricity, and telecommunications on the island prompted an end to the takeover, along with other interpersonal conflicts between the organizers, but the legacy was long-lasting and material in many ways.

Aside from inspiring an ongoing movement to reclaim Indigenous land, the Occupation of Alcatraz also inspired the writing and passing of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. The passage of this law forced the legal ending of the enforcement of a series of “Indian termination” policies passed between 1940 and 1970 that aimed to force assimilation on Indigenous people and helped give Nations more sovereignty over the financial decisions of what happens on land that belongs to Indigenous people. Of course, this did not change the fact of the U.S. government’s occupation or totally stop them from further persecuting Indigenous people, but it set legal precedent for land sovereignty disputes.

Puget Sound “Fish Wars,” September 1970

Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. The Fish Wars were the result of a decades-long battle between the Indigenous Nations who populate the area around the Puget Sound, particularly the Nisqually and the Puyallup, and the state of Washington over the state’s laws against certain kinds of fishing in the waters of the Puget Sound. According to the Treaty of Medicine Creek that was signed by the tribes that lived in the Puget Sound and the U.S., the Indigenous Nations of that area were entitled to enact their traditional tribal fishing and hunting rights. But by the early 20th century, the state of Washington was doing everything it could to try to limit their ability to fish where and when they wanted to. The passing of various state laws as it pertains to what kind of fishing could be done in the Puget Sound, including the necessity for getting fishing licenses and permits, led to a series of arrests throughout the 1940s and 1950s of Indigenous men who were violating these laws.

Since the Nisqually and Puyallup viewed the passing of these laws as a violation of the Treaty, they first resisted by continuing to fish the waters as they always had. By the early 1960s, though, the response from state authorities continued to get more and more threatening and violent. In response, members of the Puyallup Nation decided to stage a series of “fish-ins” in part of the Sound called Frank’s Landing beginning in 1963. The “fish-ins” captured national attention for a while, even resulting in the arrest of Marlon Brando in 1964 for participating in one of the “fish-ins,” but they failed to help bring about a change in authoritative action by the state or materialize any legal precedent for some years. The “Fish Wars” really came to a tipping point in September 1970 when a group of Puyallup men decided to arm themselves in defense against state law enforcement. No one was killed in the struggle, but it did lead the U.S. government to finally step in and sue the state of Washington into making sure their laws were no longer in violation of the Treaty through what became known as the Boldt Decision of 1974.

Wounded Knee Occupation, February 1973

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This event was precipitated by a number of very complicated reasons that relate not only to the U.S. government’s attempt to control what happens on sovereign reservation land but also to the differences in the way people on that reservation responded to the U.S.’s interference on the reservation. Despite the complexity of the situation, though, the Wounded Knee Occupation remains an important example of resistance against the colonial and occupying forces of the U.S. government.

Led by members of the American Indian Movement and members of the Oglala Sioux Nation, over 200 Indigenous people seized and occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota in order to protest the U.S. government’s lack of adherence to the various treaties they’d signed with the tribes living around the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and tribes all around the country. The organizers of the occupation attempted to use the action as a way to force the U.S. government into reopening treaty negotiations and hopefully bring an end to the inequitable treatment of Indigenous people in the U.S. Led by Russell Means and Carter Camp, the occupation went on for 71 days as the state and local law enforcement, along with the FBI, did their best to intimidate and weaken the activists involved in the occupation. As the weeks went on, the U.S. government tightened their grip on the region — by trying to starve out the organizers, by intimidating them with violence, and by trying to prevent any aid from making it to the people who were occupying the town — and the conflict grew more violent as a result. Organizers working with AIM were killed and injured as a result, as were members of the state and local authorities and the FBI.

The aftermath of the Wounded Knee Occupation produced less material results but did lead to a recognition by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 that the U.S. government’s interference in tribal and reservation affairs was illegal according to the treaties they signed with the Sioux Nation.

The Longest Walk, July 1978

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By the end of the 1970s, the American Indian Movement had gained a lot of traction throughout many Indigenous Nations, and the U.S. government seemed hellbent on doing everything it could to worsen the treatment of Indigenous people as it possibly could. On top of the fact that Indigenous people were already struggling to find jobs, permanent housing, and healthcare due to discrimination and lack of opportunity, Congress was set to vote on a series of legislation that would effectively void many treaty obligations that the U.S. still had to Indigenous people. If these bills were to become laws, they would have drastically altered the lives of every Indigenous person and Nation in the U.S. by forcing them to cede sovereignty and reservation land rights to the U.S. government, among other things.

To help fight against this, Phillip Deer and a group of organizers from other Nations came together to plan a walk from Alcatraz Island to Washington, D.C., where they would then camp out on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Along the way, the 24 marchers who ended up walking the entirety of the 2,700 mile journey were joined by other Indigenous activists and their supporters as they made their way across the U.S. Once they arrived in Washington D.C., organizers and supporters camped out in Maryland for 12 days and led protests around the White House almost every day.

In the end, the action didn’t solve the issues that already existed. However, Congress voted “no” on each piece of legislation that threatened to take sovereignty away from Indigenous people.

Orme Dam Protests, November 1981

I wish there was more information available online about what exactly happened during the decade-long battle between the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and the U.S. government, but there isn’t. I’m still including it on this list, because I do think it deserves a spot just based on the perseverance of the Yavapai people and their ability to keep fighting off the U.S. government and the state of Arizona for 10 whole years.

In 1968, Congress approved the Central Arizona Project, which was a development project designed to essentially make the land more hospitable for (white) American people to move to Phoenix and other parts of Central Arizona. Part of the plan was to build the Orme Dam in order to build a small reservoir off the Salt and Verde rivers. The Secretary of the Interior claimed the reservoir was for the Indigenous Nations around the area, but the truth is that the construction of the dam would flood more than half of the Yavapai reservation and would diminish the tribe’s ability to keep farming on their land. In response, the Yavapai Nation staged a series of protests over the course of 10 years to fight to keep the dam from being built.

They were finally able to stop organizing when the U.S. government decided to cancel the building of the dam in November 1981. Today, they celebrate this huge win for land rights at the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Orme Dam Victory Days Pow Wow in early November every year. So, not only did they win, but they also haven’t let anyone forget it.

Keystone XL Pipeline Protests, August 2011 – June 2021

Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images

When I thought about including this on the list, I was a little hesitant at first. The organization in opposition of the Keystone XL Pipeline was a group of environmentalists that included and was led by Indigenous people of South Dakota and Montana, but wasn’t exactly initiated by them. Regardless, though, the actions against the Keystone XL Pipeline were still largely planned and fronted by members of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and the Fort Belknap Indian Community of Montana, among many others.

The Keystone XL Pipeline was a proposed pipeline that would transport crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada through Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, eventually ending in south Texas. From the very beginning, climate activists and organizers were opposed to the construction of the pipeline, but the pipeline’s proposed pathway through many tribal lands and waterways eventually brought more people to fight against it. Starting in August 2011, there were a series of actions held at the White House that resulted in over 1,000 arrests and more significant growth for the movement against the pipeline. In November 2011, thousands of protesters managed to form a human chain around the White House in order to get then President Barack Obama to halt construction on the pipeline. From there, the movement expanded to other areas of the country as protests were held throughout the years in Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas. In 2015, Obama canceled proposed construction of the pipeline only to have the construction proposal renewed by President Trump when he took office.

The culmination of this decade-long battle came when members of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and the Fort Belknap Indian Community of Montana held their own public hearings about the Keystone XL Pipeline and then eventually filed suit against the Trump Administration for their continued support of the construction of the pipeline. Because of the lengthy fight against the pipeline and the continued battles in court, the developer of the Keystone XL Pipeline decided not to move forward with the construction and abandoned their plan altogether in 2021.

Dakota Access Pipeline Protests/Standing Rock Protests, April 2016 – February 2017

Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

Maybe you’re unconvinced how the fight against the construction of a couple of pipelines could really count as a decolonial struggle, but the fact is that both the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline are just the newest installments in the attempted expansion of the colonial powers of the U.S. And the struggles against them overlapping just serves to illustrate this further.

Similar to the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline was built to transport crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, only the distance was much shorter and cut through not only tribal lands but specifically sacred tribal lands and also threatened to pollute the water of Lake Oahe, a large reservoir that serves both the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. In response to the proposed construction of the pipeline, a group of young Indigenous activists from Standing Rock and other reservations in the area came together in the spring of 2016 and then created a Water Protectors’ camp that interfered with the path of the proposed pipeline. The protest first began as a simple occupation of space until state, local, and Federal authorities continued to exert pressure on the Water Protectors and their allies to abandon the occupation and get out of the way. By September, organizers and activists who stuck with the occupation began to experience several threatening attempts by private security forces hired by the developer of the pipeline and the local authorities. Violence escalated as the private security forces attempted to evict the protesters. Even though many people were hurt in the struggle, the escalation of the violence drew more attention from the media, politicians, celebrities, and other Americans who could see the attacks play out in the media and on social media.

