Legislative Attack Research Articles

LGBTQ+‐affirming graduate education: Preparing and supporting future family court clinicians

AbstractLesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual orientation and gender minority (LGBTQ+) youth and families have been under a social and legislative attack in the United States in recent years, marked by a stark increase in gender‐affirming care bans and religious rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. LGBTQ+ graduate students in mental health fields—particularly those who seek to work in family court settings—have specific needs that are often unmet in their educational and clinical training environments. Furthermore, the over‐representation of LGBTQ+ youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems necessitates specialized knowledge and skills that many clinicians and educators are currently lacking. This paper discusses the unique challenges facing LGBTQ+ graduate students and provides research‐based suggestions for professors, administrators, and supervising clinicians who seek to provide a holistic and humanizing educational experience that produces clinicians who can respond to the evolving needs of LGBTQ+ individuals in family court settings and beyond.

Pride and Prejudice: Celebrating Identity Among 2024’s Legislative Attacks

Pride and Prejudice: Celebrating Identity Among 2024’s Legislative Attacks

Coconstructing (Trans-)Capitalist Realism

Recent legislation targeting transgender individuals has relied on trans-antagonistic discourses depicting transgender communities as led by a perverse ideology and as attaining the status of a cult. Trans-affirming opponents to these laws have responded with a biopolitical analysis suggesting that the state is denying the means of life to a marginalized group or that right-wing pundits are manufacturing a transgender crisis to expand state power via a state of exception. However, trans-affirming activists overlook political economy in their biopolitical analysis such that both these legislative attacks and their trans-affirming opposition validate late capitalism. In the following, I use post-Marxist theory to reveal a catch-22 whereby both anti-transgender legislation and its ostensible opponents uphold neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy. Whereas anti-transgender legislation appears aligned with neoliberal austerity and the seemingly implacable privatization of (previously) public space, opponents continue to recapitulate medicalizing narratives for transgender subjects that are bound up in late capitalist tensions and erase class within these discourses (plausibly resourcing transgender subjects who become “respectable” through whiteness and wealth). In the process, trans anti-capitalist activisms are overshadowed or occluded, perhaps constituting a trans capitalist realism in which trans anti-capitalism is rendered impossible. Implications for global gender nonconforming communities are explored within the context of US and Global North cultural imperialisms, and more explicitly leftist opposition to legislative attacks are reviewed.

Puzzling Over Patterns

Social scientists in the United States face impacts of legislative attacks on critical thinking in classrooms from K-12 through college. Reduction and removal of content and pedagogy designed to develop and discuss critical thinking present challenges for anthropologists by increasing inequality in access and engagement for learners at all levels. Community engagement and creative problem solving can inform the development of learning opportunities for people who process and approaching complex problems differently. Puzzling, when used in learning processes, can increase inclusivity to facilitate learning data analysis skills with different types of learners. Activities like these allow for involvement in analysis and interpretation of data and add to anthropologists’ toolkits to learn, systematize, explain, and use social science informed knowledge.

Being and Becoming Well in the Most Transparent of Times: The Limits of Racialized Healing Strategies in Educational Research

This article examines the possibilities and limits of strategies directed toward racialized healing amidst declarations of pandemics and legislative attacks on public school teachers. We question what these strategies take as a self-evident truth: that race and racism can be conceptualized in terms of health and transparently addressed through research and practice focused on racialized healing. To complicate this assertion, we locate the strategies within a race-health nexus, a form of biopower. This nexus establishes norms, categories, and classifications that justify ranking and comparing, dividing and differentially intervening on some in the name of the health and wellbeing of all. We historicize how this nexus became integral to schooling in the United States in the 19th century, normalizing populations according to civilizational values that doubled as health standards. We argue that this nexus makes possible biopolitical strategies of “tailoring treatments” and “cultivating potential” that continue to undergird health and healing strategies in educational research and pedagogical practice today, thereby reconfiguring, rather than overturning, hierarchies of human difference. The analysis demonstrates that racialized healing strategies provide no ontological guarantee for reducing racialized harm. Instead, such efforts must be reflexively situated within the interplay of biology, coloniality, and education that makes “healing” seem necessary and urgent in the first place.

