gender – praag.org

Lesbians, Transgenders, Pedophile Priests will top Oscar Nominees

Get ready. This is going to be an interesting year at the Oscars.

The movies that are getting into position for Best Picture nominations are not “Driving Miss Daisy” material.

One of the leading candidates is “Spotlight,” Tom McCarthy’s exciting telling of how Boston Globe reporters unmasked 90 pedophile priests. The film has an all star cast including Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Liev Schreiber. They will all be contenders in the Best Supporting Acto race.

“Carol” is a love story about two lesbians in 1952 New York. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are the lovers, and their work is exceptional. Director Todd Haynes, the actresses, and cinematographer Ed Lachman will all be up for awards.

“Grandma” stars Lily Tomlin as a hippie grandmother, pot smoking lesbian who’s trying to help her granddaughter raise enough money for an abortion. Tomlin is absolutely sterling, and leads my list of potential Best Actress nominees.

Then there’s the transgender section: Eddie Redmayne plays a man who becomes a woman in “The Danish Girl.” Redmayne is absolutely spot on as he makes the transition with his loyal– and unusually understanding– wife (Alicia Vikander) by his side. Tom Hooper’s movie is exquisite.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if five of the eight or nine Best Picture nominees include “Spotlight,” “The Danish Girl,” “Carol,” “Grandma,” and “Spotlight.” Whoever hosts the Academy Awards is going to have a lot of fun summarizing these films. Really, only Billy Crystal could pull off a proper parody of “The Danish Girl.”

Other potential Best Picture nominees will be less cutting edge sexually: “Bridge of Spies” from Steven Spielberg, “Steve Jobs” from Danny Boyle, Robert Zemeckis’s “The Walk,” Ridley Scott’s “The Martian,” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” don’t involve gender issues.

Source: Showbiz411

Chicago gay parade disrupted by #blacklivesmatter

Chicago’s 47th annual gay pride parade was disrupted several times by the usual city disruptions — gang activity, gunshots, and drunks — but the event was also disrupted by a car driving into a group of bystanders. Then there was an even larger interruption by “black lives matter” protesters.

Just about every Chicago parade these days features gunfire in the perimeters as gangs clash with police and drunks have probably been a parade disruption since forever. But this year a man tried to drive into the parade route, ramming his car into some bystanders — but not hurting anyone seriously.

Police swarmed the vehicle, smashed in the rear window and yanked out the driver, a middle-aged white man, and arrested him. Chicago police have released no details on the man’s identity nor his motivations for ramming the barricades for the parade.

But by far the biggest disruption was from a large group of “black lives matter” protesters. The group was joined by members of the black queer community of Chicago who announced the disruption on their website.

After noting that they had “purposefully disrupted the Chicago Pride Parade,” the queer group explained their reasoning.

“We do so,” the group said, “because our people are dying at the hands of police, military and state-funded militias around the globe. We do so because we refuse to be tokenized by the same corporations that sponsor state violence, refuse a living wage and profit off our poverty. We do so because young queer people need a better outlet to celebrate themselves than a mire of consumption and sexual violence.”

The queer group was also attacked by the “black lives matter” protesters who held signs and walked as a group to push their own message.

Source: Breitbart.com

UCT’s SRC vice riles gays

A Facebook status update written by UCT’s black SRC vice-president Zizipho Pae has sparked massive uproar on social media and the student community in Cape Town.

Many interpreted Pae’s status as being related to the US Supreme Court ruling last week requiring states to allow same-sex marriages.

”We are institutionalising and normalising sin! Sin. May God have mercy on us,” Pae wrote.

Her statement came two days after the US court’s decision which effectively legalised same-sex marriage in all 50 states in the country.

Pae’s comment has left the mostly white lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community seething.

Source: IOL

French Muslim grocery store open for gender-specific days

A grocery store in Bordeaux has caused a furor among local residents after the store’s owners, who are newly converted to Islam, reserved gender-specific days for its customers to make sure that men’s and women’s paths never cross.

The “De L’Orient à L’Occidental” grocery in Bordeaux has put a sign on its front door saying that “sisters” can only shop during the weekend, while “brothers” are welcome at the store twice as often – on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Bordeaux Mayor Alain Juppé has condemned the initiative, calling it “unacceptable,” and saying it “totally contradicts the republic’s rules of equality and diversity.”

The mayor has called on the authorities to “address this issue in order to stop such discriminatory practices and implement measures, which the law provides in such circumstances,” LePoint.fr reported. Discrimination cases can see penalties of up to three years in prison and fines of up to €45,000.

The head of French equality group ACSE, Naima Charai, wrote on Twitter that gender-related opening hours are “unimaginable and unacceptable,” adding that “respect for the republic” is supposed to be 24/7.

