Transgender and nonbinary heroes serving our larger society

More than 10 stories, spanning hundreds of years and 3 continents, about remarkable people who made significant contributions to larger society.  

These heroes happen to be transgender and/or nonbinary. Depending on where you live, you may have benefited from the courage, hard work and kindness of these individuals. Btw, November 20 is Transgender Day of Remembrance.
 

Happy International Cat Day to our feline friends and their humans!

A curated collection of art from museums around the world, depicting people from 5 continents in the company of cats. 

Queer romance movies centering couples of non-European heritage

A list of queer romance movies with couples of color and optimistic endings

Traditional societies that recognized non-binary children

International Non-Binary People's Day in July 14.  Many traditional societies recognized non-binary children.

Transgender children are considered natural by many traditional communities

Trans kids are not a new phenomenon, and it is not a radical act for adults to acknowledge and support them. 

In fact, for many adults, it is the traditional thing to do.

Click on image to learn more.

Happy DOGust! For the Dog Lovers: Non-Eurocentric Dog Art!

Dear dog people,

August is DOGust. Tired of paging through the some arts app's mostly Eurocentric highlights looking for work created by artists from the global majority?

Good news.I've put together the following collection in Google Arts and Culture for your enjoyment :-)

Dog art from non-European cultures -  50 images of dogs and dog-like beings created by non-European artists in ancient and modern cultures

13 Names: Atatiana Jefferson, Kuanchung Kao + 11

Content warning: mention of injury or death by violence.

Kuanchung Kao and Atatiana Jefferson lived on opposite sides of the country and died 22 years apart. They were both professionals in STEM fields. Atatiana had a biology degree from Xavier University and worked in pharmaceutical equipment sales; Kuanchung was a microbiologist working in quality control. Both lost their lives after neighbors summoned police to their residences.

Do you know if your voter registration has been purged? (Animation)

Do you know if you have been purged from the voter rolls? from Wolfberry Studio on Vimeo.

13 Names: Sureshbhai Patel, Wangsheng Leng + 11

Content warning: mention of injury or death by violence.

In 2015, Sureshbhai Patel was detained by police while on a walk around his neighborhood. A neighbor called the police on him, describing him as a "black man". Video footage showed that the 57-year-old grandfather from India was NOT resisting police. An officer seriously injured Patel's neck in a needless takedown. Patel was partially paralyzed and had to learn to walk again. In 2017, police broke the neck of Wangsheng Leng, a 66-year-old with Alzheimer's, while restraining him in his own home. Leng was taken to the hospital and died a month later. Both Leng and Patel did not speak English; their unfortunate encounters had been attributed in part to their inability to communicate with police officers. But many other unarmed individuals with no language barrier with police officers have died in similar encounters:

Thirteen Names: Charleena Lyles , Tommy Le + 11

Content warning: mention of violence and death.

Yvette Smith and Charleena Lyles both called the police to their homes. Yvette needed help with resolving a domestic dispute between two other people. Charleena was reporting a burglary. Both were killed by the public servants who were paid by their tax dollars to protect them.

13 Names: Srinivas Kuchibhotla, Vincent Chin + 11

Inspired by Anirvan Chatterjee's article The $205 million industry that helped murder ‪Srinivas Kuchibhotla.

Content note: mention of death by violence

The rings contain names of Asians in America who were murdered in cases of mistaken ethnic identity - South Asians shot by someone who assumed that they were Arabs, Indians killed by someone who thought that they were Iranians, a Vietnamese American murdered by someone who assumed that they were Japanese... You can find the names of more Asian American hate crime victims at 35 Years After Vincent Chin's Murder, How Has America Changed?.

When all that's left of your child is a bit of hair

A recurring theme in folktales from different West African cultures is the mistreated child who sinks into the earth:

The Pineapple Child (from the Ga ethnic group of Ghana):

A hunter had 2 wives. The younger wife was childless, and wanted a child very much. One day, she was on her way to the farm with her husband when they met an old man who asked them what they wished for. They answered, "A child." The old man uprooted a pineapple plant growing nearby and changed it into a baby girl. The younger wife was delighted, but the old man warned them that they must never tell the child that she came from a pineapple.

The younger wife brought the baby home and spent many happy hours with her. The older wife, Adele, hated that her co-wife was so happy. She eavesdropped on the younger wife and learnt about the origin of the baby. Adele's resentment of her co-wife increased as the years went by, watching her rival dote on the growing child.

Romance in Rain City

ShaCorrie Wimbley, a Kansas transplant, and Saja Tunkara, an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone, met in Seattle in 2007. ShaCorrie recalls her initial response to Saja, the first foreign man who tried to chat her up. "I was not very nice." But Saja did impress her as kind and patient. "He called every day for a year until I answered the phone."

Fast forward 10 years to 2017. ShacCorrie and Saja are now married, with 2 children. ShaCorrie says of her husband. "He cooks, cleans, does laundry, makes the kids lunches, and gives them baths. I never have to ask for help. He just did it. We have built a life together. We have been through so many things that would have destroyed any family..."

ShaCorrie applied for US permanent residency for her spouse, but the petition was denied. They decided to wait for the outcome of his years-long pending asylum case, which was also later denied. On top of that, Saja was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and a neck tumor.

Saja was scheduled for a tumor-removal operation in January 2018. But because he had remained in the U.S. to support his family after his asylum case was denied, ICE took him into custody shortly before his scheduled operation. ICE did not allow him to keep his hospital appointment. In the weeks that followed, a local organization, NWDC Resistance, received calls from [inside the detention center] saying, 'There’s a guy with tumors on his neck that we can see, he shouldn’t be here, he should in a hospital.'"