For the next few months, the organizers and activists who stayed at the camp would experience more violent attacks from the authorities and private security forces. As the harshest parts of winter set in on the camp made the situation even worse for the activists who were still there, many decided to leave the camp in January 2017 but it still took a forceful removal of the final activists left in February 2017 by the U.S. National Guard for the occupation to end officially.

While the Standing Rock protests were not successful in getting the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down, it still serves as one of the most important actions led by Indigenous people against the U.S. government in recent years. Since 2017, pipeline protests and protests against illegal development of Indigenous pop up all across the country utilizing some of the strategies used in the Standing Rock protests.

While the majority of these were huge actions that had long-lasting impacts on both the lives of Indigenous people in the U.S. and the way the U.S. government interacts with them, it’s important to remember that these are just a few of the resistance actions taken up by Indigenous people in the U.S. in recent years. As the national and international conversations on colonialism, imperialism, and decolonization progress and spread, I think it’s important for us to continue reflecting on the big and small ways Indigenous groups in the U.S. and abroad have challenged and fought against the occupying, colonialist, imperialist forces that have attempted to wipe those groups off the map entirely. And it’s important for us to stand with them, as well. The fight for the liberation of all oppressed people is not going to stop being violent, difficult, and dangerous. At the very least, we owe it to our predecessors to take the lessons they’ve behind seriously.

Once Again, Journalistic “Objectivity” Is Failing Us — Especially Queer and Other Marginalized Writers

Jazmine Hughes was recently forced to resign from the New York Times Magazine after signing an open letter by the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza. The letter, which I am also a solidarity signatory of, calls for Palestinian liberation and critiques racist and revisionist news and media coverage of Israel’s ongoing genocidal obliteration of Gaza. Magazine contributor Jamie Lauren Keiles also signed the letter and announced he’d no longer be writing for the publication. In a live broadcast with Democracy Now!, the two writers discussed their reasoning for signing the letter as well as something I’ve thought about a lot in my decade of working in journalism and media: the hollow promise of journalistic objectivity.

“I think that objectivity is a wonderful, beautiful project for a world that does not exist,” Hughes says.

Objectivity assumes a lack of power differentials. Objectivity flattens and erases identity.

In recent years, newsrooms have made pushes to diversify, but hiring marginalized voices and then expecting them to remain silent or perform “objectivity” often means asking them to go against the cores of their identities and ignore the movements that are working toward their own liberation. Hughes and Keiles are queer writers, and Keiles is trans. In the time since I started writing this piece, Anne Boyer has also resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine as a direct result of the war on Gaza, and she is also queer. I don’t think these details are insignificant. There’s a history of queer and trans dissent in newsrooms, and LGBTQ groups and individuals have experienced intense censorship for decades. In 1990, lesbian beat reporter Sandy Nelson was removed from the newsdesk at The News Tribune for participating in a campaign to protect gay rights in Tacoma.

Mainstream historians often flagrantly ignore the connections between antiwar movements and queer liberation, but it’s actually quite easy to connect the dots between these struggles. And right now, we’re seeing journalists punished for standing up for trans rights and for standing against war. And it always comes back to this age-old debate about “neutrality” and who or what it’s really meant to protect in newsrooms.

“I signed the letter…as a Black person, as a queer person, as a woman,” Hughes says. “And, you know, all these identities have — all of those identities, or all of the communities thereof — have been awarded their rights by agitation, right? By protest. And I, as a person at the core of all these identities, wanted to amplify that effort.”

Writers are asked to bring their identities to their work but then are told to sit down and be quiet when those identities are under attack. We saw this over and over again in 2020 when it came to Black journalists (I realize the unfortunate irony of linking to the NYT, but Wesley Lowery’s words on the topic connect so many dots).

The lofty goal of perfect journalistic objectivity is often wielded in ways that amount not to fairness but to censorship and punishment. Hughes goes on in the interview to point out that she was not part of the newsroom. She worked for the magazine, and the work she did was political, sure, but it was also rooted in her identities and was not a mere presentation of facts in the way news reporters are expected to write. She wrote from a particular point of view. A point of view reflected in the Writers Against the War on Gaza letter.

As for Keiles, this was the second time he signed a letter while working as an independent contractor for the New York Times Magazine — a labor distinction Keiles points out is relevant to the larger conversation. On signing the letter, Keiles says:

“So, first and foremost, I signed the letter as a person. I feel like growing up as a Jew in America, you’re asked all the time, ‘What would people do if there was another Holocaust?’ And, for me, it was just really important to say this is the time when you’re supposed to speak up. This is the moment that you’ve been hypothetically asked about your entire life. So, journalism aside, I signed it as a person, and I think it’s the right thing to do. And I wouldn’t support an ethnostate anywhere else in the world for any other group, and I don’t support it for my own people. So, that was, first and foremost, why I signed the letter.”

Keiles also signed the open letter by nearly 1,000 New York Times contributors calling attention to the publication’s long history of transphobic bias and demanding change to the ways the paper covers trans issues, especially when it comes to trans youth. In this interview, Keiles says he was reprimanded for that despite being an independent contractor who does not receive benefits from the New York Times. He was told he couldn’t sign the letter because it singled out the work of other writers at the paper, and he responded that he doesn’t actually work there. That the paper could claim an ownership over Keiles’ speech when he is not a full-time employee is, indeed, especially ludicrous. He told Democracy Now! he resigned shortly after signing the Gaza letter because he could feel another reprimand coming.

Similarly to Hughes, Keiles covers arts and culture and not a ton of what is considered “hard news.” And though my personal experience is just a small microcosm of all of this, I’m no stranger to the frustration of being stymied by newsroom rules in ways that ultimately seem arbitrary and more in service of maintaining a dangerous status quo than in service of objectivity. While working at my college newspaper as an editor in 2013, I was informally reprimanded for participating in a pro-Palestine protest to demand my university divest from Israeli apartheid (a movement that, 10 years later, is still very much alive).

I was an editor in the Arts section of the paper. I was pretty sure my views on Palestine weren’t affecting my ability to edit reviews of Pretty Little Liars.

Jokes aside, arts and culture criticism is — or at least, should be — political. Art isn’t created in an apolitical void. We all bring specific points of view, cultural histories, and contexts to the page when we write. And writers and editors who are willing to take stands against things like genocide, police violence, etc. are not the true root of media bias; more often than not, forms of oppression like racism, sexism, and transphobia are. Not only was I an Arts editor, but I was also in the process of co-founding a section of the newspaper specifically dedicated to students of color. In the early days of the section, we were often criticized for being “too political.” The fact of our existence was political. Our identities were politicized no matter what we chose to write about or platform. We published stories that felt extremely pressing to students of color on campus, including policies regarding undocumented students, racist treatment of Black students, and the fight for Palestinian liberation. And it wasn’t enough to just write about these things; the actions and protests were vital, too. It was all connected. And some would have liked to use newsroom policies to stifle that. Journalism aside, like Keiles, it felt like the right thing to do, just like calling for a ceasefire is now.

Journalistic objectivity and intellectual honesty are not always the same thing. Keiles touches on that in the interview: “There are all these ideas about journalistic objectivity, but then when it actually comes down to the level of news being produced, things we would expect of news coverage on any other topic are totally being forgotten here.”

Last week, Writers Against the War on Gaza staged an action in the New York Times office lobby calling for a ceasefire and also criticizing the paper’s bias toward Israel in recent coverage. These biases run so much deeper and have far more harmful impacts than Hughes and Keiles signing the open letter ever could. Just look at this infographic compiled by Mona Chalabi — who has been a contributor to the NYT — as one small example:

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A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi)

In recent history, journalists have quit their jobs or been forced to resign for being antiwar, especially from the 1990s to now. Hell, even news giants like Phil Donahue lost platforms for being antiwar. Let’s think critically for a moment about what that really means: that being against militarism and war and oppressive systems is somehow at odds with being an ethical journalist.

Last month, six BBC reporters were taken off air for posting — or liking — pro-Palestine tweets. LA Times employees were recently taken off of Israel and Palestine coverage for three months after signing an open letter, a move LA Times reporter Suhauna Hussain points out effectively removes many Muslim journalists and “most if not all Palestinians” from coverage. Censorship, the criminalization of protest, and a wildly misguided crackdown on language are nothing new, especially in the post-9/11 U.S. But the extreme politicization and criminalization of the pro-Palestine movement and of Palestinian life in general, coupled with the silencing of journalists, feels more disorienting than ever. Reporters on the ground in Gaza are risking their lives to show the world what’s happening, and reporters in the U.S. are being punished just for bearing witness and standing in solidarity.

