Content warning: The following story contains discussion of violence against Indigenous women. Joyce Echaquan was a 37-year old Atikamekw woman of the Manawan community in Quebec. She was a mother to seven children and respected by the members of her tribe. On September 28, Echaquan went live on Facebook in a Joliette, Quebec hospital as she writhed in pain. Echaquan had a heart condition treated with a pacemaker and was experiencing intense stomach pain. The video showed a nurse and an orderly yelling at Echaquan in...

More than 200 Guatemalan women and girls were killed in the first eight months of this year alone. Since 2015, more than 3,000 women and girls have been killed in Guatemala according to human rights groups like Amnesty International and the United Nations. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which share borders, all rank in the top five globally for their rates of femicide. In Guatemala, crimes against women go unpunished in more than 83% of reported cases. Most of the cases of femicide this year remain unsolved and Guatemalan...

Since March, thousands of student-led protests have flooded the streets of Bangkok to denounce the Thai government. For a brief moment, the protests were halted due to the coronavirus pandemic but have picked back up since June when restrictions were lessened. The demonstrations have aimed criticism at their government’s lack of initiative to embrace new ideas, so women, especially young students, rallied to have their concerns raised to the forefront. In tandem with the anti-government protests, Thai women have used the momentum to vocalize their dismay...

Where did early suffragists ever get the idea that women should have the same rights as men? The answer may be in their own backyards—in the egalitarian society created by Native Americans "One day, a [Native American] woman gave away a fine quality horse.” The audience of women’s rights activists listened attentively as ethnographer Alice Fletcher addressed the first International Council of Women. The scene was Washington, D.C. The date was March 1888. “Will your husband like to have you give the horse away?” Fletcher recalled...

President Trump’s hasty COVID-19 recovery has brought on many conflicting feelings. After the news of his sickness broke, only two days after his cringeworthy debate performance where Trump mocked Biden for wearing “the biggest mask,” Twitter erupted. Some called the diagnosis his karmic fate; others wished death upon him. Soon after, Twitter resoponded to the surge, saying, “Tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against *anyone* are not allowed and will need to be removed. This does not automatically mean suspension.”   tweets that wish...

“Trans people are not new. We have always been here. As long as there’s been recorded human history, we have always existed. But we have been written out of the human story…” said Imara Jones for TIME earlier this year. The repercussions of being written out of the human story have never been more apparent as people’s lack of understanding too often turns into inconsolable violence. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the number of transgender or gender non-conforming people killed so far this...

In the case of six Indigenous women from the Pikangikum First Nation in Canada who pleaded guilty to impaired driving offences, Ontario Court Justice David Gibson is calling to challenge the minimum sentences and penalties under federal law. Federal law in Canada rules that repeated impaired driving offenders must face a mandatory minimum jail term of 90 days. The sentence may be served intermittently on weekends to allow the offender to maintain their employment, education, or familial responsibilities. As the six Indigenous women are all mothers,...

We missed Bi-Visibility Day, so here are some biconic individuals that have been hetero-washed by history. Do you remember ever learning First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was bisexual? I certainly don’t. Before we move on to the list, to this day bi myths still pervade the heterosexual and LGBTQ+ community. These myths erase and harm bi-folks, so to set the tone, here’s a quote from The Bisexual Manifesto (1990) written by The Bay Area Bisexual Network: “Monosexuality is a heterosexist dictate used to oppress homosexuals and to negate...

Red Light, Green Light In 1947, Women’s Wear Daily reported on a fad for novelty pins among “college girls,” who loved their “pearls and sorority pin” but would “never turn down an item that’s an attention getter, a source for conversation, or a piece that would stagger a stag line.” A small plastic pin shaped like a traffic light filled the bill: pull one of its tiny chains and a red blade emblazoned with “STOP” popped out; pull the other, and a green one marked “GO”...

Both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly have passed a bill that will try correction officers who engage in sexual relations with detainees as a Class 6 Felony.  However, Governor Ralph Northam still needs to sign the bill for it to become law. Delegate Karrie Delaney said she proposed the bill to close a loophole in the law which currently allows police officers to have sexual relations with a detainee. “This puts people in a clear power imbalance at a very vulnerable time if they were detained...