Way back in the late 1970s, we went through all this back then. Renée Richards broke ground for all the trans athletes to come afterward.
Her transition was a very big thing in the news and on the nightly evening news where millions of people watched the case play out.
We are used to cases involving trans athletes in the news but back then the case was on the evening nightly news every night!
Now all of this is on the chopping block once again!
Before then came Virginia Prince and his* trail for mailing pornography through the mail.
*Virginia always identified as male.
Will we see more laws banning us from the internet, will we see laws that criminalized us and gays as being phonographic if we post on the internet? Will my blog be labeled as promoting pornography?
Will we see a law like “Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values” that strips anything LGBTQ+ from the internet? Will we be able to post on Facebook rallies for our human rights like the one this Sunday in West Hartford?
We know that Trump’s idol is Putin and Putin passed the law to protect family values… the distribution of "propaganda of non-traditional relationships" among any age group, not just minors" among minors, will we see this here as reported on CNN,
Hey! All you gays out there who like in Pastor Martin Niemöller poem, First they came for the the trans community, but I wasn't worried because they not coming for me... well guess again,
Wow! I remember reading about her and admiring her, following her story and wishing her luck.Decades later, Renée Richards' breakthrough is as important as ever
At an anarchic US Open, the transgender tennis player made a pioneering point.
Tennis
By Steve Tignor
March 31, 2021Throughout Women's History Month, TENNIS.com will be highlighting some of the most significant achievements and moments that make our sport what it is today.
As Renée Richards walked through the winding, Tudor-lined lanes of Forest Hills, people from the neighborhood gathered around her to wish her luck. After seeing the ophthalmologist’s picture in the newspapers for months, the locals of Queens knew where she was going—the West Side Tennis Club—and the magnitude of what she was about to do.
It was August 1977, the closing weeks of the notorious Summer of Sam in New York City. Over three harrowing months, the crumbling metropolis had been rocked by terrorizing riots, a chaotic blackout and the frantic search for a serial killer. As autumn mercifully approached, though, tennis became the talk of the town, and Richards was, for the moment, the world’s most talked-about athlete.
She had taken the plunge into that fishbowl in August 1976, when she entered her first pro tournament as a woman at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in New Jersey. There had never been a debut quite like it. The Rolls Royce that took her to the grounds before her opening match was greeted by dozens of fans, autograph seekers and celebrity hounds. As the car approached the clubhouse, the mob surged toward it. Inside, Richards sank down in her seat. Was this private person ready for the public life that awaited her?
We are used to cases involving trans athletes in the news but back then the case was on the evening nightly news every night!
Then along came the cases that overthrew laws that criminalized being gayBeginning before Stonewall and continuing in the 50 years since, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have regularly turned to the courts for protection against mistreatment or to overturn laws that targeted them. From H.I.V.-based discrimination to the fight for marriage equality to President Trump’s attempt to ban transgender people from the military, courts across the country have played a key role in the story of L.G.B.T.Q. rights in America.
1958: One, Inc. v. Olesen – United States Supreme Court
In a one-sentence opinion, the Supreme Court provided constitutional protection for a gay magazine started by the Mattachine Society, reversing a lower court’s decision that had found the publication to be obscene.
1971: Baker v. Nelson – Minnesota Supreme Court / 1972: United States Supreme Court
Jack Baker and Michael McConnell asked the United States Supreme Court to declare that Minnesota’s failure to let the two men marry violated the Constitution. The court didn’t even hear arguments in the case, declaring the issue didn’t raise “a substantial federal question.”
1973: Jones v. Hallahan – Kentucky Court of Appeals
When Marjorie Jones and Tracy Knight sued to get a marriage license, the court denied the two women’s request, declaring that “what they propose is not a marriage.”
1974: Singer v. Hara – Washington Court of Appeals
John Singer and Paul Barwick cited Washington State’s new Equal Rights Amendment as a reason for requiring that state to allow same-sex couples to marry, but the court cited the Kentucky case in nonetheless rejecting their request.
1977: Richards v. United States Tennis Association – New York County Supreme Court
Renee Richards, a transgender woman, sought to play in the United States Open. After being denied entrance in 1976, she sued, winning an injunction under New York law and participating in the 1977 competition.
2003: Lawrence v. Texas – United States Supreme Court
The Supreme Court ended sodomy laws nationwide, reversing the 1986 ruling in a decision by Justice Kennedy that declared, “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”
Before then came Virginia Prince and his* trail for mailing pornography through the mail.