In 2021, NPR amended its policy against journalists participating in protests to be less limiting. The organization’s public editor Kelly McBride correctly pointed out at the time that aspects of the policy are still vague. Stifling political speech can mean stifling a person’s humanity. And we’re seeing a lot of news organizations actually double down on their rules about how journalists use social media to express views. In a Vanity Fair story about Hughes’ resignation and the larger culture of punishing journalists who speak out against Israel, Charlotte Klein writes that Vanity Fair’s parent company Condé Nast recently sent an email reminding staffers of social media policies. Hearst Magazines implemented a new social media policy that states staffers can be terminated for even liking content deemed controversial and channels the surveillance state by encouraging employees to tell on each other for violating the rules. (Read the Vanity Fair piece in full for a behind-the-scenes look at just how messy Hughes’ forced resignation was.)

It’s easy to see how the stalwart and dated rules on objectivity specifically target journalists of marginalized identities, especially because our identities are so politicized. We’re deemed controversial just for existing. Last year, an opinion piece in the Washington Post indeed asserted that journalism conflates “objective” perspectives with white ones, citing historical examples of white journalists participating in pro-segregation movements with no consequences. What is deemed objective and therefore acceptable by society and what is not often aligns with power.

In his book The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, Lewis Raven Wallace attempts to trace the origins of objectivity in news, which he writes “is sort of like trying to track down the origins of some of the water in a river.” Wallace eventually concludes the exact terminology of “objectivity” in journalism is really less than a hundred years old, though we begin to see its emergence in the very late 19th century and early 20th century. Wallace — who is queer and trans — makes direct connections between the emergence of “objectivity” as a code of conduct for journalists in early mainstream (and entirely white) newsrooms and the emergence of prominent Black-run publications. In fact, if we want to dig back into the history of the New York Times specifically, as Wallace notes in the book, Ida B. Wells was labeled “radical” for extensively covering the facts of lynchings, while the New York Times, under the guise of “balance,” reported on lynchings from a distinctly white perspective without gathering actual facts. (Wallace was fired by Marketplace for publishing a Medium essay about newsroom objectivity, by the way.)

We continue to see an alignment between “objectivity” and dominant narratives today, with anything that challenges those dominant narratives deemed “biased” or “radical.” As Keiles puts it, attempts to silence journalists’ pushback against Israel’s actions and the way they’re covered in the media indeed seems like a tacit endorsement of Israel’s actions. And is that journalistic objectivity? We are not seeing widespread firings or resignations of people in arts institutions, colleges, or newspapers for expressing Zionist views. But people across all of those sectors are being fired or facing calls to be fired for expressing pro-Palestinian views — even passively. There’s a disproportionality here that’s glaringly obvious.

Even slightly more progressive policies like NPR’s require that writers seek permission to participate in certain forms of civic engagement and dissent. But seeking permission to essentially advocate for your own humanity is beyond demoralizing. And so is stifling dissent against the oppression of any group of marginalized people. Newsroom policies emphasize facts, but what about moral truths? Can anyone look at what’s happening in Gaza and say oBjEcTiVeLy that it is right or justified? Who benefits from reporters remaining silent in the face of not only injustice but also media bias that attempts to flatten and minimize power and oppression?

Objectivity often just means preserving an imperialist, white supremecist, heterosexist status quo, preserving a viewpoint that allows for the continued marginalization of the people who are already at the margins. Anything that questions it is labeled “controversial” — and therefore dismissed, silenced, or punished.

The Complicated History of Reed Erickson, A Different Kind of Trans Resistance

Feature image of Reed Erickson courtesy of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

Reed Erickson (center) with girlfriend Daisy Harriman (left) and Michele, 1963.

When we look at resistance history, we have a tendency to focus on the most public-facing activities. We envision demonstrations numbering in the hundreds or thousands taking over entire buildings, blocking highways and train stations, and preventing boats from leaving their ports. We think of organizers vandalizing the homes or corporate offices of people and corporations responsible for some of the most terrible atrocities we’ve ever witnessed. Or we remember moments where organizers took over radio and television stations or the stages where politicians were speaking.

I see why we do that — they’re flashy, they’re impressive, they make us feel less lonely, and their coverage in the media has the power to get other people thinking about the issues at hand. But this leaves out a lot of other resistance strategies and a lot of people who work to improve our society.

I’m always thinking about resistance that happens behind the scenes, the things people do to create material change without putting themselves or their work in the spotlight. When I’m digging through archives and researching online, I’m on the look-out for people who challenged the norms of our society and created pathways for other people to do the same — even in ways we wouldn’t normally classify as resistance.

I don’t know if Reed Erickson would think of himself as being among an assemblage of people who did this kind of work. After all, his legacy is quite complicated and he was an extremely private person who evaded most attempts at public attention for his contributions. But when I think about people who had the power (and money) to do something and then did, I think of Erickson and all he accomplished.

Reed Erickson grew up in a middle class suburb in north Philadelphia where his engineer father owned a lucrative lead smelting business. When Erickson graduated from college in 1940, his father moved the business to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Erickson followed to attend Louisiana State University’s school of mechanical engineering. While going to school and working in the family business in Baton Rouge, Erickson met a female partner (her name has been withheld from all archival documentation at the family’s request) who he was with prior to his medical transition in the early 1960s. From there, he and his partner moved back to Philadelphia.

Erickson didn’t start working towards trans liberation until he was middle-aged, but his early adult life was peppered with involvement with progressive politics and left-leaning political inclinations. In 1948, he and his partner campaigned for Henry Wallce of the Progressive Party, they hosted Paul Robeson — yes, Paul Robeson — at their home in Philadelphia, and Erickson was even fired from his engineering job for refusing to fire his secretary on the grounds that she was a suspected member of the Communist Party. Erickson’s father died in 1962 and left the family business to Erickson, which he managed to expand and run successfully for a number of years.

I can’t be certain that his father’s death is what gave him the freedom to seek medical transition but it certainly seems that way from the sequence of events. In 1963, Erickson sought the help of Dr. Harry Benjamin who had a track record of treating people with hormonal replacement therapy for what would later become known as gender dysphoria. According to sociologist Aaron H. Devor, Erickson had his name legally changed in Louisiana in 1963 (Devor says it was a legal first for the state to change a name due to a “sex change”) and then underwent gender affirming surgeries in 1965. Although he originally sought treatment from Benjamin for himself, it was their relationship that precipitated a different dream for Erickson.

I want to be clear: this is a very abbreviated account. The truth is, Reed Erickson lived an incredibly rich life that was also marked by drug problems, divorces, protracted legal battles, and a very public falling out with ONE, Inc., the legendary gay rights organization that Erickson helped fund for much of its early existence. In addition to that, some of Erickson’s early work was done in conjunction with not just Benjamin, but also Dr. John Money, whose work many people (especially trans people) regard as terribly misguided at best and violent and dangerous at worst.

I don’t think the less flattering parts of Erickson’s life should be ignored just because he was able to accomplish so much in a time period when there was so little care and support for trans people. In the 1960s, the field of gender identity research was extremely limited, particularly in the U.S. There weren’t a lot of doctors, like Benjamin and Money, who were willing to take the risk of addressing “transsexualism.” In fact, it was this absence of available treatment and ongoing research in the field of gender identity that pushed Erickson to use his money — and the power bequeathed to him as a result of having said money — to do something about it.

Once Erickson’s treatment was “complete,” he didn’t just turn around and continue living his life. He used his newfound sense of whatever he was feeling — I imagine something close to freedom — to make sure other trans people could feel the same way. In 1964, Erickson founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), a philanthropic organization that was established to fund projects, institutions, and research to help trans people get the gender affirming care and treatment they needed. Through the EEF, Erickson funded the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) — now called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) — and helped subsidize the opening of the Johns Hopkins University Gender Identity Clinic.

The EEF also funded years of the annual International Symposium on Gender Identity, an event that helped gather together doctors from all over the world to discuss their medical research and advancements in the treatments of “transsexual” patients. Through their work at the symposium, the HBIGDA became the first medical organization in the U.S. to develop standards of care for transgender people: the Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders. The Standards of Care became a living document that has been amended year after year as new research and new clinical practices in the treatment of trans people evolve.

Beyond the contributions to the medical care that trans people received then and now, the EEF also provided mental health support and aid to trans people seeking help in understanding themselves. The EEF published and distributed newsletters and publications to trans people who needed information on gender affirming care and support in discovering the possibility of trans life. They also kept an in-person office with a phone line, both of which were open to anyone who needed support and wanted to call-in or stop by to get it.

Of course, Reed Erickson was in a unique position to do this work that most trans people are not. Through the inheritance of his father’s business, his growth of that business, and his sale of it, Erickson was able to amass a small fortune that is wholly inaccessible to most of us. And any good organizer knows that philanthropy technically doesn’t change the material conditions of the people it’s intended to help. In most cases, I think that’s absolutely true.