Teaching and Leading in the Age of Critical Race Theory Legislation: A Case of Self-Silencing in a School

This case centers on two early career educators: a principal and teacher struggling to address issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) in their school in the current political context of legislative attacks on critical race theory (CRT) and the simultaneous national Black Lives Matter movement. A talented teacher is reluctantly self-silencing out of fear and uncertainty when her students ask her questions related to DEIJ topics. Tired of feeling anxious and compromising her teaching, she seeks the advice of her principal. The case asks readers to consider implications for school leaders, teachers, students, parents, and teacher educators.

Finding Black Joy in a World Where We Are Not Safe

In this essay, I reflect on my lived experience as a Black, female scholar doing critical scholarship on racism in the vein of Critical Race Theory (CRT). I am particularly attentive to the ways that the current backlash against those who use critical perspectives that center the experience of marginalized persons to illuminate continuing racial oppression in society is meant to silence and frighten scholars through challenging our very livelihoods and even our sanity. Amid widespread legislative attacks in numerous states across the nation, I comment on both the emancipatory power of using the agency of Black joy to speak truth to power in a White supremacist world and the constancy of its companion-pain. I do this to better answer the question: in a place where race scholarship is under attack or heavy scrutiny, what are your experiences with leaving or staying and why?

Legislative Attacks on the Prosecutor’s Office of the Kyrgyz Republic as Evidence of the Absence of a Certain Scientifically Based Position of State Policy in the Field of Crime Prevention

The author seeks to show how the unreasonable proposals of individual deputies of the Parliament (Jogorku Kenesh) of the Kyrgyz Republic in the form of relevant legislative initiatives to deprive the prosecutor of the authority to initiate and investigate a criminal case actually nullify the active participation of the prosecutor’s office in the fight against crime. International documents and the logic of adversarial criminal proceedings in the Kyrgyz Republic unequivocally testify in favor of the prosecutor’s independent decision on the issue of criminal prosecution. The author is a consistent supporter of the idea that the official position, the level of professional training, the high degree of responsibility for the assigned case make it possible to see in the prosecutor a representative of the country's law enforcement system, capable of solving the most difficult tasks of ensuring the rule of law, including those related to the implementation of the function of criminal prosecution, especially at such a time of crisis for the Kyrgyz economy, when it is absolutely inexpedient and groundless to create any pseudo analogies of the Financial Police or the Investigative Committee.

Abolitionist Techniques of Weathering

Abolitionist Techniques of Weathering

The role of social work and social welfare in the current crisis facing trans youth in the US

Social work in the US has failed to respond to the largest legislative attack on the rights of transgender and non-binary people in the history of the country. Hundreds of laws have been proposed over the past several years, aiming to ban transgender and non-binary people from public life, as well as criminalising gender-affirming healthcare and attempting to remove transgender youth from supportive families for forced detransition. Beginning with the Trump administration, these bills have exponentially increased in number, now being proposed in more than 60 per cent of the US. This article critically reviews the ways in which national social work organisations have failed to address both the systemic erasure of transgender people in their pedagogy and the behaviours of specific actors within the social work profession who are actively helping to draft anti-trans legislation and advocate for conversion therapy, contravening both the evidence base and code of ethics.

How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea by Sandra Eder

Gender is having a moment—still. Sandra Eder’s comprehensive and compassionate history of gender comes as the concept remains deeply embattled. On the one hand, feminist and queer critiques of gender binaries have opened up cultural space for myriad gender variations. Gender-bending, gender-fuck, and the ‘new androgyny’ have mainstreamed the dismantling of rigid identity categories. On the other hand, there is a furious backlash: physical violence and legislative attacks against LGBTQ+, and particularly transgender, communities; censorship of so-called gender theory in classrooms; and cruel harassment by anti-transgender activists of children’s hospitals who perform gender-affirming medical care. The gender wars, waged for decades, are all the more reason that How the Clinic Made Gender is a welcome and powerful contribution to histories of gender. Eder, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, joins other scholars, particularly Joanne Meyerowitz, in telling her ‘uneasy origin story’ of how the ideas of gender and ‘gender role’ emerged and were put into medical practice in the mid-20th century. Focused on the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Eder historicizes her account within the complicated rise of a therapeutic society and the shifting cultural landscapes of sex, gender, and sexuality.

