SFS21: Join us for Trans Lives/Trans Voices

Later this month, we’ll be teaming up with Ground Floor Theatre to hear from Sam Davis and their story as a black, queer educator in Austin, TX.

Get registered today, and check out Ground Floor Theatre’s other fantastic storytellers and their stories here.

The New Neuroscience of Pleasure (Psychology Today) 

Marianna Pogosyan, PhD, explains the neuroscience of pleasure: “Pleasure is a way of experiencing the sensory world. When you see, hear, smell or taste something that you deem as pleasurable, the information goes through the sensory cortices of your brain. But that’s not where pleasure is encoded. Thanks to the engagement of various brain regions, it’s something that’s added later on as a hedonic gloss. Thus, pleasure is not merely a sensation or a thought. Importantly, pleasure consists of cycles of wanting, liking and learning.” Read more.

The Doctor’s Office Isn’t Always A Safe Space For LGBTQ People. This Advice Could Save A Life. (Women’s Health) 

Jasmine Gomez writes about healthcare and the LGBTQIA+ community: “In a 2017 survey by the Center for American Progress, the organization found that LGBTQ people were more likely to postpone both preventative and needed medical care to avoid experiencing discrimination. Nearly 24 percent of transgender respondents and 4.4 percent of cisgender lesbian, gay, and bisexual respondents also reported avoiding doctors’ offices that year. And those numbers increase for people of color: 10.3 percent of all respondents of color said they skipped all visits to a physician’s office. The discomfort LGBTQ people face in medical offices isn’t only frustrating in real-time. It also has catastrophic long-term consequences.” Read more.

Trans women are still incarcerated with men and it’s putting their lives at risk (CNN) 

Nora Neus focuses on the devastating violence that incarcerated trans women face in jails and prisons: “Once they are incarcerated, trans people are at significantly higher risk of violence. Trans prisoners are over nine times more likely than the prison average to be assaulted or abused by fellow prisoners, and over five times more likely to be assaulted or abused by facility staff, according to a national survey conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality. According to the 2015 survey, within the year leading up to the survey, almost a quarter of transgender prisoners reported being physically assaulted by other people in custody or staff.” Read more.

Gestational Mortality Isn’t Just a Cisgender Issue (Bitch Media) 

Sloane Jett argues for the inclusion of trans folks when discussing gestational mortality: “We must commit ourselves to all the ways we care for each other and ourselves in this world—through family building, gender-affirming care, and sexual health—or risk continually enabling the systems that have birthed so much inequality. Communally supportive surrogacy is a practice of solidarity that sees the struggles of the most marginalized people in our communities as struggles we all must participate in to alleviate. Expanding our understanding of pregnancy beyond its cis-centric definition doesn’t mean ‘smearing’ cisgender woman; it means enabling more queer and trans people to safely build families.” Read more.

If Mississippi Were Truly Pro-Life It Would Stop Banning Abortion (Rewire News Group) 

Erica Hensley discusses abortion access in Mississippi: “Most national coverage points out that abortion bans disproportionately impact women of color in Mississippi, where 72 percent of abortion patients are Black, painting the picture that only Black women seek abortions here. Not only does the state have the highest proportion of Black residents—nearly 40 percent of the population—in the country, the barriers to abortion care and health care in general disproportionately impact those living in poverty, of which a third of Black Mississippians are.” Read more.

FOSTA – Woodhull’s Fight against a Miserable Failure (Woodhull’s Sex & Politics Blog) 

Tess Joseph comments on the failure of FOSTA-SESTA: “It would be reasonable for someone who didn’t know better to assume that FOSTA-SESTA focuses on sex trafficking; the legislative package, after all, refers to trafficking in its very name. But FOSTA-SESTA erroneously conflates consensual sex work with sex trafficking, and in so doing, it harms sex workers and neglects the trafficking survivors it purports to serve.” Read more.