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26 October 2017 - NPWJ News Digest on LGBTI rights
Articles
US: Doctors Need Intersex Care Standards
By Human Rights Watch, 26 Oct 2017
Medical professional associations should enact standards of care for intersex children that rule out medically unnecessary surgery before patients are old enough to consent, Human Rights Watch and interACT said in a report released today. After decades of controversy in the medical community over the procedures, the lack of centralized care standards allows doctors to continue operating on children’s gonads, internal sex organs, and genitals when they are too young to participate in the decision, even though such surgery is dangerous and could be safely deferred.
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Balkan Pride Parades Highlight Growing Support for LGBT Rights (and Politicians Are Taking Notice)
by Global Voices, 26 Oct 2017
Three pride parades took place in the Balkans in recent months, and hate speech is more often met with legal actions. Support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights is slowly increasing in many of the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Progress has not happened evenly across the region, however, and in some cases, political reasons rather than concern for human rights appear to drive change.
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Uruguay's first transgender senator vows to bolster LGBT rights
by Anastasia Moloney (Reuters), 26 Oct 2017
BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Michelle Suarez, Uruguay’s first transgender senator, is already considered elderly. She has made it to 34 - a rarity in a country where transgender people tend to die young. As a senator representing the Communist Party, Suarez said she will push for laws that bolster the rights and protection of Uruguay’s 3,000 transgender people, who have been historically excluded from society. The law, which is currently under debate, would allow transgender people to change their legal identities without having to go before a judge.
Epidemic of Hate in Lithuania: To Report, or Not to Report?
By LGL National LGBT Rights Organizations, 23 Oct 2017
Burn the faggots!”, “Kill them!” – said a flood of Facebook comments a few years ago on a picture of two young hay men kissing, which the couple had taken to celebrate the start of their relationship. “So you really were not trying to ‘hit on’ this person who attacked you?” – a gay Italian student, who was beaten near the night club in Vilnius, was asked by a pre-trial investigator. “Skin these degenerates,” – a priest from Kaunas wrote online in response to a LGBT protest outside the Russian embassy in Vilnius. These are just a few of the more egregious examples of hate crimes and hate speech directed at members of the LGBT* community in Lithuania in recent years. Non-governmental organizations keep steadfastly repeating that Lithuania is facing a hate epidemic affecting not only the LGBT* community, but other socially marginalized groups as well. Law enforcement institutions, on the other hand, argue that they must treat all complainants equally, and official statistics do not show the large-scale prevalence of hate crimes in Lithuania.
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Marriage equality opponents call for broad right to discriminate
By The Guardian , 20 Oct 2017
The no campaign in the marriage law postal survey has pushed for broad exemptions to discrimination law to allow service providers to refuse any weddings that send “a message with which they disagree”. Marriage equality advocates have warned that such a stance would allow service providers to discriminate against couples on any basis.