Trans Youth Talk Back: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Transgender Minors’ Accounts of Healthcare Access

Contemporary transgender youth in the U.S. today face increasing stigmatization as extraordinary legislative attacks intensify discrimination and exclusion of these young people in healthcare, recreation, and school life. These attacks reflect broader political, religious, and cultural ideologies embedded in systems of power that regulate the provision of healthcare for American transgender youth. We apply Foucauldian discourse analysis and a theory-driven conceptual framework for structural analysis of transgender health inequities-Intersectionality Research for Transgender Health Justice-to identify discourses youth encounter within healthcare practice. We analyzed data from interviews conducted in Western Washington State with youth ages 13-17 (n =11) and asked how transgender subjectivity was constructed in their accounts and in what ways youth made use of the discursive resources available to them when navigating systems of care. Three sets of discourses-discourses of normativity, discourses of temporality, and discourse of access-characterized participants' narratives. We discuss how participants negotiated discursively situated systems of power in order to ensure their safety and access to care.

“Rude and in Defiance of Authority”: Arizona Anti-Mexican American Studies Legislation and the Discursive Positioning of the “Rude” Student of Color

This article considers a style of civility discourse centered on perceived “rudeness” of youth, particularly youth of color (YOC) and its use as a political strategy that positions YOC as both uncivil and lacking agency. It is constructed as a racialized concept of rudeness that positions YOC as unreliable narrators and problem students whose voices can be dismissed when it comes to educational policy that directly impacts them. I refer to this discourse as “rudeness rhetoric.” It takes on a key role in the (re)production of the school as a political site of white supremacist citizen production. I focus on Arizona politicians’ mobilization of rudeness rhetoric as justification for legislation targeting Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program for termination. I rely on triangulation of multiple sources and methods, including observation of meetings and the trial concerning the constitutionality of anti-MAS legislation, plaintiff evidence, documents and public statements by politicians, and online commentary concerning MAS. I find that, while politicians and the Arizona Department of Education engaged accusations that MAS promoted anti-white racism, they used rudeness rhetoric to frame the program as harmful, charging that it produced rude students based on protests politicians associated with MAS. Focusing on “rude” YOC allowed politicians to reframe legislative attacks on ethnic studies and move debate over MAS away from racial animus in the legislation. Rather than one explosive moment in which the rudeness rhetoric performed its political work, it snaked throughout multiple venues from political arenas to the courtroom to the media.

From Abortion Rights to Reproductive Justice: A Call to Action

As aggressive cultural and legislative attacks on abortion rights and access continue, we call upon social workers to pursue the liberatory aims of the reproductive justice (RJ) movement. We argue that the RJ framework, rooted in feminist theory, aligns with social work's social justice ethos and goals, appropriately guiding advocacy and intervention. After outlining the central aims and tenets of the RJ movement, we consider policies that impair RJ and those that could promote RJ, focusing on enhancing body sovereignty, childbearing, and parenting. We conclude with concrete recommendations for how social workers can pursue RJ professionally and personally.

Electoral support and militants’ targeting strategies

Militant groups that are in armed conflict with a government often coexist with political parties that have ethnic or ideological connections to them. In this article, we explore the extent to which electoral support received by militant associated opposition parties and nationally incumbent political parties influences subnational variation in militant attacks. We argue, and empirically demonstrate, that militants strategically target localities where the levels of electoral support for the opposition party and the nationally incumbent party are close in an effort to negatively influence the electoral performance of the incumbent party. To illustrate this dynamic we examine subnational data from 1995 to 2015 Turkish legislative elections and attacks organized by the Kurdish militants within the same time period. We also examine the impact of June 2015 legislative elections on militant attacks until the snap elections in November 2015. Our empirical examination shows that militants target localities where electoral support for the governing party and Kurdish opposition party is close. Moreover, increase in violence negatively influences the electoral performance of the governing party. However, it does not consistently have a significant influence on the opposition. The findings illustrate that militants strategically choose the location of their attacks based on electoral dynamics, and attacks can pose an electoral challenge to the governing party.

