Transgender Rights

"Transgender Rights packs a surprising amount of information into a small space. Offering spare, tightly executed essays, this slim volume nonetheless succeeds in creating a spectacular, well-researched compendium of the transgender movement." -Law Library Journal

Over the past three decades, the transgender movement has gained visibility and achieved significant victories. Discrimination has been prohibited in several states, dozens of municipalities, and more than two hundred private companies, while hate crime laws in eight states have been amended to include gender identity. Yet prejudice and violence against transgender people remain all too common.

With analysis from legal and policy experts, activists and advocates, Transgender Rights assesses the movement’s achievements, challenges, and opportunities for future action. Examining crucial topics like family law, employment policies, public health, economics, and grassroots organizing, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable resource in the fight for the freedom and equality of those who cross gender boundaries. Moving beyond media representations to grapple with the real lives and issues of transgender people, Transgender Rights will launch a new moment for human rights activism in America.

Contributors: Kylar W. Broadus, Judith Butler, Mauro Cabral, Dallas Denny, Taylor Flynn, Phyllis Randolph Frye, Julie A. Greenberg, Morgan Holmes, Bennett H. Klein, Jennifer L. Levi, Ruthann Robson, Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson, Dean Spade, Kendall Thomas, Paula Viturro, Willy Wilkinson.

Paisley Currah is associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

Richard M. Juang cochairs the advisory board of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in Washington, DC. He has taught at Oberlin College and Susquehanna University. He is the lead editor of NCTE's Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual and coeditor of Transgender Justice, which explores models of activism.

Shannon Price Minter is legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

Human rights law and the legal protection of women from violence are still fairly new concepts. As a result, substantial discrepancies exist between what is decided in the halls of the United Nations and what women experience on a daily basis in their communities. Human Rights and Gender Violence is an ambitious study that investigates the tensions between global law and local justice.

As an observer of UN diplomatic negotiations as well as the workings of grassroots feminist organizations in several countries, Sally Engle Merry offers an insider's perspective on how human rights law holds authorities accountable for the protection of citizens even while reinforcing and expanding state power. Providing legal and anthropological perspectives, Merry contends that human rights law must be framed in local terms to be accepted and effective in altering existing social hierarchies. Gender violence in particular, she argues, is rooted in deep cultural and religious beliefs, so change is often vehemently resisted by the communities perpetrating the acts of aggression.

A much-needed exploration of how local cultures appropriate and enact international human rights law, this book will be of enormous value to students of gender studies and anthropology alike.

*make practical decisions about living together
*obtain domestic partner benefits
*make medical decisions for each other when needed
*take care of your partner's finances when your partner can't
*leave property to each other
*understand the practical and legal aspects of having and raising children through adoption, donor insemination, surrogacy or foster parenting

A Legal Guide for Lesbian & Gay Couples, now in its 12th edition; is completely revised and updated to cover new domestic-partnership laws in California and New Jersey, same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and Canada, the latest on raising children and updated estate planning laws.

"Solinger is impressively optimistic about America's potential not only to evolve into 'a country of reproductive justice,' but also to overcome centuries of the sex, race, and class prejudice that have literally built our society.'
—Bitch

"A concise historical overview. . . . Based primarily on a vast array of well-documented secondary sources, this book is a well-written and useful overview of the politics behind pregnancy in the U.S. . . . Highly recommended."
—Choice

"This succinct, highly readable political and cultural history of a wide range of reproductive issues is a near-perfect primer on the topic."
—Publishers Weekly

”The book is well documented and well written... I expect this book to find a place in many classrooms.”
— The Journal of American History

"Rickie Solinger puts today's 'culture wars' over abortion, birth control and sex education into a historical context that is rich, complex and full of surprises. A deeply researched-and highly readable-book that should reach the widest possible audience."
—Katha Pollitt, author of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture

"An extraordinary accomplishment. In a courageous exploration of American history, Solinger demonstrates how public supervision of sex and social reproduction have served to maintain racial privilege."
—Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

" Pregnancy and Power definitively demolishes the myth that reproductive politics has ever been about women's choice. Rickie Solinger's brilliant and comprehensive analysis shows that, throughout U.S. history, reproductive regulation has served a social agenda that especially disadvantages women of color."
—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

"We must all be grateful to Rickie Solinger for another of her pithy, compelling interpretive histories. Pregnancy and Power offers a thoughtful, lucid overview of reproductive issues throughout U.S. history—an extremely valuable contribution that should be widely read."
—Linda Gordon, author of The Moral Property of Women: Birth Control Politics in America

"Solinger shows how the past is truly prologue as she connects contemporary political struggles over pregnancy and pregnancy limitation to racism and colonialism in the United States"
—Loretta J. Ross, co-author, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice

"Pregnancy and Power embraces far more than the usual perspective."
—MBR: California Bookwatch

[R]eading Rickie Solinger's Pregnancy and Power felt in some ways like taking a medicinal tonic. She provides a vision of what a society dedicated to reproductive justice could be... [ Pregnancy and Power] made me think— and for that, I like this book immensely.
—The Women's Review of Books

A sweeping chronicle of women's battles for reproductive freedom throughout American history, Pregnancy and Power explores the many forces—social, racial, economic, and political—that have shaped women's reproductive lives in the United States.

Leading historian Rickie Solinger argues that a woman's control over her body involves much more than the right to choose an abortion. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised breeding schemes, when the U.S. government took Indian children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressed Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the diverse plot lines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time.

Solinger asks which women have how many children under what circumstances, and shows how reproductive experiences have been encouraged or coerced, rewarded or punished, honored or exploited over the last 250 years. Viewed in this way, the debate over reproductive rights raises questions about access to sex education and prenatal care, about housing laws, about access to citizenship, and about which women lose children to adoption and foster care.

Pregnancy and Power shows that a complete understanding of reproductive politics must take into account the many players shaping public policy-lawmakers, educators, employers, clergy, physicians-as well as the consequences for women who obey and resist these policies. Tracing the diverse plotlines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the struggle to control sex and pregnancy in America.

Globalization has a taste for queer cultures. Whether in advertising, film, performance art, the internet, or in the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, queerness sells and the transnational circulation of peoples, identities and social movements that we call "globalization" can be liberating to the extent that it incorporates queer lives and cultures. From this perspective, globalization is seen as allowing the emergence of queer identities and cultures on a global scale.

The essays in Queer Globalizations bring together scholars of postcolonial and lesbian and gay studies in order to examine from multiple perspectives the narratives that have sought to define globalization. In examining the tales that have been spun about globalization, these scholars have tried not only to assess the validity of the claims made for globalization, they have also attempted to identify the tactics and rhetorical strategies through which these claims and through which global circulation are constructed and operate.

Contributors include Joseba Gabilondo, Gayatri Gopinath, Janet Ann Jakobsen, Miranda Joseph, Katie King, William Leap, Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Bill Maurer, Cindy Patton, Chela Sandoval, Ann Pellegrini, Silviano Santiago, and Roberto Strongman.