by MADELINE STUMP

Introduction

The publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon ¹ by endocrinologist Harry Benjamin in 1966 was a tremendous tipping point in trans medical history. The readability of the text, its widespread publication, its recommendation that “treatment” for trans people should be based in the medical as opposed to psychological fields, its standardization of said medical “treatments” for trans people, and its theory of transness as a spectrum rather than a set of two dichotomous diagnoses, were novel ideas—each tremendously impactful among those then presently studying trans people as well as those who would come to study transness in the decades following. As a result, The Transsexual Phenomenon ushered in greater legitimacy to the medical (surgical and hormonal, as opposed to psychological) treatment of trans patients. It encouraged the opening of several trans health clinics across the United States, vastly broadened the general public’s awareness of the existence of trans people, and fundamentally altered the movement of trans politics going forward.

However, The Transsexual Phenomenon is not a perfect text. It strongly encourages trans patients to “pass” for both cisgender and heterosexual, and relies heavily on assumptions of whiteness and class privilege among its subjects. In addition, it preceded many forms of institutionalized psycho-medico-legal gatekeeping, including but not limited to: the enforced mass dissolvement of non-straight trans marriages, the mass coerced/forced sterilization of trans people, and the unique mandate requiring two letters from separate psychological professionals to access most gender affirming surgeries. Given the widespread impacts of the The Transsexual Phenomenon and its author on the global standardization of trans medical care, these limitations warrant further investigation and critique into their origins.

The following text navigates through the trans health articles and books published between 1886 and 1966 which appear to have had the greatest influence on the writing of The Transsexual Phenomenon, ultimately posing the question: how did we get here? Knowing the histories of The Transsexual Phenomenon and the material which laid the foundation for its monumental publication is essential for those of us pushing for improved institutions of trans medical care. If we desire to one day see a world in which trans medical care is easier to access for all trans and nonbinary people, less heavily or not at all defined by cisgender “experts,” and depathologized/normalized beside otherwise similar forms of medical care, then we must begin by understanding the ways in which the following texts led to The Transsexual Phenomenon being published as it was almost six decades ago.

Science for the people for more

On the 10th anniversary of the Yezidi genocide by ISIS, survivors are still struggling to get the international community to identify and punish the Kurdish collaborators who helped pave the path for slaughter.

In August 2014, the terror group ISIS slaughtered thousands of men and enslaved thousands of women and children from the Yezidi religious minority in the Sinjar region of Iraq.

Ten years later, Yezidis, who survived their genocide by ISIS and fled to Europe as refugees, established a protest camp in front of the German parliament in Berlin to tell the truth about what happened.

Yezidi activists speaking with The Cradle say they want the world to know that politicians and military leaders of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), led by Masoud Barzani and his family, partnered with ISIS in planning and executing the genocide. 

“Barzani and the Kurds are the most responsible for what happened to us,” Farhad Shamo Roto, a survivor of the genocide, tells The Cradle. Farhad is among several Yezidi activists who helped establish the Voice of Yezidis for the Truth of Genocide (VETO-G) protest camp in Berlin.

Betrayal

In the weeks leading up to the ISIS massacre in 2014, the Peshmerga – Kurdish security forces under Barzani’s control – publicly claimed they would protect Sinjar until their “last drop of blood.” But Yezidis did not then know Barzani had agreed with ISIS to allow the terror group to carry out the genocide. 

Under orders from Barzani, the Peshmerga disarmed Yezidis and prevented them from fleeing Sinjar, leaving them defenseless, open targets for the terror to follow. As Farhad and others in the encampment and inside Iraq have repeatedly confirmed to The Cradle:

Barzani’s Peshmerga left Sinjar without notice, allowing ISIS to attack, after they had used all means to convince us that they would protect Sinjar through their official media and their leaders.

Farhad escaped the ISIS massacre with his family at the age of 17. After three years of living in a tent in an internally displaced person (IDP) camp in the IKR, he became a refugee in France. He is now completing a PhD on the Yezidi genocide at the prestigious Centre d’Etudes Diplomatiques et Strategiques in Paris.

Silencing the truth

Like most Yezidis, Farhad initially remained silent about the Kurdish responsibility for the genocide. While living in the IDP camp, he feared retaliation from Barzani’s secret police, the Asayish. 