Focus: Starting from Scratch: A Manifesto for UK Labour Law

INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 10 Volume 23 Issue 2 2016 British laws on trade unions are the most restrictive in the Western World FOCUS ❐ BREXIT I n the same month as the Brexit referendum result, the UK’s Institute for Employment Rights (IER) has published its Manifesto for Labour Law: towards a comprehensive revision of workers’ rights. The IER’s proposals on reform of the UK’s labour laws could not be timelier. Fortythree years of EU membership may have contributed some gains for the rights of British workers , but current comparisons with Europe present a stark picture of working life in the UK: ‘On average, British workers work more hours per week, more days per year, more years before they retire, after which they receive lower levels of pension than most of their European counterparts. In comparison to other European workers they have generally received less education and training, and (because of lack of employer investment ) their productivity is lower. They get fewer paid holidays than almost all European comparators (the Working Time Directive notwithstanding). Their pay is so low that a great proportion of them are in poverty (and the State subsidises employers’ low wages in respect of a higher proportion of workers) than almost anywhere elsewhere in Europe. The gender pay gap is at a wholly unacceptable level’. As the manifesto’s authors explain in detail, the UK has ‘a framework of law born out of 19th century conditions, which has bypassed many advances of the 20th century, which ignores today’s economic and workplace realities, and which is not fit for purpose in 21st century Britain’. A debate on the future of British labour law is long overdue. The authors address head on the relationship between the dire state of workers’ rights in the UK and the current legal restrictions on the exercise of trade union rights, which have increasingly made collective actions such as striking so burdensome as to be almost impracticable. British laws on trade unions in 2016 remain ‘the most restrictive in the Western World. This is indisputable in relation to the right to trade union autonomy, right to strike, and the right to bargain collectively’. The Conservative government’s latest legislative attack on trade unions – the Trade Union Act 2016 – was roundly criticised for containing provisions which violate ILO Convention 87, and concerns were raised about its compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights. Some of these aspects were watered down in response to pressure from trade unions. Nonetheless, many contested provisions – concerning ballot thresholds and the expanded role of the trade union Certification Officer – have now been enacted. The Manifesto calls for that Act to be repealed in its entirety, immediately. The restoration of collective bargaining The Manifesto’s principle recommendation for reform is to shift the balance of regulation from legislation to collective bargaining. The IER’s 25 comprehensive policy recommendations are founded on building ‘extensive sectoral collective bargaining structures underpinned by strong trade union rights’. The authors acknowledge that such a shift is ‘contingent on strong State support for [collective bargaining] and for trade unions (and employers’ associations), upon whose shoulders will lie a heavy responsibility for delivery’. Legislation therefore continues to play a key role. But the authors also amply demonstrate that legislation alone is an ambivalent and sometimes ineffective tool: the rampant levels of inequality in the UK at present are not an ‘unavoidable product of the operation of the ‘labour market’’. Rather, ‘the law has been moulded purposefully to achieve these outcomes’ – in particular since the Thatcher-era. One of the principle effects of this has been the cynical destruction of collective bargaining since 1980. Once the preferred method of regulation, collective bargaining has been largely displaced by legislation: ‘By 2011 Britain had fallen to the second lowest in Europe in terms of the level of collective bargaining coverage. Coverage is probably less than 20% today, lower than at any time since before the First World War’. The result is in ‘an unnecessarily legalistic, inefficient and immensely complex system of rules, contained in an ever-growing statute book too heavily dependent on lawyers, tribunals, judges and courts for their enforcement’. The weakness of this labour...

