Round-Up: June 16, 2015

• Civil rights activist Rachel Doelzal was recently outed by her parents as a white woman posing as black. The situation has raised a lot of interesting discussion, including:
  • Zeba Blay at the Huffington Post challenges those who are trying to compare Doelzal’s act to being transgender.
  • Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian on how Doelzal’s act exposes individual race as a performance and why that disquiets us.
  • Melissa McEwan at Shakesville suggests questions white people, and white women in particular, can ask ourselves before we’re too quick to “pretend that her next-level shit excuses the rest of us.”
• Many have argued Rachel Doelzal is a distraction from continuing issues of racist police brutality. For black women, sexual harassment comes hand in hand with police brutality, as recently indicated in McKinley, Texas (Huffington Post).
• Mexican worker and mother of six Rosa Moreno lost her hands making flat screen TVs to sell in America. Now she’s speaking out about the need for fairness for the workers making the products Americans (and Canadians) buy (The Guardian).
• An FDA panel has approved a drug commonly called the “female Viagra” but as the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog points out, there are still concerns about the drug’s safety and whether it’s even necessary.
• XY Feminist does a great job deconstructing the tactics of two groups of anti-feminist internet trolls: what he calls the “Skunks” and the “Sea Lions.”
• Fern Hill at Dammit Janet talks about how Saskatchewan is becoming the latest battleground over abortion rights in Canada.
• At Ebony, Lesli-Ann Lewis writes about white feminist gatekeeping and how that’s eroding as trans women, women of colour and trans women of colour gain more of a platform to make their voices heard.
• The lack of LGBTQ-inclusive sexual and reproductive health education is a public health concern that desperately needs to be addressed, says Gloria Malone at RH Reality Check.
• Adrienne K. at Native Appropriations is nervous about JK Rowling’s planned Harry Potter prequel about an American wizarding school and how it will relate to indigenous cultures.
• In a custody dispute ruling, an Ontario judge has ordered two parents to let their biological son discover their own gender, saying neither can force a gender upon their child (CBC).