Unprincipled Exclusions: The Struggle to Achieve Judicial and Legislative Equality for Transgender People

This Article examines recent efforts to enact civil rights statutes for transgender people in the United States. Part I provides an overview of the largely negative case law on the issue of whether transgender people are protected under existing sex, sexual orientation or disability discrimination laws. This context is provided, in part, to explain why transgender rights advocates have turned to the legislative branches of government to secure basic civil rights protections. Part II describes the initial successes that have been achieved as a result of this new focus on political activism and legislation. Part III examines the actual statutory language that has been used to protect transgender people, as well as some of the key strategic questions that have arisen in the course of drafting such legislation

From the Executive Director

CLAGS joins other LBGT groups in condemning the sexual humiliation and other forms of torture inflicted on Iraqi detainees by US military forces. As the AI-Fatiha Foundation for LGBTIQ Muslims noted in a press release last month, forcing men to masturbate in front of each other and to mock same-sex acts or homosexual sex is perverse and sadistic, in the eyes of many Muslims

Letter from Paisley Currah, Outgoing Executive Director

Unzipping the Monster Dick. I thought nothing of this title when planning the fall 2003 CLAGS and a speaker, Santiago Solis, suggested it. It seemed to me, a denizen of the world of queer studies, unremarkable, even normal as I jotted it down. Solis, who was finishing his PhD in Learning Dis/abilities at Teachers College, Columbia University at the time, had the requisite explanatory subtitle: Deconstructing Ableist Penile Representations in two Ethnic Homoerotic Magazines

Seminars in the City Update

Each semester, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies hosts a Seminar in the City, a series of monthly discussion meetings where nonacademic readers read major works in lesbian/gay/ bisexual/transgender and queer studies. This fall, Seminars in the City focused on the theme of transgender politics, reading texts by Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, and Riki Anne Wilchins

Letter from the Executive Director: Queer Studies Goes Digital

Google books, journals available only online, Wikipedia. With so much knowledge going digital, is print culture on its way our? While print probably won\u27t disappear as a scholarly medium in the foreseeable future, it is important that CLAGS remain at the cutting edge not just in terms of the kinds of research we support, but in terms of how we disseminate that research. We are currently involved in several long-term projects to share digital resources with our membership and the community at large, expanding on our longstanding commitment to making print and analog materials available that are often not accessible anywhere else

From the Executive Director: Disability and Queerness: Centering the Outsider

When James Anastos, a transgender man, turned 21 and moved into a residential living environment for the neurologically impaired in Staten Island, his male gender identity became a problem. Being transgender, they told me they could have me put away if I dressed like a boy. They didn\u27t like the way I dressed—all boys\u27 clothes, he told me during an interview

Queer Studies in Asia

How does research about diverse sexualities and genders circulate through Asia? How do linguistic barriers affect the flow of local and regionally produced knowledges? Who calls the shots, defines the agenda, decides who gets published? How can we create more venues for South-South dialogues

Minding Our Q\u27s

A personal admission first—it\u27s a scary thing to be stepping in as executive director, following in the very large footsteps of Alisa Solomon, Jill Dolan, and CLAGS\u27s founder and first executive director, Martin Duberman, who have all worked so hard and accomplished so much to make CLAGS a major center for gay and lesbian studies. But, with the support of Alisa, the tremendous CLAGS board, its exceptional staff, and the many others who participate in its work, I am also looking forward to the challenge of building on their work