Resistance to Domination

Resistance to Domination

Strong Law, Timid Implementation - How the EPA Can Apply the Full Force of the Clean Air Act to Address the Climate Crisis

I. INTRODUCTION II. GREENHOUSE REDUCTION BY THE NUMBERS: SCIENCE VS. POLICY III. A BRIEF SURVEY OF CLEAN AIR ACT REGULATION TO DATE FOR GREENHOUSE GASES: VAST POTENTIAL BUT LITTLE PROGRESS A. Mobile Sources of Pollution 1. Section 202 Standards for Automobiles and for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Trucks 2. Section 231 Standards for Aircraft and Section 213 Standards for Other Mobile Sources B. Stationary Sources of Pollution 1. New Source Performance Standards 2. New Source Review IV. CRITERIA AIR POLLUTANT DESIGNATION, NATIONAL AMBIENT AIR QUALITY STANDARDS, AND STATE IMPLEMENTATION PLANS FOR GREENHOUSE GASES A. The NAAQS Process B. Benefits of a NAAQS for Greenhouse Gases C. Challenges and Criticisms Related to a Greenhouse Gas NAAQS 1. The Section 111(d) Trade-off.... 2. NAAQS Attainment for a Globally WellMixed Gas 3. Allocating State Reductions under a Greenhouse Gas NAAQS 4. Fear of Political Backlash V. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION Dangerous climate change is upon us. Reports of stronger storms, longer droughts, heat waves, crop failures, melting sea ice, and species declines are now ubiquitous. These and other impacts of climate change are certain to worsen in the coming years. As NASA's James Hansen and his colleagues warned in 2008, atmospheric carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]) levels are already unsafe. Without deep and rapid emission reductions, changes to the Earth's climate and ecosystems will render our planet unrecognizable: If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that C[O.sub.2] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that. (1) Despite similarly urgent warnings from scientists around the world, greenhouse gas emissions continue largely unabated. At the end of 2011, atmospheric C[O.sub.2] was at 390 ppm and rising. (2) The 2008 election of Barack Obama, who pledged to reduce greenhouse emissions, created expectations that the United States government would finally heed scientific warnings about the urgency of climate change. However, any sense of momentum towards meaningfully addressing the climate crisis stalled with the defeat of economy-wide climate legislation in the 111th Congress, the concurrent failure of international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in late 2009, and the 2010 election of a new Congress openly hostile to any form of greenhouse regulation. Consequently, the leading effort to tackle greenhouse emissions on a national level has been the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) nascent regulation of C[O.sub.2] and other greenhouse gases as pollutants under the forty-year-old Clean Air Act (CAA or Act). Despite legal challenges and legislative attacks by greenhouse polluters and their defenders in Congress, the EPA's implementation of several provisions of the CAA is now underway. Greenhouse gas-limiting rules for automobiles are finally in place, and emissions limitations now apply to C[O.sub.2] from some of the largest smokestack sources. Nevertheless, the EPA's efforts to date have failed to reduce the United States' overall greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, under provisions for regulating tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks, total annual C[O.sub.2] emissions from the vehicle sector will still increase beyond current levels. Similarly, new greenhouse gas-constrained permits for coal-fired power plants have provided little or no C[O.sub.2] reductions. In short, while the EPA's early greenhouse gas regulations will reduce the rate at which United States greenhouse gas emissions would rise absent such regulation, they have not yet reduced or even stabilized emissions at current levels, much less reduced them to the degree recommended by scientists to avert dangerous climate change. …

EPA in the Crosshairs

There are those in the U.S. Congress who seem determined to dismantle the nation's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the name of economic growth and jobs. This despite EPA estimates that last year, the accumulated benefits of the Clean Air Act alone exceeded its costs by more than $1 trillion. * The struggle over the EPA has just been played out within the context of the larger budgetary conflict between the Republican-controlled House and the Obama Administration. In the brinkmanship negotiations that kept government doors open, the EPA appears to have escaped more or less intact. The agency will have to absorb $1.6 billion in cuts, or about 16% of its 2010 budget. Although not fatal, those cuts will surely slow the implementation of programs that are under legislative attack, including those that tackle water and air pollution. But the battle is far from over.

Legislative Attack

Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza in December 2008—January 2009 exposed a paradox: the attack was not only one of the most violent and destructive of Israel’s recent wars on the Palestinians and the one most strongly opposed by its critics, but also the one in which Israeli experts in international humanitarian law (IHL) — the area of the law that regulates the conduct of war — were most closely involved. The article demonstrates how these facts are connected.