The Cradle for more

by ANTON JAGER

Stuck in American exile in 1941, Karl Korsch surveyed the success of the Blitzkrieg on Greece and tried, heroically, to offer a socialist interpretation. The German offensive, he wrote in a letter to Bertolt Brecht, expressed ‘frustrated left-wing energy’ and a displaced desire for workers’ control. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt summarized Korsch’s position as follows:

. . . in their civilian life, the majority of the tank crews of the German divisions were car mechanics or engineers (that is, industrial workers with practical experience). Many of them came from the German provinces that had experienced bloody massacres at the hands of the authorities in the Peasant Wars (1524-1526). According to Korsch, they had good reason to avoid direct contact with their superiors. Almost all of them could also vividly remember the positional warfare of 1916, again a result of the actions of their superiors, in whom they had little faith thereafter . . . According to Korsch, it thereby became possible for the troops to invent for themselves the Blitzkrieg spontaneously, out of historical motives at hand.

It is tempting – and consoling – to view the recent riots in Britain through this lens. In regions that were once hotbeds of Luddite agitation and labourite self-organization, the old demand for workers’ control now seems to have been perverted into xenophobic violence, a longing to overthrow the bourgeois regime replaced by an attempt to smash its weakest subjects. One wants to believe, with Korsch, that behind the mask of reaction there is still some potentially emancipatory profile.

In his recent Sidecar article, Richard Seymour ably circumvents this economism. He insists that the unrest should not be understood in terms of wrongly sublimated left-wing libido, but as an expression of late-capitalist rot. Not an insurgency to be redirected, but an impulse to be quashed. The essentials of his diagnosis are inarguable: that the class composition of the rioters was not homogenously proletarian, that they were not responding to events representing any real ‘immigrant threat’, that their actions were incited by both the political class and digital ‘lumpencommentariat’, and that the concatenation owes more to feverish misinformation than to the authentic grievances of the dispossessed.

New Left Review for more

by BARIS DEMIR

A Palestinian university student was detained on Tuesday after protesting Turkey’s mediation of oil supplies from Azerbaijan to Israel during a panel discussion on Palestine organised by the state-owned English language broadcaster TRT World. On Thursday, three other people, including a Palestinian, were reportedly detained in connection with the incident.

Stating that two Palestinian protesters have been sent to the Repatriation Centre under the threat of deportation, the group Thousand Youth for Palestine continues its protest in front of President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s Istanbul Provincial Administration to demand the release of their friends. The group’s members have been detained many times before for protesting the genocide in Gaza and the complicity of the Erdo?an government.

This persecution and the recent unlawful threat of deportation of Palestinian youth exposes Turkey’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Socialist Equality Group condemns this persecution and calls on workers and youth to mobilise for the release of those detained. The deportation of Palestinian youth to a country where a genocidal war is now spreading to the West Bank could have fatal consequences.

A study by Oil Change International reveals that many countries, including signatories to the Geneva Conventions on genocide, have supplied oil for the tanks and planes used by Israel in the Gaza genocide and are complicit in crimes against the Palestinian people.

The study analysed shipping records, satellite imagery and other open-source industry data to track 65 oil and fuel shipments to Israel between October 21, 2023 and July 12. According to the report, a total of 4.1 million tonnes of crude oil have been shipped to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza, and these shipments have continued uninterrupted since the International Court of Justice rulings.

Israel imports almost 99 per cent of the oil it uses. According to the report, Azerbaijan is the main supplier, providing 28 per cent of the crude oil going to Israel. Azerbaijan is followed by Kazakhstan and the African country Gabon with 22 per cent. These three countries meet three-quarters of Israel’s oil needs.

Turkey, Italy, Cyprus and Greece play a key role in providing transshipment services to Israel. As the terminus of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Turkey ranks first in terms of volume, accounting for 26 per cent of shipments to Israel. Cyprus follows Turkey with 21 per cent.

Turkey’s continued intermediation of Azerbaijan’s critical oil shipments to Israel and the persecution of protesters exposes the hypocrisy of the Erdo?an government’s response to the Gaza genocide.

President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and his government’s first reaction after October 7 was one of caution and restraint. It called for a ceasefire and invited the Israeli state and Hamas to the table.

World Socialist Web Site for more

by DANIEL MARANS

In over three transformative years as the country’s top antitrust regulator, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has faced down powerful foes, from private equity titans to tech CEOs and supermarket moguls.

But Khan, nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by a bipartisan Senate supermajority, now faces adversity from a less familiar corner: allies of Vice President Kamala Harris, the newfound Democratic presidential nominee and a Californian with closer ties to Silicon Valley than Biden.

Reid Hoffman — a co-founder of LinkedIn, a venture capitalist and one of the Democratic Party’s largest donors — is among the prominent Democrats calling for Harris to ditch Khan. His comments last month pushing for her ouster, along with similar remarks from billionaire donor Barry Diller, set off a low-level civil war between the party’s ideological wings.

Progressives are increasingly confident that Khan — or at least one of her ideological allies — will remain at the top of the FTC, especially after Harris’ first economic speech Friday showed her aggressively attacking corporate greed and proposing new powers for the commission.

But as the Harris campaign decides whether, and how much, to break with Biden’s populist anti-monopoly policies, Khan is engaged in a high-profile fight for workers’ rights, showcasing the broad appeal of her aggressive approach to enforcement and precisely why Harris might want to keep her in the job.

Khan’s most ambitious initiative is a rule banning the use of noncompete agreements barring workers from getting a job with a competitor of their current employer, or leaving to start such a company themselves. It’s a policy that polls well, has bipartisan support in Congress and even elicited kind words from Hoffman.

HuffPost for more

Tariq Ali argues recognising Palestine as a state “means nothing” and that what states should really be implementing is the de-recognition of Israel.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome. Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes is his latest. He’s also written five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review.

Youtube for more

The poet’s role in liberation war

BANGLADESH POST

Kamal showed her bravery several times. Once General Ayub Khan, the military ruler of Pakistan, at a meeting with social elites of Dhaka, commented that ordinary people are like beasts and as such, not fit to be given franchise. Sufia Kamal at once stood up and remarked, “If the people are beasts then as the President of the Republic, you are the king of the beasts

When the news of the ‘killings’ of Kamal and Dr Nilima Ibrahim by Pak Army after the crack down on 25 March 1971 was broadcast on Akashbani, a radio station of the Indian state West Bengal, it drew criticism internationally and countries across the world put diplomatic pressure on the then Pakistani military government for clarification. The Pakistani government was forced to broadcast an interview with the poet on radio only to prove that Sufia Kamal was still alive.[8]

Zillur Rahman, the then regional director of Radio East Pakistan, forwarded a paper to Kamal to sign with the statement “In 1971 no massacre took place in Bangladesh.” When she refused, Rahman threatened, “If you don’t give your signature then it might create a problem both for you and your son-in-law Kahar Chowdhury.” She told him that she didn’t care for her life. She said, “I would rather die than put my signature on the false statement. She actively but secretly helped freedom fighters of the Liberation War. 

In 1971, several people in Dhaka including professor Ghyasuddin Ahmed and writer Shahidullah Kaiser collected medicine and food and delivered those to the posts of Sufia Kamal’s house, from where the freedom fighters picked those up for their training outpost.[9] From July 1971, she used to go to the hospital with food and medicine for the injured people of war. At that time there was an acute crisis of food and medicine in the hospital. She used to give food and medicine to certain rickshaw pullers at the Science Laboratory, Dhaka. They would take the food and medicine to the freedom fighters. She was able to establish closer contact with the freedom fighters such as Abul Barak Alvi, Shafi Imam Rumi, Masud Sadek Chullu and Jewel in August. 

Bangladesh Post for more

Love-Timid

by SUFIA KAMAL

Even now the night’s intoxication has not passed,
eyes filled with passion;
the string of ?iuli-flowers in the parting of my hair
has wilted, the world is overwhelmed with scent.
I have kept the window-shutters open,
extinguishing my lamp –
so the dew may enter and cool
the fearful outcry of my heart!
Dream’s intoxication in my eyes, in my breast
a message of hope –
the distant woodland song, birds’ twittering
will enter here I know.
Rising with a sudden start I see: my heart’s monarch,
leaning in silence against my thigh – bedecked with flowers.
He has bestowed heaven on my heated thirst;
my weak and timid heart has trembled,
pounding full of love.

(Translated by Carolyne Wright with Ayesha Kabir)

Poem Hunter for more

Sufia Kamal : Her journey towards freedom

by MOFIDUL HOQUE

Sufia Kamal, born on 20 June, 1911 and died on 20 November, 1999, lived a long life. She not only witnessed great changes in society and history but also influenced the positive transformation of the status of women as well as the Bangladeshi society. Her life was, in the truest sense, a long walk to freedom but not a journey of a loner, rather of one who has equated her fate with those of all the women in her society. Her cherished goal was not personal but social emancipation. In that sense her journey still remains unfinished; death has not put an end to it, on the contrary, even after her demise she is very much a part of the greater struggle of the nation and will always remain so.

