Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Hereville drawing process: Using reference photos

Posted on January 3, 2016 by Ampersand

Here’s my part of a panel from Hereville 3. (It’s from page 128, if you have the book and would like to compare.)

I usually don’t use photo reference for figures – it’s difficult to prevent photo-referenced figures from looking lifeless, at least for me (other cartoonists do it better). When I use a photo ref and the resulting drawing looks like it was photo-referenced, I think of that as me “getting beat up by the photo.” But some poses are just too hard to figure out without reference. This three-way hug is definitely one such pose.

So I made my housemates Matt, Maddox and Sydney pose for for this photo (Matt is the girls’ dad), and used that as the basis for my drawing. Even with the photo, there are still differences between the reference and the final image – although there are also bits that are very similar (compare Fruma’s hands to Matt’s). The biggest change was Mirka’s entire figure, and turning Layele’s head so that readers could see her happy expression.

I think I’ve gotten much better at not letting source photos beat up my drawings. In the first Hereville book, there are some drawings that still make me wince because they look so obviously drawn from photos.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Hereville | Comments Off

Al Hirschfeld’s “Late Late Very Late Show” – How Many Can We Identify?

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Ampersand

A game: I thought it might be fun to see how many people from this 1955 Al Hirschfeld drawing we could collectively identify.

Sorry for the less-than-stellar quality image; I took this picture with my cell phone. It’s on the wall of my mom’s apartment in Florida.

[Update: Replaced the cell phone photo with a better quality image.]

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Popular (and unpopular) culture | 27 Comments

Paramount and CBS Sue To Stop A Fan-Made Star Trek Movie

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Ampersand

Mike Glyer at File 770 writes:

Paramount and CBS have filed a copyright infringement suit against Alec Peters and others involved in making Axanar, a fan-produced Star Trek movie project that raised more than $1 million on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Paramount has tolerated other elaborate fan productions over the years, such as the crowdfunded fan films Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, which received $150,000 in donations in 2006 and Star Trek: Renegades, which raised $375,000 in 2014. It maybe that Axanar’s budget, or CBS being on the verge of launching its new TV franchise, caused the companies to pull the trigger.

In comments there, I wrote that “Star Trek was created a half century ago; no good purpose is served by keeping it out of the public domain at this point.” Mike responded:

When you say “no good purpose is served by keeping it out of the public domain,” what is your idea of a good purpose. You mention Axanar trying to make a little money off this property and pay a few people — won’t CBS and Paramount be providing a lot more jobs and stimulating the economy far more?

I responded to Mike: ((I’ve edited this response a bit before posting here on “Alas.”))

1) I wouldn’t assume that CBS and Paramount would only make a Star Trek TV show if they can have exclusive rights to the Star Trek universe. There are lots of TV shows and movies based on works in the public domain (recent and off the top of my head: Into The Woods, Once Upon A Time, Grimm, Frozen, the BBC’s Fairy Tale, Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock, and Elementary).

(And by the way – consider that there are two simultaneous hit TV shows based on Sherlock Holmes. That’s good for everyone. If copyright laws didn’t get in the way, why couldn’t there be two or more simultaneous takes on the Star Trek universe at the same time?)

Studios go where the money is. They’re clearly willing to make works based on public domain properties when doing so is profitable. There’s no reason to suppose that Star Trek would stop being profitable if Star Trek was public domain.

2) But even if Paramount and CBS decided not to make a new Star Trek series, that just means they’d be making something else instead. Some TV show didn’t get picked up because room in the budget and schedule has been made for Star Trek. So from a stimulus-and-jobs perspective, it’s pretty much a wash.

3) In this way, I’m a libertarian: I favor a free market for old intellectual properties. ((Honestly, I think a free market might be better for newer intellectual properties as well, in many cases. But there’s a MUCH stronger case to be made for strong copyright protections for new works, than there is for copyright protections for half-century-old creations.)) If CBS can make a better (or at least, a more commercial) Star Trek show than the Axanar folks – and they should be able to, given their budget – then the market will reward them for that. If despite their huge advantages, they can’t withstand competition from Axanar, then both the fans and the market would be better served by having Axanar available.

4) By “good purpose,” I meant encouraging the making of new creative and intellectual works. Insofar as copyright makes it possible for creators to earn a living, giving them incentives to make movies and comics and books and spaceship model kits and so on, then copyright is serving a good purpose.

But none of that is happening with Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry is dead and will not be creating any new works, regardless of what happens with Star Trek’s copyright. CBS has a profit motive and a TV schedule to fill and stockholders to placate, and will be creating new TV shows regardless of what happens with Star Trek’s copyright.

Instead, at this point, the copyright for Star Trek is being used to create disincentives – to make people like the folks creating Axanar shut up and not produce work that they want to produce and – judging by the success of their Kickstarter – fans want to see. That’s not good for anyone, except maybe CBS’s stockholders.

* * *

There are interesting comments about the lawsuit on Facebook from Marc Zicree, the co-writer of Axanar, and David Gerrold, who (among other things) wrote “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode of Star Trek. (Both links via File 770).

Posted in Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc. | 1 Comment

Viewers With Prosopagnosia Enjoy TV and Movies and Plays and Comics With Diverse Casts

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Ampersand

These are two characters from “Sense8.” I honestly don’t know which two they are.

Or, at least, I do.

I’ve got prosopagnosia, aka face blindness. ((At least, I believe I have prosopagnosia. I’ve never been officially diagnosed.)) I’ve recently started watching “Arrow,” which is a TV show about a bunch of muscular, thirtyish, conventionally handsome, mostly white men plus a few really thin, twentyish, conventionally pretty mostly white women. And usually I deduce who I’m looking at based on context, but it’s common for a scene to begin and I’m looking at some young fit short-haired white guy in some context that doesn’t tell me who I’m looking at, and I genuinely have no idea what character I’m watching. There was an episode in which another hooded archer, a bad guy, unmasked himself at the end, and there was a dramatic musical sting to let the audience know that GASP! this was a big shocking reveal, and I had no idea who I was looking at.

This happens to me a lot when watching TV or plays or movies or reading comics. When I started watching “Friends,” it took me most of a season before I could tell Joey and Chandler apart, or which one was Monica and which one was Rachel. ((For some reason, Ross and Phoebe didn’t look like the others to me – I think perhaps because both of them diverge, to at least some degree, from the usual cookie-cutter faces casting directors seem to prefer.)) And as diverse as it was in many ways, I had a very hard time telling Lito, Wolfgang and Will apart when I was watching “Sense8.”

The more visually diverse characters are – in terms of skin color, age, body shape, facial characteristics, etc – the easier it is for prosopagnosiacs (not sure that’s a real word) to enjoy any form of visual storytelling. And current estimates are that between 1 and 2 percent of the population has prosopagnosia, which is millions of people.

I’m not trying to make a big moral point with this post. I’m just saying that, for 1 or 2% of people, it’s probably easier to know which character is which when the characters are visually diverse. If all else is equal, that might be a reason for cartoonists and other creators to err on the side of being more diverse instead of less. ((I’m not saying I’ve been perfect in this regard. I’ve made a mental note to try and do better.))

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture | 38 Comments

Open Thread and Link Farm: Which White Man Was That One? Edition

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Ampersand

By the way, I’m going to be in Sarasota Florida over the next week or so, so if you’re in town and want to have lunch drop me a line.

An Unbelievable Story of Rape – ProPublica A woman reported being raped to the police, and later confessed that she had made it up. But she hadn’t. A horrifying long read.
Study: Your Brain Is a Mosaic of Male and Female.
On Setting The “Universal Sex Difference” Bar Way Too Low | Skepchick
Growing Up Arab American in DC After 9/11 — Medium
Tennessee Woman Charged With Attempted Murder After Failed Self-Induced Abortion
Son, Men Don’t Get Raped. An Esquire article from last year about male victims of rape in the military. It’s not a great scan, you can visit this post to see a few pull-quotes if you don’t want to read the whole thing.
Feminist Frequency: “Yes, it’s fake. Who cares? This is legitimately what she would have said anyway, so she might of well of said it.” Remember, it’s about ethics. Also, CW for misogynistic comments and death wishes.
Whites earn more than blacks — even on eBay – The Washington Post
Fun facts. (Humor).
Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty | Demos I used to be provisionally in favor of marriage-promotion, on the grounds that marriage seems to be something that a lot of people really really want, and it seems to be a net positive in most married people’s lives. But it’s become increasingly clear that marriage promotion policies simply don’t work.
80 Books No Woman Should Read | Literary Hub “…of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.”
Men Explain Lolita to Me | Literary Hub “But “to read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov” said one of my volunteer instructors. I thought that was funny, so I posted it on Facebook, and another nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn’t thought of that yet.”
Are Republicans For Freedom or White Identity Politics? Interesting article about how (in the author’s view) Trump represents a change in the GOP to a European-style White Identity Party. CW: The author is a conservative who makes unfair assumptions about liberals. The discussion of immigration – in which it’s a terrible injustice to voters that neither party supports deportation policies that even right-wing immigration experts agree are not possible to implement – is impressively incoherent.
When a school assigned homework on Islam, it drew so many threats the district shut down – Vox Of course I don’t excuse the threats, but some parents objecting angrily was inevitable given the assignment: “The worksheet asked students to try to copy the Shahada — the statement that “there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah,” the pillar of Muslim faith — in order to understand the complexity of Arabic calligraphy.”
In Texas, a 12 year old Sikh boy was arrested for “terrorism” over a solar charger / Boing Boing He was also suspended from school for three days. Deja vu.
More Big Pharma outrage after 2,000% overnight price hike on an infant seizure medication. Deja vu squared.
Shut up about the y-axis. It shouldn’t always start at zero. – Vox
1918: Court Refuses To Fine Women In Man’s Attire. News you can use.

Posted in Link farms | 110 Comments

What I’m Reading: Spinster, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I’ve been slowly making my way through Spinster, a novel by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. The book, which was first published in 1959, is a fascinating story about a white teacher of Maori children in New Zealand. The books is really interesting on a number of levels, including its exploration of sexual and racial politics, but what I’ve been most closely paying attention to the past couple of times I’ve sat down to read is its take on pedagogy, particularly early childhood pedagogy. Ashton-Warner was a pioneer in that field. This is from a little less than two-thirds through the book. The narrator, Anna Vorontosov, is meditating on the writing her Maori students have started to do:

I can’t help noticing all the strange writing they do. It must be the beginning of composition; the first wall between one being and another; the putting of thoughts for someone else into written words instead of speech or touch; the graduation of talkers and touchers into writers; the progress of mixers into hermits; the springs of loneliness.

But I didn’t start it: they began themselves. I didn’t tell Twinnie to write onthe wall blackboard “My sister can’t draw for nuts.” She asked me how to spell “sister,” “draw” and “nuts,” and I look up and see it. Then the other twin as always copies, and a few more copy until now among the sixes and sevens we have smart exercise books and it’s all “Sharpen my pencil” and “Where’s my rubber” and “How do you spell ‘ghost.’” Plainly it is another medium of expression and another subject in the creative vent; two actually, writing as well as composition. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. And I am far too removed from the good and real teacher to halt it. I can only say I’m sorry.

Not because it is an offence against current professional method but for another reason. I don’t think it is fortunate to write. Or clever. It’s cleverer to converse. To read the facial expression, to extend the voice, to interpret the intonation, to sense the temperature of the emotion and to reply in keeping. It’s cleverer to make the physical conversation of love-making. For what does it require to sit alone at your little table and write what it is yourself? Not the hazards and glamour of communication itself but technique. Only technique.

Even reading a story rather than telling it is a step apart. Waiwini, anyway, can’t take it. She rises in the middle of it and comes to me for the real thing. She touches me and examines the depths of my eyes and asks questions to which she insists that I reply. It reminds me of love: the absolute encounter. (153–4)

It’s worth noting that these thoughts come to Vorontosov after a colleague who was pursuing her romantically and whom she rejected, and who also wanted to write a book but failed to do so, killed himself. It’s also important to keep in mind that she is “talking back,” so to speak, to the current professional method that would likely have said that what was happening in her classroom when it came to writing was too disorderly, that her students would therefore never be able to learn properly, or some such thing. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting take on what gets lost when writing and, by implication, reading, are privileged as means of communication over speaking and listening.

Posted in Recommended Reading, Writing | Comments Off

Open Thread and Link Farm – The Wild Election of 1800 Edition

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Ampersand

A discussion about what a men’s movement that isn’t horrible might look like. (I agree with some but not all of what’s written here.)
And, related: How to Do Men’s Rights Rightly
Is 90% of All EvoPsych False? Richard Carrier criticizes evolutionary psychology in significant depth. Not a quick read, but a worthwhile one, and a link worth remembering next time evopsych (aka sociobiology) comes up.
The real-life election of 1800 was even wilder than Hamilton the musical lets on – Vox
This amazing mom updated her tattoo to reflect transgender teen’s transition – Gay Star News Thanks for the link, Grace!
Ask Your 2016 Candidate These Questions on Drone Warfare – Defense One
Similarities between anti-gay and anti-sex work arguments | topherhallquist
Donald Trump is getting all the press, but the Bernie Sanders movement is more important for the future – Vox.
Yes, Donald Trump’s dad really is the reason he’s rich | topherhallquist
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: Today’s Small Thought. On Class Privilege as an Example of Problems in the Privilege Concept.
Dilapidated Schools and Race – Lawyers, Guns & Money
An explanation of the climate deal (or sort of deal) in Paris – Vox
Is Corporate Media a danger to Society? Coverage of Trump v. Sanders | Informed Comment I don’t agree with everything here. But that Sanders has as much support as Trump, but barely gets covered at all, is illustrative of how media coverage shapes the race.
The Crazy Story Of How “Clue” Went From Forgotten Flop To Cult Triumph Madeline Kahn’s transcendent “flames, flames, flames on the side of my face” moment is the only improvised bit in the entire movie.
Shutting Down Conversations About Rape at Harvard Law – The New Yorker This criticism of the “I believe women” slogan, by a woman of color who is a Professor at Harvard, is a better-than-average member for its genre, because it doesn’t ignore the real reasons the slogan was created. I also liked The Unit of Caring‘s critique of the same, because it’s nuanced and acknowledges competing needs.
“When did three or four twitter posts become something to write a news article about? We are rapidly reaching peak outrage culture.”
That town that rejected solar energy is not as stupid as people are reporting.
Horizons: How Gun Control Plays Out in Red State Elections
Another Day in the Life – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
Trumpeting The Right Not To Be Called A Bigot | Popehat
Job Sprawl – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
The Unit of Caring “I think if she changed her communication style it’d be way healthier for you, and for me. But maybe it’d cost her more than we’re anticipating, and there are other needs at play that are hard to quantify.”
Sentencing Law and Policy: “Negotiating Accuracy: DNA in the Age of Plea Bargaining” False convictions and plea negotiations.
Laquan McDonald and The Corrupt System That Killed Him – The Atlantic
Randall Kennedy on race and racism at Harvard Law School (and elsewhere) – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money. Although I don’t disagree with Kennedy’s critique, I’m also not certain that anything new is going on on campus. Students seemed pretty similar to me when I went to college in the late 1980s; the difference is, we didn’t have social media making what we did and said accessible nationwide.
Posner v. The Arbitrary Abortion Obstacle Course – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
Not Even Scientists Can Easily Explain P-values | FiveThirtyEight
Atlantic Readers Debate the Protests at Mizzou and Yale – The Atlantic
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: The Global Gender Gap Report, 2015 The US ranked 28th (which is to say that, by the report’s measures, 27 countries did better than the US).
How America’s rejection of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany haunts our refugee policy today – Vox
Copyright Is Abused to Censor Political Ads | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Kate Beaton on refusing to let women be forgotten and increasing audience diversity of a comic convention | Features | Culture | The Independent
Networks May Be Preparing To Wean Themselves Off “Pure Heroin” Of Netflix Money – Consumerist. Which is one reason Netflix has been moving so strongly into original content.
How a heroin epidemic among white Americans led to a softer war on drugs – Vox
Mein Copyright: Controversy Erupts Over The Reprinting Of Hitler’s Infamous Work | JONATHAN TURLEY Keeping Mein Kampf unavailable isn’t possible, because internet. But they might succeed in keeping annotated scholars version out of print. Keeping the responsible edition out of print means that the main copies available might be distributed and edited by modern-day Nazis; as a Jew, I don’t feel it benefits me to have only antisemites editing and contextualizing Mein Kampf.
More Evidence that Fat Stigma is Killing Us | And, of course, the more that stigma makes fat people less healthy, the more that statistics show that being fat is unhealthy, which in turn is used to justify the stigma. (I’m not saying that there are no health effects of fat aside from stigma. I am saying that stigma should be included as a contributing factor in studies of fat and health.)
6 Experts on How Silicon Valley Can Solve Online Harassment | WIRED “Solve” is hyperbole, but how to mitigate is still a worthwhile discussion to have.
“Cabinet Battle #1,” explained – Vox An interesting article looking at the musical “Hamilton” in the context of changing understandings of US history.
Transit Infrastructure and the Temptations of Techno-Autocracy | Natasha Plotkin | The Hypocrite Reader Why does it cost so much more to build a subway train in the USA than in Europe?
Why Richard Sander’s “mismatch” hypothesis is proved wrong by the evidence. (pdf link). (Sanders argues that affirmative action causes minorities to do less well in college by putting underqualified students in colleges that are too hard for them.)
Smart People Saying Smart Things About The Abigail Fisher Affirmative Action Case | Alas, a Blog This is a post I wrote in 2012, which is suddenly current again.

Posted in Link farms | 41 Comments

Spotlight Is an Important Movie. If You’re a Survivor of Sexual Violence, You Might Not Want to See It Alone

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Last night, my wife and I went to see Spotlight, the new movie starring Michael Keaton that tells the story of his character, Walter V. Robinson, and team of journalists he led at The Boston Globe in that paper’s coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a very powerful movie, and a good deal of its power, I think, comes from the way it focuses less on the horrors of the abuse per se–though we do get to hear some survivor stories–or even on the impact the abuse had on families and other personal relationships, than on the dogged and painstaking research the journalists had to do to uncover not just the fact of the scandal, but also some sense of just how uncomprehendingly widespread it actually is. This focus brings home to the viewer, in a way that telling survivors’ stories would not, the institutional nature of the scandal, the way the church not only covered up the scandal, but knowingly enabled those priests who were sexually violating children to continue doing so.

Given that the Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the quitnessential patriarchal institution on the planet, that sexual violence should have been institutionalized in this way should surprise no one, though beyond that intellectual response and a complex of emotions that still leaves me more or less speechless, I don’t have all that much to say. One of the more powerful moments–for which I cannot find a clip–came when Keaton’s character, Robinson, admits that someone, one of the lawyers involved in the cover-up, had handed him the story at least a decade before the events depicted in the movie and he had essentially buried it. The scene is powerful because it demonstrates just how deeply people of good will can become complicit in institutional silences and silencings without even realizing it.

Even though I am a survivor of childhood sexual violence, I did not expect the movie to effect me as deeply as it did. I came home and sat with the lights out for an hour or more, sipping a tumbler full of scotch in my living room, just thinking about my own experience, the men who violated me, and the silences around that that have been so central in my life. I’m glad I went to see the movie with my wife. We haven’t really talked abou it, but it was important to be sitting next to someone whose love, understanding, and compassion I know I can count on.

Cross-posted on my blog.

Posted in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 8 Comments

Quote: A very long, sharp wedding ring

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Ampersand

Jess Zimmerman:

There have probably been more real-life woman warriors than we know. Until recently, archaeologists would determine the gender of a grave’s occupant based on the artifacts buried within; jewelry meant a woman, weapons meant a man. When skeletons are actually sexed (an imprecise process, often, but better than guesswork based on accessories), there turns out to be a small but existent number of women interred with weaponry.

Even then, some archaeologists—I’m willing to bet male archaeologists—are quick to caution that just because a woman was buried with weapons doesn’t mean she wielded them. Arms and armor in a man’s grave are martial, but in a woman’s grave, they’re symbolic. When the body of an Etruscan prince was unearthed in Italy in 2013, he was initially assumed to be a great warrior because his skeleton held a lance. The incinerated corpse on a smaller platform was thought to be his wife. Once it was determined that the prince was actually a princess, though, the lance magically became a metaphor for marriage according to a (male) researcher: “The lance, in all probability, was put there as a symbol of the union between the deceased.”

The lance could have been a symbol of power. It could even have been a symbol of war, the way it would be in the hand of a real-life Furiosa: an Amazon, for instance, or Boudica, the British queen who led a revolt against occupying Roman forces in around 60 A.D. But no, that’s not what women do; that’s not what women have. An unidentified skeleton with a weapon is a man; an unidentified woman with a weapon does not really have a weapon but rather, a very long, sharp wedding ring.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc | 18 Comments

Now This Is a Hotel Manager Who Should Definitely Be Fired

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Ampersand

911 Audio: Hotel Manager Reports Guest For Being Transgender – BuzzFeed News

Meagan Taylor and her best friend, who are both transgender women, were traveling through Iowa on July 13 to a funeral for her best friend’s brother when they stopped at Drury Inn & Suites in West Des Moines.

As the pair attempted to check in, “both the clerk and the manager gave us looks of disgust when they were not avoiding eye contact,” Taylor wrote in a complaint she filed against the hotel with the Iowa Civil Rights Commission in November. […]

In the 911 call, a woman who identifies herself as the general manager says she was concerned because Taylor is “dressed as a woman, but it’s a man’s driver’s license.” She also wanted police to “make sure they’re not hookers either.” […]

Police arrived at the hotel room the next day, according to Taylor’s complaint, and officers found hormones she takes as part of a medical treatment for gender dysphoria. She was arrested for not having a prescription, then jailed for a few days in solitary confinement.

Taylor was never charged with prostitution, the complaint said. The Transgender Law Center reported that Taylor had an outstanding warrant for an unpaid fine in Illinois. She was charged for possessing a drug without a prescription, but all of the charges were dismissed.

Strangio noted on the ACLU’s blog that transgender women of color face high rates of discrimination and profiling as sex workers. “It is this type of profiling that leads 47 percent of Black transgender women to be incarcerated at some point in their lives,” Strangio wrote.

In a chat with me, Grace commented:

The drug in question was spironolactone, often known to trans women as “spiro”, which is probably the most common androgen suppressor prescribed to trans women. It is not a scheduled drug, though it is a prescription drug, which means the potential for abuse is essentially zero, but it should be taken with medical supervision. So this would have been, I’m guessing, an arrest for a violation of an Iowa law which requires prescription drugs to be kept in the labelled container. Which is great in theory, but I violate such a law every day that I have my meds in a pill minder.

In the course of my duties, we routinely come across prescription medications which are in pill minders, and once we identify them (using a program which permits us to search on things like the shape, color, and imprint), we routinely hand them back to people, as long as they are not scheduled drugs. Because seizing prescription medications can have negative consequences, as you might imagine, and why would we arrest someone for possessing something which is not dangerous, and which they’re legally allowed to possess, because they possessed it in a method which helped them to carry it with them and/or take it correctly?

You can listen to the audio of the 911 call:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/236707216″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

This manager absolutely should be fired, and hopefully has been fired already. And the hotel should pay restitution – enough to hurt, enough to leave them with an strong incentive to make sure this never happens again.

Anytime a business discriminates against minority people is wrong. But it’s particularly reprehensible when hotels discriminate. The ability to travel around the country is one of the most basic freedoms we have. But that freedom isn’t meaningful if people aren’t able to eat on the road and depend on finding reasonable, safe accommodations. It’s not meaningful if checking into a hotel can mean being arrested and spending ~~three~~ eight nights in jail.

The issue here isn’t just the hotel’s discrimination, but also the police department’s discrimination. Although all charges were eventually dropped, Taylor never should have been arrested in the first place. That she spent ~~three~~ eight days in jail, essentially for being a trans woman of color, is disgusting. I don’t know how police departments can be incentivized to change – lawsuits? Disciplining the officers? Sensitivity training? – but clearly change is necessary. Trans women should be able to know that if they encounter police, those police will treat them like they’d treat anyone else, instead of searching for a pretext for arresting them. Police discrimination of this sort is an even worse threat to freedom than hotel discrimination is.

One final point: Assuming that someone is a prostitute because they’re black and trans is indefensible. And there’s no reason here to think that Taylor, or their friend, are prostitutes.

But even if they were – so what? It seems reasonable to me for a hotel to not want prostitution going on in their rooms – but of course prostitutes need be able to stay in a hotel. That prostitution is used as an excuse for this kind of harassment is yet another reason prostitution should be legal.

Posted in Prisons and Justice and Police, Race, racism and related issues, Sex work, porn, etc, Transsexual and Transgender related issues | 9 Comments