It was not until April 2018, after spending months in pain, that Saja was allowed to have his operation, by which time nerve damage had led to permanent decreased mobility in his arm.

Saja was deported in October 2018, after spending more than 9 months in detention, during which time he acquired vision and breathing problems, in addition to more tumors. ICE did not allow him his wife and children to say goodbye to him. The Tunkaras miss each other terribly.

Friendship and sisterhood: supernatural folktales of women helping each other

Women who make other women's lives miserable are disproportionately represented in folktales from around the world. Wicked stepmothers and cruel sisters drive the plots of countless fairy tales. Sometimes, the negative woman-woman relationships in the story are offset slightly by the presence of a wise crone or fairy woman who aids the heroine. But stories of mutually beneficial relationships between women who are peers are harder to find.

With that in mind, here are a few stories that meet the following conditions:

1. A woman protagonist but NO woman antagonist
2. Two or more female characters who help each other or work collaboratively (the typical fairy godmother intervention would not count because the giving is largely one-sided)

Bridge of Love

A shout out to all the organizations and individuals that have been working to reunite families.

National Bail Out, which has been working on the #FreeBlackMamas campaign to bail black mothers out of pretrial detention and reunite them with their families. Their work addressesthe issue of lower-income people accused of non-violent offenses (guilt not yet proven) languishing in jail for lengthy periods waiting for their trial, while wealthier people accused of more serious crimes can get out of jail while awaiting trial, because of their ability to post bail.

ColorOfChange, part of the National Bail Out coalition. ColorOfChange has also been a leader in the #NoTechForICE protests against family separation at the border.

Black Alliance for Just Immigration, also part of the National Bail Out coalition, whose intersectional work engaging African American and black immigrant communities to organize and advocate for justice flies in the face of the divide-and-conquer narrative of outsiders who spread the false idea that immigrant issues and black issues are separate from each other and compete for attention. These old tactics to prevent communities of color in the Americas from allying with each other date back to the 16th century, when European colonists adopted policies to separate Natives and Africans and use them to fight each other. (See Chapter 3 of "Black Indians" by William Loren Katz.)

More organizations are listed in the comments.

Available on RedBubble.

Featured on Creative Action Network

Let's show some love to Puerto Rico

My friend Gloria, a Puerto Rican artist/scholar, was doing research in P.R. when Hurricane Maria cut all power to the island in September. She was able to return to mainland U.S. safely after a number of very challenging weeks.

Puerto Rico is on a long road to recovery after being hit by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Please consider donating or volunteering to help Puerto Rico. Volunteer lawyers, tech experts and medical staff are needed.

Despite numerous stories of people inside Puerto Rico selflessly helping their neighbors, some people have put out a false narrative that Puerto Ricans are not doing anything to help themselves and are only sitting around waiting for the U.S. government to help them. (We've probably heard the same false narrative applied to other groups of people, but that's a topic for another time.)

If compassion cannot move us to extend a hand to Puerto Rico, perhaps self-interest can motivate us. Puerto Rico is one of the world's biggest centers for pharmaceutical manufacturing. It supplies the rest of the U.S. with medicines.  Now the medicine supply in the U.S. may be impacted by the disasters that struck Puerto Rico..

Btw, do check out Gloria's artwork on Etsy. There are some fun holiday cards that you can color. And other cool stuff too.

3 video games that make a difference

Cameroon's first African role-play game: Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, takes inspiration from across the continent to create its fantasy setting.

Game developer Madiba Olivier wanted to break 'the exotic world' image of Africa. It is showcased at Africade, the first art exhibition dedicated solely to African video games.

Never Alone is a collaboration between 8 Alaskan tribal communities and game developer E-line media. The platformer set in the harsh, challenging landscape of Alaska won the Best Debut Game at BAFTA Game Awards.

Eco is an online game where players must collaborate to build a civilization in a world where everything they do affects the environment. Work together through the player-run government and economy without polluting the world and destroying it.

"Buried" by Injunuity

Buried, a great animated short about the shameless destruction of sacred native sites by corporate interests in the Bay Area.

Baby cemetery destroyed to make room for movie theater and parking garage.

Same-sex unions in Earthsea

An interesting excerpt from "A Description of Earthsea" in Ursula Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea :

"Women who work magic may practice periods of celibacy as well as fasting and other disciplines believed to purify and concentrate power, but most witches lead active sexual lives, having more freedom than most village women and less need to fear abuse. Many pledge "witch-troth" with another witch or with an ordinary woman. They do not often marry men, and if they do, they are likely to choose a sorcerer."

I wonder if this aspect of Earthsea was inspired by some Native American societies, considering that Le Guin's parents were anthropologists who studied Native Californians.

• Masahai, a 19th century shaman and witch of the Mohave Tribe (whose reservation is in California, Nevada and Arizona), was serially married to 3 women and also had male lovers.¹
• A report from the 1890s mentions a Quechan kwe'rhame (female-bodied person with non-cisgendered status) married to a woman. The Quechan live on Fort Yuma reservation in present day California and Arizona.²
• An anthropologist recorded reports of a lesbian couple among the Apache imprisoned at Fort Sill, Alabama in the late 19th century.³

For more on two-spirits in indigenous North America, check out NativeOut.com.

Notes:

Fantasy and folklore art inspired by the African diaspora in the Americas

Click below to view Illustrations, fine art, and decorative figurines created by artists from Jamaica, Europe and the United States: