Black Transgender Not Allowed to Claim Self-Defense ...

[SammiValentine]

North Wales > South Wales.

[Prospero]

Ahh - North Wales is better. I love Harlech and Rhuddlan and all of those great medieval places

[GroobySteven]

And one of my favourite songs is about the old mining valleys.
Help me Rhondda.

Booooooooooooooo!

[Stavros]

If he's not yet been banned I suspect Mlid Cigar will now respond with some equally baleful questions about the veiling of women under islam.
Let me pre-empt that one. It is NOT demanded in the Koran - where the practice is encouraged for the wife of the prophet because of the numbers of strangers visiting his house. But it was also a common practice through the region well before the establishment of slam among Christian women and other faiths. Today adherents of the Wahabi and Salafi threads in islam do, indeed, demand it for women. But many other Muslims view this extreme and fundamentalist form of the faith to be aberrant. And it is also interesting that many Muslim women choose to adopt the veil where it is NOT at all demanded by their local communities in the UK for instance. i have met and talk with young Muslim women who adopt the veil out of a sense of resistance to the growing prejudice against their religion.) For them it is a feminist position!.

A few points:
1) Frantz Fanon discusses veiling as a form of political resistance, in either The Wretched of the Earth of his collected essays.

2) the precise word Hijab has numerous meanings depending on the context: it can be screen in contemporary English as well as Veil. Also, in the sections on women in the Qu'ran it is evident that many people were naked or semi-naked in 7thc Arabia and that Islam introduced a more modest -if expensive- form of dress, rather in the way that Christian missionaries in Africa and the South Pacific persuaded women and men to cover their bodies. For an interesting discussion on this, the Moroccan feminist, Fatema Mernissi's books, The Veil and the Male Elite; Beyond the Veil are worth investigating.

3) Veiling in my opinion, historically, is more class oriented than religious: I once attended a talk on Russian history in which it was stated that the physician called to attend the Tsarina of Russia, the wife of a 16thc Tsar whose name I cannot recall, discovered that she was veiled and could not remove it because he was not a fit person to look upon her, he was also not allowed to examine her physically. In the Middle East, certainly after the First World War, eyewitness accounts show that the veil was mostly worn by wealthy women -in Syria, Jordan it was Circassians mostly- who could afford to buy clothes. Women would cover their face with their gowns, but in the case of Bedouin women, this is a practical aspect of living in a desert environment. What we have seen in recent years is the opposite of what once happened: veiling is now more closley associated with rural people and the urban poor, or as a political statement, as Prospero has noted, and as is discussed by Leila Ahmad here:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...l_of_ignorance

[Stavros]

Unless the jail has more than one TS at a time, I not sure how solitary confinement is avoided. Assuming that the TS in question still has her male genitalia then housing the TS with the women prisioners doesn't work. Also placing her in with the guys would be like throwing chum in the water and stirring up the Sharks. I will reiterate that her defense counsel must be putting in continuance motions or her 6th ammendment right to a speedy trial will have been violated.

You haven't really answered the question but I don't know how one finds out what the prison policy on gender is; the more important factor is the impact of solitary confinement on someone who has not been found guilty of a crime: it seems she did indeed kill that man, in which case she could be suffering extreme forms of guilt unmediated by any other mitigating presence to calm her, rationalise her feeelings. This could have a decisive impact on her testimony in court when the case comes to trial. It seems to me as if she has been locked up and forgotten about at a time when she most needed care and some kind of counselling.

[mildcigar_2001]

Strange too that the vast majority of Muslim women are never subjected to the practice. There are Christians, who on religious principle, refuse to let doctors give their children medical care, blood transfusions etc., even when their children's lives are on the line. Should we therefore condemn Christianity?

By all means condemn the Christian Scientists and the Jehovah's Witnesses. To put the record straight I don’t think I implied that all Muslims practice FGM, but the overwhelming majority of FGM are committed by Muslims.

It is interesting why the supposed Liberals of this forum feel the need to try to defend the bizarre cultural/quasi-religious practices of Islam. I can think of almost no culture that would be more unfriendly to the TS community than Islam.

In some of the gay pride parades in the States some of the gay/TS community dresses up as nuns. Just suppose what would happen if you attempted something similar (only anti-Muslim in flavor) in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.??? Can anyone say beheading?

Your arguments would be like the Jews in the 1930s saying the Nazis are not all that bad, and in the same breath decrying the warmongering of the British.

[Prospero]

So with lucidity Mild Cigar makes it clear that hates Muslims. Pure and simple. Muslims = Nazis do they? I rather think if historical parallels are to be employed that they are the Jews (and I can anticipate your response here - that the jews didn't have a substantial coterie of terrorists in their ranks. True. But they were reviled as a group just as you clearly revile Muslims)
Zyklon B your gas of choice?

[Stavros]

I can think of almost no culture that would be more unfriendly to the TS community than Islam.

You may or may not know thugs of various size and political persuasion have broken up attempts to mount LGBT marches in Russia; that transexuals are in stealth across southern Europe, in China, and that sub-Saharan Africa is hostile to any form of open display of non-heterosexuality, be it Muslim, Christian, Pagan or whatever: in fact the Christian Church in Africa is one of the most extreme conservative segments of the worldwide community.

Liberal attitudes to social behaviour have advanced enormously in my lifetime in Europe, North America, Australasia and parts of South America, but these advances have actually been minor compared to the world as a whole, where social attitudes to gender and sexual diversity are still rigid and wholly different now from what we accept.

Here is Tony Blair squirming in his pants while sitting next to Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf who dismisses homosexuality and has no intention of changing the law in Liberia:


Surely this cannot be the Lynton Blair who was fined £50 for importuning another man in a public toilet in Westminster in 1974? Surely not the Oxford university guitarist known as Miranda to his band-mates...??

[robertlouis]

You may or may not know thugs of various size and political persuasion have broken up attempts to mount LGBT marches in Russia; that transexuals are in stealth across southern Europe, in China, and that sub-Saharan Africa is hostile to any form of open display of non-heterosexuality, be it Muslim, Christian, Pagan or whatever: in fact the Christian Church in Africa is one of the most extreme conservative segments of the worldwide community.

Liberal attitudes to social behaviour have advanced enormously in my lifetime in Europe, North America, Australasia and parts of South America, but these advances have actually been minor compared to the world as a whole, where social attitudes to gender and sexual diversity are still rigid and wholly different now from what we accept.

Here is Tony Blair squirming in his pants while sitting next to Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf who dismisses homosexuality and has no intention of changing the law in Liberia:


Surely this cannot be the Lynton Blair who was fined £50 for importuning another man in a public toilet in Westminster in 1974? Surely not the Oxford university guitarist known as Miranda to his band-mates...??

And only in the US is there a major party in the developed west which actively promotes anti-homosexual activity. Just thought I'd throw that in....

[Prospero]

And yes - the Conservative Party in the UK, for all it's other faults, is actually pretty enlightened about Gay issues.