However, when I examine Erickson’s contributions, it feels much more complicated than that. Erickson wasn’t technically an organizer and the EEF wasn’t necessarily started as a political organization working towards the liberation of trans people. In fact, the mission of the EEF was “to provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support.” From this vantage point, it seems like Erickson’s work with Benjamin (and Money and many others at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic) wasn’t just about providing critical care to trans people but also to push the boundaries of what people understood as “normal.”

This reality is most closely reflected in who was able to take advantage of the foundation’s support and Benjamin’s and the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic’s treatment. Although it’s estimated that Benjamin treated more than 1,500 trans patients over the course of his career, the majority of the people who could both afford to make the trip to Benjamin’s clinic and take advantage of treatment options were middle to upper class white trans people who exhibited Benjamin’s very narrow and specific set of symptoms for “gender identity disorder.” The EEF’s funding didn’t help alleviate this lack of access for other trans people, and Erickson stayed incredibly rich until his death in 1992.

But even with those limitations Reed Erickson’s contributions were significant to the material conditions of trans people’s lives. It’s important to recognize the fact that gender affirming care almost always guarantees happier and more fulfilling lives for trans people. While it’s true that any real liberation movement would address and attempt to solve the problems I’ve noted, it’s also true that the creation and existence of the institutions he funded made it possible for many other people to receive treatment. The advancements in these treatments and care for trans people that came out of the institutions he personally bankrolled have been improved upon as the years have gone by, and that wouldn’t have been possible if they never existed in the first place. And even though trans healthcare is still not as accessible as it absolutely should be, Erickson’s funding of this essential research helped the field grow and move forward toward a more substantial level of accessibility. It took a lot of courage and a lot of tact — and, sure, the privilege granted to him through his class position — to not only live publicly as a trans man in the 1960s and 1970s, but to provide medical institutions with the funding necessary to give others the same opportunity.

When we think of resistance, we don’t often think of it this way. But even as a person who thinks immense wealth is a crime against humanity, I can’t deny that Reed Erickson used his class position and the power that came with it to actually affect vital and lasting change.

This doesn’t absolve Erickson’s wealth hoarding, but I do wonder if it can serve as an example for what’s possible in our current moment of legalized anti-trans violence. Challenging the legal discrimination and exclusion of trans people in public and in the courts is, no doubt, an essential part of the fight for our lives and our ability to live them. But I wonder if sometimes we forget the fact that many of us have to live our lives — and figure out how to afford therapy, gender affirming care, etc. — regardless of what happens with the law. There are many organizations working to provide critical mental health support to trans people around the country who desperately need it, yet the anti-trans violence keeps coming. And the more extreme the violence gets, the more I find myself wishing we had a network of care and relief that could not only provide mental health support to trans people experiencing the effects of these laws but could also help us make the material changes needed to improve the conditions of our lives overall. A lot of people might roll their eyes at the idea of the redistribution of wealth and a lot of people probably feel overwhelmed at the thought of movement building, but if one guy could change the trajectory of trans history simply by throwing a bunch of money at the lack of trans healthcare in this country, I think we could pull together — especially those of us from privileged and powerful class positions — to work towards the same.

At a time when gender affirming care wasn’t just unusual but was also illegal in some places, Erickson and the EEF were able to pull the resources together to create a pathway to both help create the very first standards of trans healthcare and help provide that treatment to many people who needed it. Right now, we’re standing at the crux of a historic moment where many people are faced with the same decision as Erickson. Do you make the choice to resist and figure out how to create the conditions necessary to get people the care they need? Or do you use your privilege and power to shield yourself from the more damning effects of the anti-trans violence we’re all experiencing?

I’m not saying we need another Reed Erickson, but I do think we can use the lessons we’ve learned from him and the Erickson Educational Foundation to conceive of a more liberatory path forward, a path even he couldn’t imagine.

This piece is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).

Virginia’s Election Results Push Back Hard Against Anti-Trans Agendas in the South

feature image photo of Virginia election day watch party by The Washington Post / Contributor via Getty Images

It was surreal to arrive back in my home state of Virginia on the morning of Election Day. My dad couldn’t pick me up at the airport, because he was working at his polling place. My mom took my toddler niece with her when she went to vote after getting my fiancee and I settled in. Even though I haven’t been a Virginia voter in many years, for the first time in a while, I was closely following Virginia electoral politics. This was the most important election for LGBTQ rights the state had seen in a while.

I knew the stakes were high, especially when it came to fighting against anti-LGBTQ hate and policies. The state’s stronghold as a place in the South where legislation targeting trans folks wasn’t on the rise could be suddenly threatened. Governor Youngkin — easily the most evil governor Virginia has had in my lifetime — has been determined to dismantle LGBTQ rights here, and Democrats could only narrowly shut those efforts down with a majority in the state Senate but not in the House of Delegates. If that majority in the Senate was lost on Tuesday the way many pundits predicted it might be, it would suddenly become much easier for Governor Youngkin to start pushing through his anti-LGBTQ agenda. Not only did Democrats maintain a majority in the Senate, but they also flipped the House and elected nine openly LGBTQ candidates, including Danica Roem, who will become the first out trans senator in the South. Out candidates Laura Jane Cohen, Rozia Henson, Adele McClure, Kelly Convirs-Fowler, Marcia Price, and Mark Sickles also won their House of Delegates races, and Adam Ebbin, who was the first-ever openly gay member of the Virginia General Assembly, won his Senate re-election. Now, there’s an entire legislative wall in place as protection against Youngkin’s hate.

In addition to introducing a 15-week abortion ban, Youngkin had promised to introduce all sorts of regressive policies if his party emerged victorious on Tuesday. Right now, Virginia is the only state in the South with more protections for LGBTQ people than discriminatory policies. Virginia and South Carolina are the only two states in the region that haven’t introduced bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Youngkin keeps trying to roll back rights — especially for LGBTQ students — and when the Republican majority House earlier this year voted in favor of a bill targeting trans youth, it was the first time ever for a bill targeting trans youth to be passed by a Virginia legislative chamber. But while that was a devastating blow, the Senate was able to shoot it down, and now we see voters showing up for LGBTQ rights this week. Regression has been met with progress, with a fierce refusal to bend to people’s assumptions about the South. Things aren’t perfect here. Hell, literally yesterday it was decided a Virginia wedding photographer is allowed to discriminate against gay people. The state has a terrible track record on voting rights (and, in fact, there were some valid fears that the latest bouts of voter suppression would significantly impact the results of this election).

While I am increasingly disillusioned by electoral politics (particularly at the federal level, where the two party system forces us to choose between warmongers), the wins in Virginia do reiterate the power of local politics. There’d be an abortion ban and bills targeting trans kids in this state before the end of the year if Youngkin had gotten his way. More trans youth live in the South than any other region, and while a lot of states are ramping up efforts to target, marginalize, and punish trans kids, Virginia is actively working against the narrative that the South is a monolithically transphobic and queerphobic place. Having a trans woman in the state Senate is a genuinely big deal. In far too many of these legislative bodies aggressively passing anti-trans bills, there isn’t a single out trans voice present.

Now, listen, I’m from Virginia, so I’ve long heard all sorts of jokes about how it “isn’t the real South.” But I think a lot of the time, those jokes are rooted in the same sort of assumptions about the South that hold LGBTQ progress back. Assuming the South is just some backwards place is dangerous and counterproductive to progress and liberation. Do people see Virginia as a “fake” Southern state because of its comparatively better track record on LGBTQ rights and other social issues? Maybe it’s not as simple as that, and jokes are jokes, but having moved recently to Florida, I’m thinking a lot about the ways people talk about the South — both inside and outside of it. Organizations love to warn people against traveling to certain states without ever addressing what that means for the queer and trans people who live here, who cannot easily leave. Again, think about the fact that more trans youth live here in this region than anywhere else. Understand that that’s exactly why they’re being especially targeted here.

Virginia shares borders with four states that have banned gender-affirming care for trans youth (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina), and while I’m not suggesting it’s easy for families to uproot their lives, Virginia’s proximity to these places where it has become increasingly challenging to live freely as a young trans person does matter. There are now a record number of queer people of color in Virginia’s legislature. Roem is making trans history. You can’t tell just one story about the South.

Your Fear Doesn’t Matter

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“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real,” Stephen King writes in the foreword to his first short story collection Night Shift. “I know that,” he continues. “And I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”

The boogeyman of my childhood wasn’t a monster under my bed, but it was almost as fictional. My mom — like so many suburban moms — worried about me getting kidnapped, and that worry was passed along to me. Every stranger was a threat. Unsubstantiated rumors of ominous white vans — which reemerged in 2019 — made this common car an object of terror. Every night, I eyed my closed bedroom window, nervous someone would break it and snatch me from my bed.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned the rarity of so-called “stereotypical kidnappings.” The vast majority of kidnappings are carried out by non-custodial parents or someone else the child knows. Myths of human trafficking mask a reality that most children who disappear run away from abusive homes and/or are manipulated by older boyfriends. The closest reality to our cultural perception of human trafficking does not occur for upper middle class suburban white kids, but to people with limited options due to violent immigration policy and the people who abuse the vulnerability that policy creates.

They say sex sells, but nothing sells better than fear. Whether it’s the nightly news that scared my mom during my childhood or false Facebook posts that scare the young moms of today, a culture of fear is great for ad sales.

It’s also great for upholding the institutions that enact the most harm.

Our misperceptions around topics like missing children create a society that fails to address its most pressing issues — like abuse, like failed immigration policy. Instead, people yearning for a feeling of safety develop a mistrust in each other and a false trust in law enforcement.

Since learning more about police and prison abolition in 2014 during the Ferguson protests, I’ve had many conversations with white friends and family who struggle to disentangle themselves from our justice system. Their personal experiences with police range from annoyance to incompetence — a speeding ticket for going ten over the limit, a busy signal when calling 911, dismissive cops in the face of robbery, stalking, or sexual assault. They admit the police have failed them in the past but can’t let go of their idea of a heroic police force taught to them by film and television.

People ask: What about serial killers? Who will catch them? What will we do with them?

Only 15% of the U.S. state prison population is incarcerated for homicide. Only 3.3% of the U.S. federal prison population is incarcerated for the oddly expansive category of “homicide, aggravated assault, and kidnapping.” Take into account that less than 10% of homicides are believed to be committed by strangers to the victims, and it’s fair to say serial killers are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of those in prison.

Serial killers are a compelling narrative, but they almost certainly aren’t going to kill you or your children. The leading cause of death for people age 44 and under is by far unintentional injury. Of all his many monsters, killer cars are Stephen King’s most accurate villains. (It’s too bad traffic cops don’t actually make our roads safer.) Every time you get in a vehicle or walk on the street or step in the shower, you’re at a far greater risk of death by accident than you’ll ever be from death by serial killer or human trafficker or, of course, terrorists.

As more people buy security cameras and use apps like Next Door, I’ve become convinced that fear — specifically reducing people’s irrational fears — is the most urgent political issue of our time. That has become even clearer since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel led to a resurgence of Islamophobia and a genocidal response from the Israeli government.

As a Jew who grew up in a largely Jewish suburb, I spent my childhood thinking antisemitism was a thing of the past. When my parents told me they moved away from Orange County due to antisemitism, I rolled my eyes in disbelief. (The same O.C. where Seth Cohen celebrated Chrismukkah? Come on!) It wasn’t until the Charlottesville marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us” that I realized antisemitism was not one of my parents’ irrational fears.

Throughout the Trump administration — and again as he runs for reelection — the comments made by the former president and his associates have horrified me. He chose not to take a side in response to the Charlottesville marchers and has played into the most basic tropes of Jews as all-powerful and money-grubbing.

When the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue occurred in October 2018, it felt like an inevitable horror in the wake of rising antisemitism.

But since October 7 of this year, accusations of antisemitism have been more prevalent than antisemitism itself. Social media posts warned of a “Global Day of Jihad” set to occur on the 13th — a racist, Islamophobic, and easily debunked rumor that nevertheless gained mainstream attention.

As I was talking to my family about the occupation of Palestine, they not only fought with me but also warned me to not go outside. They were convinced Jews around the world were going to be killed on this day. When this did not occurr, their fear did not dissipate. Rather, like a cult that has wrongly predicted the end of the world, they picked a new day. On the 14th, one family member still insisted she was afraid to go outside. While my family and others anticipate mass violence against American Jews, there has already been a rise in hate crimes against Muslims driven by rhetoric like their own.

Comedian Iliza Schlesinger was given space this week in The Hollywood Reporter to lament the lack of support for Jewish people in the face of antisemitism. Her piece claims people aren’t taking a rise in antisemitism seriously, but she fails to cite any actual occurrences of antisemitism beyond those committed by Mel Gibson and Kanye West. All of her post-October 7 examples are not descriptions of antisemitic sentiments but anti-Israel sentiments. To be against Israel is not antisemitic. To be merely critical of Israel is definitely not antisemitic. It’s absurd to call protests against Israel inherently antisemitic when the largest demonstration in the U.S. was led by a Jewish organization and Israeli Jews themselves have begun to protest.

In fact, mere weeks before the October 7 attack, it was not controversial to criticize Trump for conflating Israel with all Jewish people. He has long talked to American Jews like Israel is our true country rather than the one he led and hopes to lead again. The far right in the U.S. overwhelmingly supports Israel despite — or, rather, because of — their rampant antisemitism. They want American Jews to embrace Israel as our home and let the U.S. be Christian — and then, for some, upon the rapture, the world.

The increased violence against Palestinians by the Israeli government has already and will continue to lead to an increase in antisemitism. It’s an inevitability if people ranging from comedians to President Joe Biden continue to conflate Israel and Judaism. Family members and politicians have insisted this is because Hamas does not want to destroy Israel but to “destroy all Jews.” Even if this were true, it would not justify imitating their reduction, but it’s even more inexcusable considering Hamas’ 2017 charter says the opposite.

If the narrative continues that to criticize Israel is to criticize Jews worldwide, this conflation will catch on further, and Jews everywhere will suffer for the Israeli government’s crimes.

Your fear does not matter simply because you are afraid. As a trans woman, I’ve had to learn the difference between hate that upsets me and may signal an increased violence in society vs. hate that puts my life in immediate danger. When I read a random comment online or even when someone shouts at me on public transportation, I’ve acquired the ability to measure my reaction. I would not function out in the world if every negative encounter left me fearing for my life. This isn’t to belittle the emotion of these experiences or the annoyance of, say, having to wait for the next bus in order to deescalate an encounter. Nor is it to suggest physical violence could never occur. I’ve just found that engaging with the reality of the harm done leaves me far better equipped to deal with it.

While reading an antisemitic comment on the internet or seeing an antisemitic poster at a largely Jewish-inclusive protest is upsetting, it is not equal to actual acts of violence. If this is the extent of the antisemitism someone has experienced in recent weeks, I’d urge them to reflect on whether they are engaging with the reality of that harm. Words matter, but they matter more from the president of the United States or even a comedian with a platform than they do from a random commenter or protester. When over 9,000 Palestinian people have been killed in Gaza since October 7 and acts of violence have been enacted against Muslim Americans, fear of what might happen to you and your family is selfish at best. At worst, it’s a cry for more violence.

We need to replace our fears with facts. We need to let go of our cultural boogeymen — serial killers, white vans, terrorists — and confront the real dangers in our society. The first step is accepting the fact that you will never have a guarantee of safety. No amount of money given to the police or the military will cure the world of its dangers. It will, however, make things worse. Our desire to cheat death cannot be used as an excuse to kill others.

Violence is cyclical. Police, prisons, the military, colonialism all create more violence that leads to more violence. So get rid of your Ring cameras, stop calling the police, stop viewing every stranger as a threat, and free yourself from fear.

If people calling for a ceasefire — a literal end to violence — feels like a threat against you and your family, the problem is not that call to action. The problem is your fear.

Palestinian Liberation Is Queer Liberation

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If you are a queer and/or trans person who is pro-Palestine, it’s likely you’ve been on the receiving end of some form of the insidious statement that you would be killed, brutalized, beheaded for your queerness in Palestine. Perhaps a complete stranger on the internet hurled this at you; perhaps it came from a loved one. It’s an absurd (not to mention Islamophobic, racist, and counterproductive) thing to say to anyone. It’s also, ironically, homophobic in and of itself. At least, it is if we think of homophobia to comprise not just hatred or discrimination toward queer people but also a privileging of certain queer lives over others.

I live in Florida, where we hear similar sentiments when it comes to the hurricanes that batter this place. During the most recent hurricane season, as a storm approached Florida’s Gulf coast, I saw someone reply to a tweet about the news saying it’s what DeSantis deserved for Don’t Say Gay. As if a hurricane would somehow harm a governor with easy means to evacuate and shelter more than it would the hundreds of houseless queer youth living in Central Florida. Every election cycle, that GIF of Bugs Bunny sawing Florida off the map resurfaces. Travel advisories warn out-of-state LGBTQ folks from avoiding traveling here and never once acknowledge the LGBTQ people who live here. These examples are not even remotely on the same level of attempting to justify genocide, but they come from a similar ignorance. Similarly, when Texas was hit by devastating winter storms that took out the state’s power grid, there was also this undercurrent of snark about how Texas — and Texans — deserved it, how this was punishment for the state being oppressive toward LGBTQ folks. A red state deserves to bleed, so it seemed these people believed. At least 246 people died that winter as a result of the storms.

Again, these are very small things compared to what is happening right now in Palestine, a place not hypothetically being cleaved off the map like that stupid GIF but quite literally by Israel’s ongoing occupation. But these things are all connected to the same harmful erasure of queer lives in certain contexts. Queer people exist in Texas, in Florida, in Palestine. Queer people are everywhere, and to wield homophobia as a tool to justify the oppression or destruction of others is in fact to just replicate hate, harm, and oppression, not fix it.