The grand imam of Bordeaux, Tareq Oubrou, appeared to be among those who slammed gender-related opening hours at the “De L’Orient à L’Occidental” grocery store.

“We never saw that at the time of the Prophet! The markets were mixed,” Oubrou told France 3 Aquitaine, adding that the practice of gender-specific days for customers “seemed a bit odd in a world where diversity is an established culture.”

According to the imam, it was more like the owners’ “psychological than theological choice.”

The owner of the business, Jean-Baptiste Michalon, has defended his move, telling French newspaper Sud Ouest that he “didn’t know it was forbidden” by law. “It was for a savvy public that knows that our practice of [Muslim] religion does not allow the mix.”

“It’s not an obligation, everyone does what he wants,” said Michalon, a recent convert Islam who has taken the name Yahya.

Boys will be… girls

One of the largest toy chains in Sweden published a gender-neutral Christmas catalogue, which pictured boys playing with dolls and girls holding toy machine guns. The move has reignited a debate in Sweden over the proper place of gender roles.

Top Toy has produced children’s Christmas catalogues in Denmark and Sweden for both Toys R Us and BR. Though the catalogues’ page layouts are the same in both countries, the gender of the pictured kids is reversed in the Swedish edition.

“With the new gender thinking, there is nothing that is right or wrong. It’s not a boy or a girl thing, it’s a toy for children,” Top Toy director of sales Jan Nyberg told TT news agency.

The Danish catalogue showed a boy wielding a toy machine gun, which was replaced by a girl in the Swedish version. The “Hello Kitty” page of the Swedish catalogue also replaced a girl with a boy, and a one girl’s pink t-shirt was turned into light blue.

The move is a profound shift in strategy for Top Toy. In 2008, the company was criticized by Swedish advertising watchdog Reklamombudsmannen (RO) for encouraging outdated gender roles with catalogues that featured boys dressed as superheroes and girls as princesses.

Since then, Top Toy has modified its strategy based on RO’s advice.

“We have produced the catalogues in a completely different way this year,” Nyberg said. “For several years, we have found that the gender debate has grown so strong in the Swedish market that we… have had to adjust.”

Sweden is the frontline for the gender debate.

Since 2008, the government has spent 110 million Swedish crowns ($16.3 million) on promoting gender equality in schools, including the introduction of laws requiring teachers to actively work to reverse gender stereotypes.

The country also proposed a new single gender-neutral pronoun – ‘hen’ – to replace ‘he’ and ‘she’ in order to minimize gender stereotyping.

In January 2012, children’s author Jesper Lundqvist’s release ‘Kivi and Monster Dog,’ a book that uses ‘hen.’ The move sparked debate in Sweden and worldwide about the proper place of gender roles.

Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, claimed that the use of the word hen is an example of notions of gender equality going too far.

Claeson argues that mixed messages about their gender can be harmful for kids: “It is important to have your gender confirmed to you as a child. This does not limit children; it makes them confident about their identity,” she told the Christian Science Monitor.

Phoenix sends only non-white police to Washington

They’re supposed to be the cream of the crop, going to Washington to protect the newly elected American president and represent Phoenix, Arizona.

But the police association said the Phoenix Police Department used race to determine who’s going – and that’s not all CBS 5 News, a local TV channel has learned.

One of the officers who’s set to pack up and head to Washington when we elect a new president is on the Brady List – a compilation of officers whose honesty and integrity is in question.

“I couldn’t believe it, because we sent officers back four years ago and that was done on seniority,” said William Buividas with the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, or PLEA.

The Phoenix Police Department hand-picked a group of 40 or so officers to go, but the way they did so has PLEA up in arms.

“In this case the department decided to use ethnic and gender as a basis for selection,” Buividas said.

He showed CBS 5 News a group of officers from one division who were chosen. Buividas said several officers were passed up despite their seniority.

“The two alternates have seniority, are senior to every person who’s going on the list,” Buividas said.

He also showed CBS 5 News a string of emails with the department in which they admitted to using race, gender and ethnicity in their selection process, saying it was the expressed desire of the police chief.

“Why somebody with very little seniority gets to go but somebody with 20, 25 years on gets passed over because they’re the wrong color,” Buividas said.

But that’s not all. In this sample we found one officer, Diana Pineda, is on the Brady List. The Brady List is a group of officers within each department whose integrity has been called into question. CBS 5 News paid a visit to Pineda and asked her why she thought she was chosen to go to the capital.

“Oh, I have no idea,” Pineda told us.

Pineda is on the list stemming from an incident back in 2007. We asked her what happened.

“You know what? I can’t really talk right now, but why don’t you guys come back,” she said.

But when we returned, no one answered the door.

PLEA has filed a grievance but so far no changes have been made. We reached out to police for an interview, but they declined saying because they’re in the grievance process it would be inappropriate for them to comment.