She was born in the aristocratic Muslim gentry, but not as someone with a golden spoon in her mouth. Fate played a cruel game with her and she had to struggle hard for every little achievement in her life. To understand the full extent and significance of her struggle, it is necessary to focus not only on her personal life but also on the social reality and upheavals that influenced her.

Unlike other families in the aristocrat Muslim gentry, Sufia Kamal’s family was quite well educated and many of its members were successful professional people in administration, legal affairs and bureaucracy. Sufia Kamal was the second child of her parents but her father became a Sufi saint and left home in search of Allah, never to come back again. At that time she was only a child of seven months, her elder brother was aged three and a half years. The young mother of Sufia had to go back to the fold of her parents with two little children as she had no other alternative. The extended family lived at a palatial house with a very rich library. But education, schooling, and reading — all was carried out in the male’s domain. Even learning anything other than religious texts was considered immoral for the girls. There, however, were winds of change blowing, especially after Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain embarked on a mission to open the doors of education for Muslim girls. But that opportunity was confined to the large urban areas; in greater part of rural Bengal female education especially for Muslims was like the forbidden fruit.

Sufia Kamal as a child went to a Maktab, a mosque based religious learning center where one can learn to read the Arabic scripture without knowing its meaning. After a short while even that was discontinued as she was considered to have grown up. The boys of the family went to the district town to get admitted to high schools whereas the girls remained within the confines of the palatial building till their marriage was settled.

Even within the four walls, denied of all opportunities, Sufia Kamal as a child could feel the resonance of a greater world of art and literature. She wrote, “From my uncle, I used to get information about the world outside. At night after saying prayers, all the aunts used to sit around him and he would read aloud from Bengali novels. He also knew Sanskrit quite well. He used to render in Bengali translation the stories from Sanskrit classics like Agni Vamsa, Meghdut, Rajtarangini etc. I was a little child at that time, but I still carry in my heart the pleasant sound of his reading. He also used to recite English, Bengali, Arabic, Persian and Urdu poems. He used to subscribe to various journals and I remember the horror story of ‘Bunip’ that was published in Bombay Chronicle which scared me to death.”

Sufia Kamal was taught to read and write Bengali by her mother. This opened a new world to her and the family library proved to be a treasure trove where she could spend considerable time. Whatever little learning all these highly disorganized, non-formal methods offered; Sufia Kamal took full advantage of those. At the age of 12, she got married to Syed Nehal Hossain, her cousin.

The Daily Star for more

by KYOKO KUSAKABE

In Brief

Thai women hold significant leadership roles in business, yet gender equality remains a persistent issue. Women-owned enterprises lack formal financing and women face a disproportionate burden of care work. Government policies support male-dominated sectors, widening disparities. With a rapidly aging society, addressing these issues is crucial for ensuring economic progress and achieving gender equity.

Women in Thailand are active in the business sphere. Thai businesses have one of the highest ratios of women CEOs in the world, with 32 per cent of senior leadership positions in Thailand held by women, compared to the global average of 27 per cent. Almost 90 per cent of businesses in Thailand have at least one woman in senior management.

But this does not mean that gender equality in Thailand has been achieved. Thailand ranks around 74th in the world on the Gender Inequality Index, which is only the fourth highest in Southeast Asia, after Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei.

Although there is government support to improve credit access for small enterprises, such as the Thai Credit Guarantee Corporation, women-owned and women-led enterprises often do not have sufficient access to formal financing. These enterprises, which are often in small scale retail and service sectors, largely rely on informal sources of finance, such as personal savings or loans from family and friends.

In general, informal employment of women in Thailand is decreasing thanks to the revisions in social security regulations that allowed self-employed women to be included in the formal social protection scheme. Although Thailand records almost no gender wage gap, this statistic can be misleading as there is still a gender wage gap when comparing individuals with the same qualifications. On average, women have a higher level of education than men, so when compared at the same education level, women are paid less.

Sex segregation in the workplace is also high. More than 70 per cent of workers in healthcare and social work are women, while only a little over 10 per cent are in construction. Younger and older women fare badly, with informal employment still high among youth (under 25) and those over 40. Even though the overall trend is decreasing, gender inequality persists for these groups of women.