Queering the Map, a community-based and collaborative project that seeks to digitally archive LGBTQ+ experiences, desires, narratives, and personal truths via an interactive map where queer and trans folks can input their personal stories attached to geographical locations, has made an explicit effort to highlight the existence of queer Palestinians. It’s a queer map not just in the surface-level sense of mapping queer missives onto places but in reimagining place in a radical way. I’ve loved Queering the Map for a while, but I especially love it for this. It proves the project’s mission really is to queer the map. Maps are produced by and reinforce colonialism and empire, and here is a version of a map that challenges borders. It recognizes Palestine despite the fact the U.S. does not. In London, a group called The Dyke Project hacked a bunch of display ads on the U.K. transit system, replacing ads with images screenshot from Queering the Map highlighting queer Palestinian experiences.

📢BREAKING📢 we have HACKED over 100 bus adverts across London’s TfL network 🚇🚌🚏We replaced ads with stories from queer Palestinians, and a call for an end to the occupation 🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/QngGhjBVFx

— The Dyke Project (@theDykeProject) October 27, 2023

Just like there are queers everywhere, homophobia, transphobia, and the persecution of LGBTQ+ folks exists all over the world and certainly in our own backyards here in the U.S. To single out Gaza reinforces Islamophobic assumptions. It also represents a complete disconnection from the realities of what’s happening in the United States right now. Murders of trans people doubled in the U.S. from 2017 to 2021. It is not technically illegal to be queer or trans in the U.S., but states throughout the entire country are trying to legislate us to the margins. This is especially true for trans folks, whose access to medical care and basic human rights are significantly restricted. You’re going to sit here and try to spin some hypothetical “gotchya” moment about what my life as a queer person would be in Palestine when I live in a state where a doctor can decide not to treat me if they don’t feel like it on religious grounds? Get outta here.

Everyone deserves safety, autonomy, and basic human rights. In the time since I started writing this, I’ve seen op-eds and social media posts pop up suggesting that “queers for Palestine” is akin to saying “chickens for KFC” or “minks for fur.” Aside from the dehumanization and condescension of those ridiculous comparisons, they also just aren’t accurate. They set up a hierarchy that true queer liberation seeks to dismantle. Global oppression of queer folks does not supersede any other form of violent, racist oppression. Fighting for Palestinian rights does not fundamentally take away from our own rights. Imperialism constantly constructs and maintains anti-queerness, and anti-imperialist work benefits all queer people.

I’ve seen people online peddle the misguided idea that Palestinian freedom and queer freedom are at odds with each other because queer Palestinians seek asylum from persecution in Israel. Indeed, Israel has an official policy to grant temporary stay permits to LGTBQ+ folks from the West Bank and in some cases has issued work permits. Israel also has cultivated a reputation for being an ultra queer friendly destination, though as queer feminist Jewish activist Ashley Bohrer has written, the deliberate pinkwashing of Israel seriously obscures a lot of the lived realities of queer Palestinians living in Israel: “This so-called gay-friendly state of Israel preys on the vulnerability of queer Palestinians, a vulnerability that many of us who live in ‘progressive’ ‘human rights-friendly’ countries still face.”

A longread feature in the independent nonprofit magazine run by Israeli and Palestinian journalists +972 Magazine similarly highlights stories from asylum-seeking queer Palestinians that contradict the dominant narrative of Israel as a LGBTQ+ safe haven, suggesting it’s only a safe haven for some. These queer Palestinians often face financial abuse, restrictions on access to healthcare, and other forms of discrimination and abuse. And while many of the sources interviewed indeed experienced violence in their homeland, it’s clear from reading these testimonies that things are not as simple as it being safe for all LGBTQ+ folks in Israel and unsafe in Palestine. In 2014, an op-ed published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz urged the IDF to stop its practice of blackmailing gay Palestinians. So even within Israel, there is pushback against the notion that Israel can function as a refuge for queer Palestinians.

Social justice movements do not exist in a vacuum, often intersecting in meaningful ways. There is a long history of queer artists, activists, and thinkers speaking and writing extensively on the importance of standing in solidarity with Palestine. In fact, almost all of my own personal consciousness raising about Palestine came from listening to and reading queer activists — first in a collective for women of color I was involved in at University of Michigan, and then far beyond my personal circles when I started reading more queer theorists and activists during my early years of coming out.

“I do not believe that our sexuality, gender expression and bodies can be liberated without making a ferocious mobilization against imperialist war and racism an integral part of our struggle,” Leslie Feinberg said at the Al-Fatiha international retreat in Washington in 2002. I highly recommend reading the linked full transcript of the speech. Feinberg explicitly touches on the problems with pitting queer folks against Palestine:

“…the spin-doctors of war are making every appeal to the progressive movements to back the imperial juggernaut as though this is a defensive and progressive war. They said part of the reason they are bombing Afghanistan is to ‘liberate’ women there. Then why did they earlier arm and back the counter-revolutionary forces that overturned women’s rights there?

They say we should fight against nations whose religion does not welcome l/g/b/t people. Yet they have no problem propping up anti-gay regimes that do their bidding. And when they talk about anti-gay religion, they don’t mean the church that is mired in child abuse revelations and blaming gay people for it. Or the Christian right wing that labels us “child molesters” to block our rights. Our fight is here!”

Bisexual poet and essayist June Jordan also has expressed solidarity with Palestine through her work and words. Her poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” is dedicated “to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.”

You can watch a video of Angela Davis reading June Jordan’s “Moving towards Home” — another one of her works explicitly about solidarity with Palestine.

In 1989, Audre Lorde spoke on Palestine in her commencement speech at Oberlin College: “Encouraging your congresspeople to press for a peaceful solution in the Middle East, and for recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people, is not altruism, it is survival.” This was over three decades ago. (You can read more about the long and ongoing legacy Black feminist thought and perspectives on Palestine at BlackWomenRadicals.com.)

Lesbian and Jewish author Sarah Schulman began the work of re-educating herself about Israel/Palestine and interrogating her political consciousness of the Middle East in her book Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. Recently, she penned a piece for New York Magazine furthering this work. “The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence,” she writes.

Schulman is also an HIV/AIDS activist who worked with ACT UP in New York at the height of the HIV/AIDS movement in the late 80s and early 90s. She remains committed to documenting ACT UP’s important history, recently publishing the urgent book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993.  It’s easy to see a direct correlation between the recent action by Jewish Voice for Peace in New York to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and past actions by ACT UP. In fact, Jewish Voice for Peace — which is a Jewish collective of anti-Zionist activists organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle — made it clear the group was inspired by the work of ACT UP.

In January 1991, ACT UP organized the Day of Desperation, a massive protest at NYC’s Grand Central station. On October 27, 2023, thousands of Jewish activists and allies followed suit with a massive action at Grand Central station calling for a ceasefire. Many are saying it’s the largest act of civil disobedience New York has seen in two decades. In an Instagram post with side-by-side photos from both historical events, Jewish Voice for Peace writes:

“The iconic 1991 ACT UP Day of Desperation at Grand Central inspired queer anti-Zionist Jews to scale that same marble ticket office in the world’s biggest train station 32 years later to again disrupt business as usual and plaster an urgent message over the train schedule: NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE. PALESTINIANS SHOULD BE FREE.”

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ACT UP leader Gregg Bordowitz, who was one of the “ONE AIDS DEATH EVERY 8 MINUTES” banner holders at the Day of Desperation in 1991, said of the recent Jewish Voice for Peace action: “HEALTHCARE NOT WARFARE is still a relevant demand as Congress prepares to give enormous military funding to Israel while key Republican congressional members block the dispersal of funds to PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), a 20 year old program which has saved more than 25 million lives around the world.” Here again, we see a direct link being made between the fight for queer life and for Palestinian life.

Including leaders of ACT UP, plenty of LGBTQ+ people showed up for JVP’s action at Grand Central. Trans activist and actor Indya Moore as well as trans writer, activist, and sex worker rights advocate Cecilia Gentili were among the hundreds of people arrested at the action. All these movements for liberation are connected.

Queer Muslim and queer Jewish activists have been calling for other queer folks to realize the importance of coalition building for Palestinian freedom, and it’s time to listen if you haven’t been already. The most urgent thing we can do right now is call for a ceasefire, though that is just where the work starts. All of the great queer thinkers I quoted in this piece have said much more about Palestine, and I encourage you to seek out their words but also, of course, the words of queer Palestinians who are here and whose queerness must not be erased, questioned, or used against them.

Where To Give Money and Take Action To Support Palestinians Right Now

feature image by Ilia Yefimovich / dpa via Getty Images

We at Autostraddle stand against the occupation of Palestine and the increased violence in the days since the tragic, horrifying attack in Israel that resulted in 1,400 Israeli people killed, 3,500 injured, and an estimated 200 still being held hostage by Hamas. We can grieve these losses and hurt for and with those families and communities while also recognizing that the response from the Israeli government, endorsed by the U.S. government, signals an act of genocide against the Palestinian people and this violence must stop. No person anywhere should be subject to any of this terror.

