Choice for youth and sexuality

Many advocates believe that fundamental change can only come when more trans people are willing -- like M.J. and Jansen -- to be "out" and tell their stories in their communities. Parallel polls have shown that, in the case of gay rights, as more and more people came to know gay people as friends, co-workers, and family members, support for gay rights grew as well. There is reason to think that similar progress can be made as more trans people feel safe enough to be "visible" -- out and open in their communities.

Salt Lake City is well known for the intimidating heights of Temple Square, the heart of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But just a few blocks to the east is a lesser-known community hub: the bustling building complex of the Utah Pride Center. Offering services to the entire LGBT community of Utah, the center has made transgender rights a priority

Even in conservative Mormon enclaves like Davis and Weber counties, Nelson reports that judges now routinely allow people to change their name when they transition.

"When you're trans in Wyoming, you're wearing a bull's-eye on your back," Jasmine says. "The best protection for Wyoming is having pepper spray, a stun gun, and an expandable tactical baton." She flashes her nails dramatically and laughs. "I didn't grow these for my health."

Lindsay tells the story of how she was twice involuntarily committed to a mental hospital as a danger to herself for no other reason than that she was trans.

Employment discrimination has touched almost everyone.

If we avoid the tempting but misleading analogy to race and look at what's directly at stake, the combination of widespread opposition to same-sex marriage and equally widespread support for other gay rights is easier to understand. Gay rights in employment and civil unions don't require the elimination of longstanding and culturally potent sex roles. Same-sex marriage does.

Civil rights law reflects this ambivalence about sex difference. While constitutional law applies "strict scrutiny" to racial distinctions and federal employment law condemns race discrimination in almost all its forms, there's no such comprehensiveness with respect to sex. Sex discrimination is not subject to the same exacting scrutiny as race discrimination under constitutional law, and federal employment law allows many types of it. For instance, courts have routinely upheld workplace rules that enforce sex-specific dress and grooming norms against legal challenge. Employers lawfully can require women to wear makeup and feminine attire and prohibit men from wearing jewelry and long hair. By contrast, they can't have one set of grooming rules for white employees and another one for black employees. Civil rights laws explicitly allow employers to defend a claim of sex discrimination by arguing that male or female sex is itself a job requirement—say, for prison guards who do strip searches or for restroom attendants. By contrast, as a matter of federal law, no job can be the exclusive province of white people, or black people, or Asians or Latinos.

Same-sex relations are not banned in Turkey. But like America, it bans gays and cross-dressing men from the army. Yet to win exemption from mandatory military service, they must prove their sexual orientation. A Human Rights Watch report notes that this can involve “abusive and intrusive anal examinations”, and adds that many are forced into psychiatric treatment because they are deemed to be mentally ill.

Hetgeen volgens de onderzoekers weer is te herleiden tot de uitgesproken machocultuur onder veel Marokkaanse (straat)jongeren, waarin stoer, mannelijk en dwars gedrag (‘in straattaal van de jongens: kapot moeilijk’) de hoogst haalbare status is.

Evenmin is gebleken dat de oververtegenwoordiging van Marokkanen iets te maken zou hebben met nare seksuele ervaringen in hun jeugd.

Religie, aldus de onderzoekers, speelt daarbij geen enkele rol

Verdachten van fysiek geweld, althans in de hoofdstad, zijn meestal jongens van 17 tot 25 jaar oud. Ze zijn even vaak autochtoon-Nederlands als van Marokkaanse afkomst, elk 36 procent. Maar omdat blanke Nederlanders in die leeftijdscategorie 39 procent van het totaal uitmaken en Marokkanen 16 procent is er sprake van duidelijke Marokkaanse oververtegenwoordiging.

Buijs, Hekma en Duyvendak onderzochten tevens de veel gehoorde stelling dat het imago van Amsterdam als homohoofdstad van de wereld ‘naar de knoppen zou zijn’, zoals voormalig D66-leider Boris Dittrich (thans Human Right Watch) het recent nog verwoordde. Onjuist, aldus de wetenschappers.

In het onderzoek Jeugd en Seks uit 1995 zoomt Rutgers Nisso vooral in op jongeren die zelf weleens dingen doen tussen de lakens die verder gaan dan de ander wil. Daarin geeft 37 procent van de seksueel ervaren jongens en 22 procent van de meiden aan, weleens andermans of eigen grenzen te veronachtzamen.

Criminoloog Anton van Wijk presenteerde in 2006 een onderzoek waaruit blijkt dat de zedendelinquentie onder jongeren met 300 procent toenam in vijftien jaar tijd. Naar de exacte oorzaak (betere, snellere registratie, meer aangiftebereidheid, de komst van internet?) blijft het vooralsnog gissen.

the girl was refused in two hospitals in her hometown of Lublin due to a conscience clause, which is the right of a doctor to refuse an abortion if it's contradictory to his/her religious beliefs.