And then the heavy hand of the law fell on him for this was the time of the Lavender Scare! In the gay community like the trans community we starting to network, the gay Mattachine Society was busted for mailing smut through the mail, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Then Prince’s case.On the Body: What Transgender History Can Teach us About Censorship
February 28, 2018 Alex Falck Censorship, Civil Liberties, LGBTQIA+
By: guest blogger J. M. EllisonWhen we discuss the dangers of censorship, we usually talk about the importance of ideas and their free circulation. We would be wise to consider also the dangers censorship poses to the body. Restricting intellectual freedom is a means for oppressing communities – for justifying incarceration, for preventing education, for destroying networks, and for thwarting resistance.
Take what happened to transgender activist Virginia Prince. In late 1959, a friend put Virginia Prince in touch with a pen pal. For Prince, exchanging letters with strangers was nothing new. Seven years previous, Prince and a group of friends started a newsletter titled Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. Transvestia was a part of Prince’s work to foster supportive community for people whom she described as “transgenderist.” The correspondence with her new pen pal, however, rapidly grew into something different.
Prince received a photograph from her new correspondent of two women being sexual with each other. Below was the caption “Me and You.” Prince’s pen pal invited her to “ask anything.” Their letters grew more intimate. Prince wrote a letter describing a sexual fantasy between the two of them. This story could have remained nothing more than an analog precursor to cybersex, but in 1960, postal inspectors questioned Prince. Prince was prosecuted for the crime of distributing obscenity through the U.S. post.
During the 1950s and 1960s, obscenity laws were wielded against trans and queer communities not because they were somehow more sexual than cisgender and straight people, but as a part of repressing their organizing. At stake during Prince’s trial was not just the free circulation of ideas, but also the freedom of bodies. Prince and her community were facing the possibility of prison. Further, their right to control how they dressed was being restricted. In fact, at stake was how we understand gender itself and whether a person’s self-understandings of their own body would be respected.
Will we see more laws banning us from the internet, will we see laws that criminalized us and gays as being phonographic if we post on the internet? Will my blog be labeled as promoting pornography?
Will we see a law like “Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values” that strips anything LGBTQ+ from the internet? Will we be able to post on Facebook rallies for our human rights like the one this Sunday in West Hartford?
We know that Trump’s idol is Putin and Putin passed the law to protect family values… the distribution of "propaganda of non-traditional relationships" among any age group, not just minors" among minors, will we see this here as reported on CNN,
The 19th News writes that...Putin signs expanded anti-LGBTQ laws in Russia, in latest crackdown on rights
By Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova
December 5, 2022Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed into law a bill that expands a ban on so-called LGBTQ “propaganda” in Russia, making it illegal for anyone to promote same-sex relationships or suggest that non-heterosexual orientations are “normal.”
The ban was rubber-stamped by Putin just days after a harsh new “foreign agents” law came into effect, as the Kremlin cracks down on free speech and human rights as its military operation in Ukraine falters.
The new laws significantly broaden the scope of a 2013 law which banned the dissemination of LGBTQ-related information to minors. The new iteration extends the ban on promoting such information to adults as well.
The new laws make it illegal to promote or “praise” LGBTQ relationships, publicly express non-heterosexual orientations or suggest that they are “normal.”
Project 2025 equates being transgender — or adopting “transgender ideology” — to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed. Under this plan, the federal government would enforce sex discrimination laws on the “biological binary meaning of sex,” and educators and public librarians who spread the concept of being transgender would be registered as sex offenders. The plan says that children should be “raised by their biological fathers and mothers who conceive them,” unless those biological parents are found unfit by a court.
[…]
These ideas have drawn national attention for their far-reaching scope, but they didn’t appear out of thin air. They all have roots in anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation that conservative lobbying groups and think tanks have supported for years, like the law that took effect in Kentucky. Contributors to Project 2025 include senior staff from Alliance Defending Freedom, whose lawyers have helped write anti-transgender legislation in a number of states and defended those laws in court. Members of the conservative groups Family Research Council and the American Principles Project, which have similarly pushed anti-LGBTQ+ bills and anti-trans rhetoric, have served on the Project 2025 advisory board.
The plan states that policies supporting single mothers and LGBTQ+ equity should be replaced with those “that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families,” the authors write — and it lays out specific ideas of how American families should have kids. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate with ties to the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin D. Roberts, has shared similar views publicly.
The Republicans have a trifecta, it will be like Florida on steroids.