Gaza currently faces a humanitarian crisis beyond measure. In a situation the International Committee of the Red Cross described as “abhorrent,” Israel hascut off water, food and power supply to much of the 2.3 million residents of Gaza while also demanding 1.1 million people to move south in anticipation of a ground invasion. But there is nowhere for them to go. Hospitals are running out of supplies, and aid workers and journalists have been among the victims of Israeli air strikes. Pathways for delivering aid to Palestinians have also been attacked. We grieve for the 2,750 Palestinians killed and at least 10,000 wounded in the past two weeks. As we write this, Al-Jazeera is reporting that a hospital in Gaza where thousands of Palestinian civilians were sheltering and receiving medical care was just hit by an Israeli airstrike. (ETA: Israel and Hamas have blamed each other for the attack on the hospital, there is seemingly no official confirmation one way or the other as to whom was responsible as of this writing. Either way, the victims of the attack are in increasingly dire need of help.)

It can feel helpless witnessing these atrocities from thousands of miles away, so we wanted to put together a list of resources. If you have money, we hope you’ll donate it to the groups providing aid on the ground. If you have time, we hope you’ll protest alongside the groups fighting for peace and decolonization. If you have neither, we hope you’ll at least take a moment to contact your representative and urge them to end their support of this violence.

The current circumstances are beyond the point of silence or inaction — they have been for a long time. If you’d like to read more about the occupation, Drew has put together a list of pieces she’s read this week.

Action Aid: Action Aid has established an emergency fund to provide humanitarian aid to Palestine, deliver essential relief and sustain long-term disaster preparedness around the world.

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights:  Gaza-based human rights center dedicated to protecting the fundamental rights of Palestinians and hold perpetrators of international law violations to account.

Anera: Non-profit responding to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Itemizes what certain monetary donations will enable (e.g., $100 to provide a displaced family with 7 days of food, $30 to provide Gaza’s Central Blood Bank Society with 16 blood bags.)

Baitulmaal: Provides humanitarian aid to underserved populations around the world and already has field workers providing emergency response aid in Gaza.

Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): This group has been donating medical supplies and was providing medical care in the region until Israeli airstrikes made it impossible for them to safely coordinate humanitarian operations in Gaza. However, they still have Palestinian staff working in hospitals in Gaza and are preparing medical teams and humanitarian supplies to send into Gaza as soon as possible. You can read more about their work in Gaza here.

Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement: An Israeli non-for-profit founded in 2005 with the goal of protecting the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents.

If Not Now is a movement of American Jews organizing our communities to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis. They have been organizing massive protests and also have opportunities to contribute financially.

The International Committee of the Red Cross: The ICRC is a neutral, independent humanitarian organization who are working to improve access to water and electricity in Gaza and support livelihood projects throughout the occupied territories. They’ve been delivering medicine and other aid to Gaza City and have declared “we’ve been in the area since 1967, and we intend to stay.”

Islamic Relief USA: Islamic Relief is working with local partners to provide emergency relief to families in Gaza including food aid, essential non-food items such as hygiene kits, and vital medical supplies.

Jewish Voices for Peace is the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. They are organizing on the ground and politically and have options for activism and financial gifting.

Medical Aid for Palestinians: A UK-based group already on the ground in Gaza, where they work to stock hospitals with essential medicines, disposables and other healthcare supplies.

Mercy Corps: A long established and well-known humanitarian org that takes a two-pronged approach of providing immediate aid while also establishing long-term, lasting aid solutions.

Middle East Children’s Alliance: MECA works to protect the rights and improve the lives of children in Palestine and Syrian refugees through aid, empowerment and education.

Muslim Around the World Project: MATW is an organization that has been providing life-saving aid in the form of medical aid, food, clean water, and shelter for the last five years.

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund: PCRF is the primary humanitarian organization in Palestine delivering medical relief and humanitarian aid. One child has been killed in Palestine every seven minutes since October 7th.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights: The Centre is an independent Palestinian human rights org based in Gaza City. They were established in 1995 by Palestinian lawyers and human rights activists to protect human rights.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel: PHRI provides services free of charge to people with limited or no access to health care–primarily migrants, refugees, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East: This group that provides assistance and protection for Palestinian refugees is seeking $104 million to support a “multi-sectoral” humanitarian response covering food, health and protection needs for up to 250k people seeking shelter throughout the Gaza Strip, but with current funding can only continue to do so through the end of the month.

World Food Programme: The WFP has been attempting to deliver high-energy biscuits to Gaza.

As a Jewish Anti-Zionist, Here’s What I’ve Been Reading This Week

feature image by Kevin Dietsch / Staff via Getty Images

Like so many of my political awakenings, I came to anti-Zionism through art.

In 2014, The Freedom Theatre spoke at my university as part of an Art as Resistance series. Located in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, The Freedom Theatre was established to use art as a tool to address fear, depression, and trauma among children. The representatives from the organization talked to us about their education programs, their theatre school, and their full-scale productions. They also spoke of the challenges they face doing this work in the West Bank.

The Freedom Theatre is not a radical organization, but as an American Jew taught to unequivocally support Israel, the talk was eye-opening. Afterward, I spoke to three Israeli classmates of mine who were studying abroad and they educated me further. They had served in the IDF but now denounced their service. They confirmed the talk we had just attended was not false propaganda, but a mild sample of the horrors they’d witnessed.

I signed up for The Freedom Theatre’s mailing list and made it a goal to learn more about the occupation. I’d been raised to study the Holocaust and say, “never again.” The realization that “never again” only meant “never again for Jewish people” was harrowing.

After nearly a decade, I’m still pursuing my goal to learn more about the occupation. I do not think it is uniquely complicated, but I do think our world is always complicated, and there’s always more to learn. During a fraught conversation with a family member this week, it became clear that I’m far more knowledgeable about the last two decades of the occupation than I am the early years of Zionism and the 20^th century violence in Palestine. That is a gap I hope to fill in the coming months and years.

But a lack of expertise should not be an excuse to turn away; it should be an invitation to learn. The only thing I was taught in my childhood that wasn’t pro-Israel  was that “the Israel/Palestine conflict” was just too complicated. If this is how you feel — as friends and family and voices you trust post conflicting statements — I’d encourage you to learn more, not less.

Rather than make any arguments of my own, I’d like to share with you what I’ve been reading this week as well as some other pieces I’ve read and watched over the years. Whether you feel completely ignorant on this topic or were raised to embrace Zionism, I hope you’ll read these words with an open mind. Even if you’re someone who will never agree with me, I know it’s important we try to understand each other — we must see the humanity in every person.

“We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” by Arielle Angel in Jewish Currents

“Most of our internal disagreements center on the correct container for our grief. Our staff is not unlike the rest of the Jewish world in that many of us are only a matter of degrees from someone who died or was taken hostage. How can we publicly grieve the death and suffering of Israelis without these feelings being politically metabolized against Palestinians?”

“Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes from Here” by Isaac Chotiner, interviewing Tareq Baconi, in The New Yorker

“If we want to think about Hamas and its political project, the group still doesn’t speak on behalf of all Palestinians. Palestinians are not all Islamists. The bigger issue here is that the Palestinian political project, which was the P.L.O., which was actually more in line with anti-colonial movements in the seventies and the eighties, was equally treated as a terrorist organization by the West until it was decimated both institutionally and through the assassination and imprisonment of Palestinian political leaders. This was the decimation of the political project of the anti-colonial movement. And, in the Palestinian case, it worked, or worked temporarily. But the political project right now is reconstituting itself, and so far Hamas is the loudest manifestation of that project.”

“Gaza’s shock attack has terrified Israelis. It should also reveal the context” by Haggai Matar in +972 Magazine

“The dread Israelis are feeling right now, myself included, is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, and under the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza. The responses we are hearing from many Israelis today — of people calling to ‘flatten Gaza,’ that ‘these are savages, not people you can negotiate with,’ ‘they are murdering whole families,’ ‘there’s no room to talk with these people’ — are exactly what I have heard occupied Palestinians say about Israelis countless times.”

“Jewish Grief Must Not Be Used As a Weapon of War” by Stefanie Fox in The Nation

“It is in our tradition to sit shiva for seven days—to pause to reflect and to mourn. But I cannot sit back while Jewish grief and trauma is weaponized by the Israeli government to destroy Gaza. As I write this, Israel just announced that the 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza—half of them children—will have 24 hours to flee, which the UN has already deemed impossible. The US government is beating the drums of war, rushing to send more weapons to the Israeli military to wreak utter devastation.”