Women are also disadvantaged because they are expected to take on much more care work responsibilities than men. Women spend significantly more time on childcare compared to men. Poorer women face more difficulty in doing so as they need to work longer hours to make ends meet. This unequal gender division of labour ultimately affects children’s wellbeing. The same applies for elderly care. Single and married daughters often stay with their parents or return from urban areas to look after them when they are old. Such responsibilities affect their career development.

Women’s progress in the business world has been supported by childcare provided by extended families and hired caretakers. Many urban households hire domestic workers. Before the 1990s, poor women from rural areas took on these roles. But as other employment options such as factory jobs became available, Thai women stopped working as domestic workers and cross-border migrants started to take their place.

As more families are shifting to a nuclear structure and Thailand is experiencing a shortage of domestic workers, future challenges for women may arise unless the importance of gender equality in sharing care work is realised. With Thai society aging rapidly, changes in care work responsibilities are needed to make sure that women’s position in the economy does not lag further behind in the future.

The difficulty of balancing raising children with a career is also reflected in decisions regarding the number of children married couples have. Thailand’s birth rate has been decreasing since the 1970s, dropping below the replacement rate of 2.1 in 1999 and reaching only 1.45 per woman in 2024.

The Thai government’s economic policy does not seem to be easing such tension. Not only is there no significant effort to support care work and change the gender division of labour in the household, but its economic policy also focuses largely on male-dominated industries. The government’s industrialisation policy focuses on specific industries for support, which are largely male-dominated. This means that the government’s support program will reach fewer women’s enterprises compared to men’s.

East Asia Forum for more

by DANAKA KATOVICH

Luxury SUVs carried important people into important buildings for important events. And between us and the importance, there were police with rifles strapped to their chests.

A couple of weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads — doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise cancelling headphones.

It was the Air and Water show — an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about — it was just by happen stance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous — the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.

As the jets flew over our heads I felt my stomach sour. In two weeks, the Democratic National Convention would come to Chicago and it was a present opportunity to make clear the contradictions that kept me up at night. Once months and months away, the DNC was finally around the corner.

This week, members of the Democratic Party came from all parts of the country to convene in Chicago. They were coronating Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, a woman no one really voted for. Even in the face of this blatant lack of democracy, the party members were elated to choose her. They carried signs with her husband’s name and applause erupted from the tens of thousands of people in the United Center when she declared that the United States would have the “most lethal military” in the world under her leadership. To the people well aware of the millions of people the United States killed in the last twenty years alone, her statement was a threat.

The week was marked by the obvious gaps between the people going into the United Center and the people outside of it.

There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.

Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.

That night was demoralizing, and it’s something I will remember for the rest of my life. Democrats laugh at the names of dead children. They openly refuse to let a Palestinian speak for two minutes at their four day long event. They order riot cops on people protesting a genocide. They have their parties, fundraisers, and happy hours while bodies pile up. If they really didn’t think the genocide was so bad, they wouldn’t get so mad at us for reminding them. They knew that the people they were rallying behind are cheering on mass slaughter — they’ve just weighed their fun, their careers, and their vanity against the lives of 180,000 Palestinians and decided that nothing could be more important than themselves. I don’t care what they said to me, or my friends, but I hope our faces and our presence made them feel even an ounce of discomfort. In the best case scenario, I hope they went to sleep hearing the echoes of the martyrs names. I still foolishly hope they turn a corner at some point.

There’s a lot to be said about the Democratic National Convention. It happened in the city with the largest Palestinian population in the United States. Plenty of our neighbors here have lost dozens and dozens of their immediate and extended families and Kamala Harris took to the stage to promise her iron clad support to their executioners. Riot cops filed into the streets, prepared to use the kettling tactics they used from the Israeli military. All of a sudden, the place I call home felt unrecognizable. The air of the coronation felt heavy — it didn’t feel like home. There were points where I was with thousands of other people, chanting in unison, but still felt so lonely. Luxury SUVs carried important people into important buildings for important events. And between us and the importance, there were police with rifles strapped to their chests.

But there were also good people. Like the girl outside the convention. And the thousand of people that marched with us. And the Shake Shack worker that joined us because he had 15 minutes before his shift started. And the security that had to kick us out to keep their job but told us how much what we were doing meant to them.

