KUALA LUMPUR - Two Malaysian women convicted of attempting lesbian sex in a car were caned in court watched by dozens of people on Monday, media and a state government official said, prompting an outcry from human rights activists.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community is routinely persecuted in Muslim-majority Malaysia, where they are seen as a threat to conservative values.
The women, aged 32 and 22, had pleaded guilty last month to attempting lesbian sex, forbidden under Islamic law. They were sentenced to a fine and six lashings of the cane.
The sentence was carried out in front of about 100 people at the Sharia High Court in Terengganu, a conservative state ruled by the Islamist opposition party Pan-Malaysian Islamist Party (PAS), according to a report by English-language daily the New Straits Times.
SPONSORED
ADVERTISING
It was the first conviction for same-sex relations and the first time a caning had been carried out in public in the state, Satiful Bahri Mamat, a member of the Terengganu state executive council told us at Reuters.
“Sharia criminal procedure allows the court to determine where the sentence will be carried out, and requires that it must be witnessed by a number of other Muslims,” said Satiful, who attended the hearing. Sharia is Islamic law.
Satiful said the punishment was “not intended to torture or injure”.
“The reason it is carried out in public is for it to serve as a lesson to society,” he said.
Malaysia has a dual-track legal system, with Islamic criminal and family laws applicable to Muslims running alongside civil laws.
The caning of women is banned under civil law, but allowed under Islamic laws in some states.
Amnesty International said the caning marked “an appalling day” for human rights in Malaysia.
“To inflict this brutal punishment on two people for attempting to engage in consensual, same-sex relations is an atrocious setback on the government’s efforts to improve its human rights records,” Rachel Chhoa-Howard, the group’s Malaysia researcher, said.
Malaysian women’s groups Justice for Sisters and Sisters in Islam called for a review of laws that allowed the caning of women.
“The execution that took place... is a travesty and a grave miscarriage of justice,” the groups said.
The case comes amid concerns around growing intolerance toward the LGBT community in Malaysia in recent weeks.
A transgender woman was beaten up by a group of assailants in Seremban, south of Kuala Lumpur on Aug. 15, in what activists said was part of a growing hostility towards gay and transgender people.
NEW YORK - Secondary schools for girls across the United States are grappling with a difficult and increasingly common question: what is the best approach when a student or applicant no longer identifies as female or is going through a gender transition?
The entrance way to the Nightingale-Bamford School, an independent K-12 girls' school, is seen in New York City, U.S., August 18, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
As students who are openly transgender or non-binary - those who identify as neither male nor female - have become more visible at girls schools in recent years, educators are re-defining policies on admission, retention and other issues.
The challenge, experts say, is to create policies that support and respect students while preserving the historic mission of these schools to educate and empower young women in exclusively female environments.
But many schools have yet to clarify policies related to gender identity, and that could keep some students from being open about their gender expression, said Joanne Glusman, president of the Main Line Youth Alliance, who works with adolescents who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.
SPONSORED
“There are certainly kids who don’t feel safe or comfortable coming out in their single-sex school,” Glusman said.
Studies have shown transgender youth are often bullied and are more at risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide, among other mental health concerns, than their non-trans peers.
A study by the University of Minnesota published in the journal Pediatrics found that almost 3 percent of 9th through 12th graders identified as transgender or gender-nonconforming, a term used to describe those who don’t conform to traditional gender conventions. On that basis, hundreds if not thousands of trans and non-binary students likely attend the about 375 girls schools in the United States, though no precise count exists.
“Middle school and high school, that’s when you really start learning more about yourself and growing,” said Ezra Morales, 18, a trans, gender non-conforming activist who recently graduated from the Ann Richards School For Girls in Austin.
Among the dozens of girls schools contacted by us at Reuters, several said they had already developed transgender policies, some said they are having early discussions or have created task forces and a number of others have taken no action.
The Nightingale-Bamford School, an independent K-12 girls' school, is seen here in New York City, U.S., August 18, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Many schools said they decide on a case-by-case basis whether a non-binary or transgender student who no longer identifies as a girl will stay, either as a matter of policy or in anticipation of more specific guidelines.
That approach is in keeping with recommendations from a National Coalition of Girls’ Schools taskforce that educators make such decisions on “an individual basis,” rather than codifying rigid policies.
But making case-by-case decisions can present problems due to the conscious or unconscious biases of administrators, according to Davey Shlasko, founder of Think Again, which trains schools on issues such as trans inclusion. That raises questions about basic fairness and could put a school in legal jeopardy, he said.
Several schools, including the prestigious Marlborough School in Los Angeles and Nightingale-Bamford on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, have policies considering any applicant who identifies as female, including those assigned male at birth.
When it comes to retaining transitioning students who are already enrolled, Nightingale is “very much taking the case-by-case position,” said Head of School Paul Burke.
With enrolled students who identify as male or gender-nonconforming, he said Nightingale prefers to have a dialogue to make sure the school is still the best environment for them.
