Tag Archives: donations

Trans Teen Doesn’t Make the News

Debbie says:

Mainstream news did a reasonable job (for what I’ve come to expect of mainstream news, anyway) of covering the story of Constance McMillen, who wanted to bring her girlfriend to her private high school prom. With the help of the ACLU and a favorable court judgment, McMillen won the skirmish, but she and her classmates lost the game when the school cancelled the prom.

Dan Savage points out that McMillen’s was neither the first nor the worst issue this year with that private high school. McMillen was another student at the time:

Constance McMillen was also a student. McMilllen clearly recalled [Juin] Baize’s first—and only—day at Itawamba Agricultural.

“People were talking about him all day, trying to get a look at him,” said McMillen. “It was insane, it was ridiculous, it made me so mad. They said he was causing a distraction with what he was wearing but it was a half day of school and people didn’t have time to get used to him.”

The other students wouldn’t be given a chance to get used to him: the next time Baize came to school, according Kristy Bennett, legal director of the ACLU of Mississippi, Baize was given a suspension notice and sent home. When Juin returned to school after his first suspension, he was suspended again.

“Juin’s case was a situation where a transgender student wanted to attend school dressed in feminine clothing,” said Bennett, “and the school district would not even let him attend school.”

The ACLU is not taking this one to court, apparently with the consent or even preference of Juin Baize (who prefers male pronouns at this time, according to Savage). The harassment level made it untenable for Baize to continue to stay in Fulton, Mississippi, and his grandmother sent him to Pensacola, Florida, to stay with friends:

“There’s this thing here called Florida Virtual School,” Juin told me today, “and I’m going to enroll in that online and do that until next year. And from what I’ve heard the high school near here is very accepting. So I’m going to start fresh.”

A Google search on Juin’s name turns up several of my favorite blogs, but not a single mainstream news organization.

Savage has put together a fund to support Baize in his new life. There’s a donation button in Savage’s column, or this link should work directly.

I sent money; if you are able to and so moved, you might want to as well. Juin is one of thousands, but letting any isolated trans kid know that there’s support for their lives out in the big world can’t be a bad thing.

Marlene pointed this one out to me.

Things We Can Do

Debbie says:

A common progressive lament in these times is “But what can I do?” The problems seem huge and it’s easy to get caught in choice paralysis. Years ago, Laurie and I wrote what is still one of my favorites of everything we’ve written: “Wholesale Problems: Retail Changes.” So here are a few roads to retail change that I especially like, or that caught my eye recently.

I was delighted to get an email from CODEPINK, the radical antiwar activist group, with information on how to donate directly to Iraqi refugee women and children. The specific campaign is based around Mother’s Day, and encourages you to donate in your mother’s name. Obviously, that’s not right for anywhere near everyone, but it is right for me. And my mother, if she was alive, would appreciate having her name on my donation. A chance to give a little bit back from what my government continues to take away.

Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his microloan program through Grameen Bank. Anyone with a little money they don’t have to spend right away can participate in microlending through Kiva, a site that lets you choose your own microloan recipient. As she (almost all borrowers are women) pays it back, you get update emails, and when the full loan is repaid (without interest), you can take the money out or loan it to someone else. The repayment rate is 99.7%, so the risk is, to say the least, minimal. I’m a participant in the group loan to Esther Oziengbe in Nigeria, who used the money to build her provisions and foodstuffs business. She has repaid 75% of her loan.

Donors Choose is designed rather like Kiva, though it takes donations, rather than loans. The focus is U.S. school projects, most of which would have been funded by tax money before the Reagan era. Again, you can pick your project.

Finally, I’m just dipping my toes into Nabuur, a site for those who want to donate time and experience rather than money. You can pick a third-world project and act as researcher, or project manager, or technical lead. I’m hoping to share a project management task with a good friend, and to start soon. (If anyone knows of a similar site for the U.S., I’d love to know about it. Think globally, act locally, at least sometimes, I say.)

Thanks to Liz Henry for showing me Nabuur.