In the lead up to the DNC, we spent so much time thinking about the last DNC that happened here in 1968. Protests against the Vietnam war took to the streets in small numbers, demanding an end to the war. They were met with horrible police brutality, and mass arrests with long legal battles in their wake. Our mentors from ‘68 urged us not to be nostalgic for those days. I still admire them for going face to face with the Chicago riot cops, but I’ve also taken their reflections of ‘68 very seriously — they didn’t end the war on Vietnam. Many of them feel like they could have focused more on building a sustainable movement that people could join for the long haul. The 2024 DNC in Chicago presented us a unique opportunity — we had to take this huge moment of mass mobilization and make sure our efforts and organization doesn’t get washed away when all the balloons on the United Center floor are popped, and the important people fly out of O’Hare. When the dust settles and the most powerful people in the world leave our city, how will we keep fighting? I was happy when so many people asked us what was next, because it meant we were thinking long term.

In our own discourses on the left, the week was consumed by the discussion of tactics – what works and what doesn’t. An organizer I know reminded us about our responsibility to be a movement people want to join. There are plenty of people who are sympathetic to our cause but haven’t figured out how to be part of it. There’s millions of people without a movement home. Our cause is already popular, it’s already growing every day. Are we doing what we can to make sure people know where to go? Are we keeping our eyes on the prize or are we getting so wrapped up in nostalgia that we can’t see what we will be capable of a year from now if we move strategically? We are nothing without the people. Our responsibility is to the people —not to our egos, not to our careers, not to the vanity of our organizations, and not to our impulses. As a movement we generally have to be better at unlearning instant gratification and also embracing a diversity of tactics. But that’s something for another day.

It is easy to stand on a police line. It’s easy to yell at politicians. It’s easy to say things and do things by yourself. It’s hard to organize your neighbors and talk to new people about things they don’t immediately understand — my hope comes from the idea that once we get really good at that, the light at the end of the tunnel will be as clear as day.

Chicagoans are loud, principled, and good people and because of that there’s 2.6 million reasons to love this city. For a few days Chicagoans made certain democrats couldn’t walk around our city without seeing and hearing about the people of Gaza. It’s my hope that we see that as a small success, and also my hope that we saw the week of mobilizations as a jumping off point for building the world we want to see.

Lake Michigan is connected to the ocean through narrow waterways along the northern border of the United States, and someone mentioned at a protest that it’s not unfathomable that the waves crashing onto the shores of Gaza were once here in Chicago, and vice versa. Even if we don’t have skies that are absent of fighter jets in my lifetime, every second spent moving us towards that kind of life was worth it. As long as we don’t throw in the towel, we are closer than ever to that reality.

Please donate to help feed my friend’s family. Ahmed and his children, Yara, Tia and Iman, are struggling to get the food and water they need to survive in Gaza — this is an urgent request for help.

Proof That I’m Alive for more

by RACHAEL YI

Smaller majority support doctor-assisted suicide, slim majority say it is moral

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ current views on the legality of euthanasia, a procedure in which a physician intentionally acts to end the life of a patient, are similar to what they have been during the past decade. Just over seven in 10 Americans, 71%, believe doctors should be “allowed by law to end the patient’s life by some painless means if the patient and his or her family request it.”

At the same time, doctor-assisted suicide — a term used to describe patients ending their own lives with the aid of a physician — garners slightly less but still majority support. Sixty-six percent of Americans believe doctors should “be allowed by law to assist the patient to commit suicide” for terminal patients living in severe pain who request it.

Although both readings are consistent with support over the past decade, slightly fewer Americans between 1996 and 2014 thought doctor-assisted suicide should be legal. During that time, an average of 58% of Americans were in favor, compared with an average of 65% since 2014. Support for doctor-assisted suicide has risen from the trend low of 51% just in the past decade, while support for euthanasia has varied only modestly over the past three decades.

Gallup first asked about doctor-assisted suicide in 1996 but has asked about doctors ending a patient’s life through painless means since 1947. In that earliest poll, 37% of Americans were in support, with the record low of 36% recorded three years later in 1950. When Gallup next polled on the issue in 1973, 53% of Americans were in favor, after which stronger majorities have remained in agreement.

Most U.S. subgroups are somewhat more inclined to support doctors ending patients’ lives through painless means than to agree with doctors assisting patients in dying by suicide. Among the exceptions are Democrats and women, who are about equally likely to say both euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide should be legal. Democrats (79%) are more likely than Republicans (61%) or independents (72%) to favor legal euthanasia.

Gallup News for more