In one hospital, as the mother was talking to the senior registrar, a priest arrived and attempted to persuade the girl not to have the abortion

According to Wanda Nowicka, the head of the Foundation for Women and Family Planning, an obvious violation of doctor-patient privilege had taken place, not to mention the girl's right to privacy

Unofficially, the doctors wouldn't perform the abortion because the hospital was raided by pro-life activists and spammed by e-mails expressing both pleads and threats. To the staff's horror it turned out that personal data of the girl had been leaked, including her mobile number, on which she received threats and pleads via SMS. When the girl left the hospital, she was followed by pro-life activists on the street and even at the police station where she and her mother sought refuge.

Finally, thanks to the Foundation for Women and Family Planning, the girl and her mother found a place where they could perform the abortion and it was carried out on the last day possible - at the very end of the 12th week of pregnancy

Top American researchers called the treatment unthinkable for the millions infected in Africa and impractical even for insured patients in top research hospitals.

That mutation, discovered in a few gay men in the 1990s and known as Delta 32, must be inherited from both parents. With it, the white blood cells produced in the marrow lack the surface receptors that allow HIV to invade the immune system.

Doctors say the case gives hope for therapies that artificially induce the Delta 32 mutation.

Personality tests also show differences, with gay men ranking higher than straight men in standardised tests for agreeableness, expressiveness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism. Lesbians tend to be more assertive and less neurotic than straight women.

Dr Zietsch and his colleagues tested their idea by doing a twin study of their own. They asked 4,904 individual twins, not all of them identical, to fill out anonymous questionnaires about their sexual orientation, their gender self-identification and the number of opposite-sex partners they had had during the course of their lives.

Their first observation was that the number of sexual partners an individual claimed did correlate with that individual’s “gender identity”. The more feminine a man, the more masculine a woman, the higher the hit rate with the opposite sex—though women of all gender identities reported fewer partners than men did.

When the relationships between twins were included in the statistical analysis (all genes in common for identical twins; a 50% overlap for the non-identical) the team was able to show that both atypical gender identity and its influence on the number of people of the opposite sex an individual claimed to have seduced were under a significant amount of genetic control. More directly, the study showed that heterosexuals with a homosexual twin tend to have more sexual partners than heterosexuals with a heterosexual twin.

According to the final crunching of the numbers, genes explain 27% of an individual’s gender identity and 59% of the variation in the number of sexual partners that people have. The team also measured the genetic component of sexual orientation and came up with a figure of 47%—more or less the same, therefore, as that from previous studies. The idea that it is having fecund relatives that sustains homosexuality thus looks quite plausible.

Rouvoet benadrukte geen wettelijke maatregelen te eisen, maar een breed debat te willen.

Volgens Rouvoet staat er ‘een generatie op het spel’.

Exit polls in California found that 70 percent of black voters backed the ban. Slightly more than half of Latino voters, who made up almost 20 percent of voters, favored the ban, while 53 percent of whites opposed it.

The status of those marriages, among 17,000 same-sex unions performed in the state, was left in doubt by the vote

The cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Santa Clara County, as well as several civil rights and gay rights groups, said on Wednesday that they would sue to block the ban.

Proposition 8 was one of the most expensive ballot measures ever waged, with combined spending of more than $75 million. Focus on the Family and other religious conservative groups contributed money to help pass the same-sex marriage measures in all three states.

In 1987, the government banned doctors from revealing the sex of a fetus before birth. But experts say enforcement was lax because officials feared too many doctors would be caught.

In China in 2005, the ratio was 120 boys born for every 100 girls, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Vietnam reported a ratio of 110 boys to 100 girls last year. And although India recorded about 108 boys for every 100 girls in 2001

The Population Fund warned in an October report that the rampant tinkering with nature’s probabilities in Asia could eventually lead to increased sexual violence and trafficking of women as a generation of boys finds marriage prospects severely limited

“When I first joined the company in 1995, a woman was expected to quit her job once she got married; we called it a ‘resignation on a company suggestion,’” she said. Now, she said, many women stay after marriage and take a three-month break after giving birth before returning to work. “If someone suggests that a woman should quit after marriage, female workers in my company will take it as an insult and say so,” Ms. Shin said.

In 1990, the law guaranteeing men their family’s inheritance — a cornerstone of the Confucian system — was the first of the so-called family laws to fall; the rest would be dismantled over the next 15 years.

And last year, a study by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs showed that of 5,400 married South Korean women younger than 45 who were surveyed, only 10 percent said they felt that they must have a son. That was down from 40 percent in 1991.

If it becomes law it would mean "punters" would have a legal obligation to ensure women they pay have not been trafficked.

Nine of them, including "Helen", later gave statements to police. Most of them have since been sent back to Thailand. "Helen" had been bought out of her slavery by a client, who had paid off the remaining £20,000 of her debt to her "owners".