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Gains by Intersex Activists Under Biden, Battles with Rightwing Legislators Over Medical Care
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Out-FM is a weekly progressive queer show on listener-sponsored, noncommercial WBAI/Pacifica Radio. It airs at 99.5 and wbai.org, generally on Tuesdays from 8-9 PM. Please support us by donating to WBAI. Become a member for $25 or a BAI Buddy (sustainer) for $5/month or more. Go to wbai.org or call 212-209-2950 and let WBAI management know you listen to Out-FM by supporting the station with a donation.
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Tune into Out-FM on Tues., November 16, 2021 from 8:00-9:00pm, on 99.5FM WBAI/NY & listen at https://www.wbai.org/listen-live/
Kimberly Zieselman JD of Interact Advocates
In this episode we bring you news of the LGBTQI Communitites struggles. Naomi Brussel and John Riley also bring us an extended interview about Intersex issues. Intersex is a group of conditions in which there is a discrepancy between the external genitals and the internal genitals (the testes and ovaries). The older term for this condition is hermaphroditism. In the past two weeks, several events have brought the issues related to intersex people and their rights into the news. The United States State Department has issued its first passport using the X gender marker to Dana Zzyym (pronounced Zim) who had fought a six year legal battle to change the State Department's gender marker policy. And the Biden administration held a white house round table on intersex awareness day, October 27th, and issued a statement through its department of education. Protecting the rights of intersex students. The organization, Interact Advocates for Intersex Youth in conjunction with Harvard law school for the LGBTQ and Advocacy Clinic, there, launched an intersex advocacy toolkit. And one of the people responsible for driving various numbers of these events is Kimberly Zieselman, who is with us today. Zieselman is the executive director of Interact Advocates. She is an intersex woman and has more than 20 years of experience in advocacy and nonprofit management. After graduating from Suffolk University law school, she served as a policy analyst for the Massachusetts joint House and Senate Committee on Healthcare, and then worked in government relations and advocacy for a variety of healthcare related nonprofits, including Boston Children's Hospital.
She led the group Interact through a successful strategic planning process about six years ago and rebranded and reorganized the organization in 2016 to reflect its core mission around intersex youth and the importance of raising intersex visibility, as well as using law and policy initiatives to protect intersex children's rights. She talked with Out-FM co-hosts Naomi Brussel and John Riley about some basic issues that Interact deals with, how rightwing legislatures on one hand demonize gender affirming surgery for trans youth and on the other affirm the right of parents and medical providers to do surgeries on intersex babies and toddlers
Climate Chaos - Community Uproar Over Park Plan and Possible Privatization.
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Out-FM is a weekly progressive queer show on listener-sponsored, noncommercial WBAI/Pacifica Radio. It airs at 99.5 and wbai.org, generally on Tuesdays from 8-9 PM. Please support us by donating. Become a member for $25 or a BAI Buddy (sustainer) for $5/month or more. Go to wbai.org or call 212-209-2950 and let management know you listen to Out-FM by supporting the station with a donation.
Sign up for Out-FM's Weekly Newsletter with show announcements.
Tune into Out-FM on Tues., Oct 27, 2021 from 8:00-9:00pm, on 99.5FM WBAI/NY & listen at https://www.wbai.org/listen-live/
Council Speaker Corey Johnson & Eileen MilesDiscussing East River Park's Future
Climate Chaos - Community Uproar Over Park Plan and Possible Privatization.
After Superstorm Sandy in fall 2012, community groups worked with the City to create a flood control plan for lower Manhattan and East River Park. Four years later they came up with a plan which involved a berm (similar to a dike) that would run along the FDR and the park. But to the shock of the community, about two and a half years ago Mayor Bill de Blasio trashed the community-backed plan and changed it to what is now called The East Side Coastal Resiliency Plan, (ESCR), a plan that will clear cut 1000 mature trees, remove every shred of biodiversity, then bury the entire, (almost 50 acres) park in 8-10 feet of landfill, killing every living thing and exposing the neighborhood to an enormous amount of particulate dust for many years, meanwhile all of it costing the city twice as much, almost $2 billion.
Tune in to learn about this plan and how activists from a number of affected communities are opposing the plan. Lambda Award Winning Poet and activist Eileen Myles, Tony QueyLin from National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS) and community activist Rachel de Aragon fill us in on an effort that is getting the run-around from elected Council members, the mayor and various city officials and agencies. Some activists suspect the city is moving to privatize the park and build housing on it. Whatever the motivation, why did the city overturn the community favored plan, and substitute their plan. Why did the city refuse to provide the report justifying the decision, then turn around and say no report existed, then turn around after it was sued after it failed to provide it under the Freedom of Information Act? A process that took a year and a half. Why did they then deliver a redacted plan that was completely unreadable and only deliver a readable report after more legal pressure? What's at stake? Activists say the ESCR Plan would devastate the community and leave it open to more flooding.
Removing this large number of trees will without question harm the health of many New Yorkers. Removing the trees will remove the only substantial protection from the traffic on FDR and the air cleansing and reduction in heat the trees provide. People will be killed from the heat created in the absence of these trees. This plan will especially affect those living in NYCHA (NY City Housing Authority) buildings along the East River Drive (FDR) who already suffer high rates of respiratory disease. And now with COVID, we cannot afford to lose any open space. Many people will have no place nearby to go for recreation without this park; and of course the mental health effects of this destruction are not quantifiable. The City claims they will then build a new park on top of the fill but no matter what, once the trees are cut, we will not get a park back like this in our lifetimes if ever, Many of the trees are 80 years old.