“The Gaza Bombshell” by David Rose in Vanity Fair

Note: This article is from 2008. I’d been seeing people use the election of Hamas as a justification for the invasion of Gaza and wanted to better understand that election, as well as the ways American colonialism creates violence around the world. If it needs to be said: just like American citizens did not deserve to be murdered for the election of George W. Bush, Palestinian citizens do not deserve to be murdered for the election of Hamas, regardless of the circumstances.

“Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.”

“Where Is My Birthright?” by Suha Najjar in The Michigan Daily

Note: I’ve been trying to better understand my family and peers who support Israel and I kept thinking about Birthright. I never went on this trip because I came to my anti-Zionism pretty early into college, but I know how much it shaped people I know. This first article from 2014 is by a Palestinian writer, the article that follows is a New York Times piece from 2019 about the evolving responses to Birthright, and the Jewish Currents roundtable, also from 2019, includes five conflicting essays about how to have an ethical relationship to Birthright. 

“I am Palestinian; I am from Huj, yet I am not allowed to visit Palestine. I am not allowed to leave the 136 square mile open-air prison densely populated by 1.7 million people. On the other hand, my Jewish peers in my American high school would come back every summer boasting about their birthright trips. Most of them were born here, and their parents and grandparents were also born in the United States. Many times they were of European descent. However, none of them were actually born in Israel. Until this day I don’t understand how it is their right to visit a country which they have never been to or have never known to be home, but I, who — like so many generations before me — was born in Palestine, am not even allowed to visit my own home. How is it that other kids are getting free trips to travel across the world, yet when I was in the Jabalia refugee camp, I was not allowed to drive a few miles to visit the place where my father’s history yearns to be affirmed? Another “holy” site of sorts, off limits. Where was my birthright?”

“Birthright Trips, a Rite of Passage for Many Jews, Are Now a Target of Protest” by Farah Stockman in The New York Times

“Ms. Nagel said the protests had prompted an important conversation that Jewish Americans needed to have. She said that she, too, had been attending more Jewish religious and social events since the trip.

‘I’ve been to more Shabbats and Havdalahs,” she said, referring to the Jewish Sabbath and a ritual marking its end. “What’s different is that at our Shabbats and Havdalahs, we talk about racism, sexism and the occupation.’”

“Roundtable: The Ethical Response to Birthright” in Jewish Currents

“In the aftermath, IfNotNow fielded questions from across the political spectrum as to why we supported participants in walking off Birthright trips. Israel’s liberal defenders would ask why we left the trips instead of staying and continuing to ask questions. In fact, I did attempt to ask questions in an effort to change the minds of the 40 other people on my trip. But my questions were dismissed and ignored as we regularly drove past the separation wall without any acknowledgment of what lies on the other side. By contrast, when we walked off, we were able to livestream the whole thing to Facebook and to alert international media. Videos and articles about our action (including in the New York Times) went viral, allowing us to reach millions and to challenge the widely accepted notion that Birthright is apolitical. By the end of the summer of 2018, if you were an American Jew between the ages of 18 and 26 googling ‘Birthright’ to sign up for a trip, you would see articles and videos about our actions. The media coverage generated by these actions did far more good than asking questions of our tour guides did.”

“My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’” by Refaat Alareer in The New York Times

Note: This article is from 2021.

“Then comes the intolerable indecision: I am caught between wanting to take the family outside, despite the missiles, shrapnel and falling debris, and staying at home, like sitting ducks for the American-made, Israeli-piloted planes. We stayed at home. At least we would die together, I thought.

The deafening strikes destroy Gaza’s infrastructure, cutting off roads leading to hospitals and water supplies, bringing down access to the internet. Many of the targets Israel hits have no strategic value. Israel knows this, and knows how it unnerves us. I wonder what those officers do in their command centers: Do they draw straws on which block to annihilate? Do they roll a dice?”

“Solidarity With Palestine Is Not a Crime” by Nima Shirazi in The Nation

“In our Israel/Palestine narrative, at best, only the most perfect Palestinian victims are allowed to be mourned, their murders blamed on the faceless, sinister entity known as Hamas, not the actual Israeli pilot who followed orders to flatten their home with a missile or fire white phosphorus at their ambulance. Peaceful resistance to occupation, apartheid, and colonization is met with false accusations of anti-Semitism and outlawed. When Palestinians in Gaza mobilized en masse for a year and a half against the siege and occupation with the symbolic Great March of Return toward the fence that separates the blockaded territory from southern Israel, IDF snipers shot and killed over 200 protesters and wounded more than 33,000.”

“Against the Pinkwashing of Israel” by Ashley Bohrer in Al Jazeera

Note: This article is from 2014. 

“Israeli LGBT organisation Aguda estimates that around 2,000 Palestinian queers live in Tel-Aviv at any one time, most of them illegally. The dismantling of economic stability and opportunity inside Palestine forces LGBT Palestinians to leave their homes and to live as undocumented, precarious workers in Israel, where they have no protections against harassment, rape, intimidation, or job discrimination, and in which finding safe housing and steady employment are scarce.

The options presented to LGBTQ Palestinians are living as stateless, undocumented migrants or braving the constant violence and indignity of living in occupied territories. Neither of these sounds like LGBT liberation to me.”

“Imagining Myself in Palestine” by Randa Jarrar in Guernica Magazine

Note: This article is from 2012. 

“Finally, they took me to a room in the corner of the baggage claim area. It was becoming clear to me that at Ben Gurion, unjust things happened in corners. The guards asked me to open my bags. I did as I was told. I noted that the room was filthy. The Israelis were concerned with showing a clean and gleaming exterior—the floors of the airport outside shone–but for suspected threats and people like myself, behind closed doors, tucked away in dirty corners, they hadn’t bothered. A very butch young woman asked me to follow her. She led me to yet another room, where the walls were faded and filthy, and the floor was covered in dirty carpet, littered with small bits of paper and hair clips. It reeked of intimidation, and of humiliation.”

“Why I believe the BDS movement has never been more important than now” by Omar Barghouti in The Guardian

“The anti-racist, nonviolent BDS movement, supported by labor and farmers unions, as well as racial, social, gender and climate justice movements that collectively represent tens of millions worldwide, is inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the US civil rights movement. But it is rooted in a century-old, often unacknowledged heritage of indigenous Palestinian popular resistance to settler colonialism and apartheid. This nonviolent resistance has taken many forms, from mass workers’ strikes, to women-led marches, to public diplomacy, to building universities, to literature and art.”

“Explanations Are Not Excuses” by Sarah Schulman in New York Magazine

“There is always, of course, the choice to end the siege of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank and end the second-class reality of Palestinians living in Israel. Make everyone equal citizens with the same rights to vote, passports, roads, universities. The reason this solution of just reconciliation, known as ‘One State,’ is not yet on the table is because of this selective reality: this panic that equalizing Palestinians in Israel would be allowing an enemy in, one that is fundamentally opposed to Israeli existence. But what this fear overlooks is that Palestine, like every society in the world, is a multidimensional society. Like Jews and Americans and Israelis, Palestinians contain multiple factions and religious perspectives — Muslim, Christian, Druse — and they hold a wide variety of political visions. The only thing they share is the desire to be free. They would never be able to act like a united block and all vote in the same way, for example, in the same way that we cannot. Because they are human, as we know ourselves to be. To fear unanimity is to imagine they are different from everyone else on earth.”

Some Other Things I’ve Watched and Read Over the Years:

• First, I recommend signing up for the Freedom Theatre’s mailing list and signing up for the Palestine Museum’s mailing list.. Over the years, I’ve learned so much about Palestinian art, culture, and experience.
• My second article ever written for Autostraddle was a review of Maysaloun Hamoud’s incredible film In Between. I appreciate how this movie shows the intersecting experiences of sexism, homophobia, and occupation. No point of oppression excuses the other — instead they compound upon the lives of these three Palestinian women living in Tel Aviv. It is currently streaming for free on Kanopy.
• The response this week has been frighteningly reminiscent of post-9/11 sentiment. I was too young and sheltered to really understand the bigotry and jingoism at that time, but learned a lot from reading How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America by Moustafa Bayoumi.
• At TIFF 2022, one of the best films I saw was Firas Khoury’s Alam. It was supposed to screen last week at the Boston Palestinian Film Festival before that was canceled. It will next be screening at the Other Israel Film Festival in New York on November 1st. If you’re not in New York, keep an eye out for its streaming release next year. It’s such a powerful film that honors the youth of the teenage activists in its story.
• There are too many things to list, but I’d also like to add how much my anti-Zionism is born from being a student of the Holocaust. Understanding the circumstances that led to that genocide — rather than just writing off Nazis as evil — has led to a deeper understanding of cyclical violence. Humans are capable of horrific acts, but I cannot — I will not — believe humans are inherently horrifying.

Here Are Some Things I Still Want to Read and Watch:

• The Question of Palestine by Edward Said
• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
• Shell Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault by Mohammed Omer
• Jake Witzenfeld’s Oriented, a documentary about three gay Palestinian friends living in Tel Aviv