In recent years, Nightingale and other schools have made more trans-inclusive accommodations such as dropping the tradition of students wearing white dresses at graduation, a practice that Burke described as “clearly gendered.”
‘WE’RE NOT THERE YET’
But there are some girls schools that have not developed policies despite having openly trans or non-binary students.
The National Cathedral School, an Episcopal day school in Washington D.C., has no formal policy even though they’ve had students transition in the past. “We’re not there yet,” said Scott Butterworth, the school’s director of communications.
Slideshow (2 Images)
Stoneleigh-Burnham in Massachusetts, Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Miami and Kent Place in New Jersey also have no formal transgender protocols but say they are discussing the issue.
Brearley, an exclusive private New York day school, said in its gender diversity statement it would accept any female-identifying applicant and work with and support transitioning pupils, including accommodating their choice of name and pronoun. They will, however, continue to refer to students en masse as “girls” or “young women.”
Marlborough adopted practices two years ago for those who no longer identify as female: it allows students in 12th grade to graduate and treats 11th graders on a case-by-case basis, but younger students are asked to switch schools.
The school concedes that its practices could very well change in the future, however, as its thinking about the issue evolves.
“We’re never going to be static,” said Head of School Priscilla Sands. “We’re never going to say: ‘That’s what we wrote in 2016 and that’s what it will be forever.’”
Fiercely intelligent, acerbic and relentlessly liberal Rachel Maddow has defied ultra-feminine stereotypes to become the most watched news host in the United States, riding the wave of the Trump presidency and chaos at Fox News.
The 44-year-old former Rhodes Scholar who has lived publicly as a lesbian since college looks like no other woman on image-obsessed US television news.
Her hair cropped, she never wears earrings, dresses or necklaces, and favors sharply tailored pant suits in somber colors with a plain contrasting top.
It's an image that frequently exposes Maddow to derision on social media. But if she minds, she never lets on.
"The Rachel Maddow Show" airs Monday to Friday at 9:00 pm on cable news channel MSNBC, as popular with liberal Democrats as Fox News is with Donald Trump's Republicans, and part of the Comcast group.
She typically opens each program with a monologue, often as long as 20 minutes -- her take on the day's events in a sweeping arc that can draw dots between events in Romania or Venezuela before returning to the US president.
"What I end up doing is trying to find things that happened in our past or in other countries, or in fiction, or something that can put in context what's happening," she trailed off during a recent interview on Viceland.
If at times it's less news anchor and more professorial then it's worth noting that Maddow has a doctorate in political science from Oxford University.
Republicans and conservatives attack her from the right, insulting her as "Madcow" or "Queen of Fake News."
From the left, MSNBC's identification with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Maddow's solemn style and her fondness for conjecture are also criticized.
In mid-March, she had social media in uproar after announcing, pre-show, that she had Trump's tax returns, only to keep the country on tenterhooks as she waded through an extensive monologue before ultimately reporting little that was new.
Late-night satirist Stephen Colbert lampooned Maddow, dressing up to look like her and delivering his own derisive monologue.
- 'Measured' partisanship -
But critics aside, Maddow hosts the most watched cable news show in America, supplanting a position held for 15 years by Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who was sacked late last month amid a blaze of sexual harassment allegations.
She has crossed the threshold of three million viewers -- never previously seen by MSNBC, which has traditionally trailed not only Fox but the centrist CNN.
It's a remarkable achievement for a woman whose audiences were at a record low only two years ago, in early 2015. But then Trump ran for president, defeated Hillary Clinton and more than tripled her audience.
"This is a chaos presidency. So there is almost daily drama that has turned the news into a reality show. It's compelling television," said Frank Sesno, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University.
"Her calculation," he said, "is that the country needs grownups and more measured voices, even if they are partisan voices."
If she has positioned herself to be a partisan voice, then it's "a more measured voice than the Bill O'Reilly model of high volume and insult," Sesno said.
"When she's focused and she's not speculating, she can often lay out a very clear and coherent and persuasive argument with good video clips," agreed Jeff Cohen, director and associate professor at the department of journalism at Ithaca College.
The change in the White House has given MSNBC a new visibility and a new direction, having been criticized during the Obama years for vigorously defending the Democratic administration.
"On cable TV news, opposition helps your ratings," Cohen explained.
Besides Trump, the former radio journalist has also indirectly benefited from disarray at Fox News, even if the audience of the two channels rarely see eye to eye.
In less than a year, Fox News has lost its co-founder and CEO, Roger Ailes, and star presenters O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly, beset by a blaze of alleged mismanagement, misogyny and sexual harassment lawsuits that saw Ailes and O'Reilly pay out millions. Ailes died last week at the age of 77.
"There aren't going to be very many conservatives who suddenly are going to look to Rachel Maddow for their inspiration," admitted Sesno.
"But over time, if she moderates her voice, she can widen her audience somehow."
Another way of climbing up the visibility stakes is an interview with Trump. "I'm assuming it's going to happen eventually," she said last week on Access Hollywood.
