This No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ) news digest rounds up some of the week’s top LGBTI rights stories for the week ending 10 January:
First transgender pride march hopes to shatter stereotypes in PakistanGlobalVoices, 10 Jan 2019
To assert their rights and demand implementation of the law, a Transgender Pride March took place in Lahore, Pakistan, on 29 December 2018. For the first time in the country’s history, Transgender people dared to step out of their seclusion and demanded that the Government implement The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, of 24 May 2018.
Israeli doctors ban gay conversion therapy as risks ‘mental damage’
Thomson Reuters Foundation, 09 Jan 2019
A ban on conversion therapy by Israeli doctors will help protect gay people from treatments that claim to make them straight, but more work needs to be done with religious groups that support controversial ‘cures’, activists said on Wednesday.
Members who perform conversion therapy could now be expelled from the Israel Medical Association (IMA), which represents 90 percent of the country’s doctors, if a complaint is filed to its ethics committee, said IMA spokeswoman Ziva Miral.
Marielle and Monica: the LGBT activists resisting Bolsonaro’s Brazil The Guardian, 09 Jan 2019
Marielle Franco, a Brazilian LGBT and human rights activist, was killed in March 2018. Her widow, Monica Benicio, has continued her fight for better treatment of the poor, the LGBT community and black Brazilians.
The murder has still not been solved and in our documentary Marielle and Monica, as the police investigation drifts, Monica is plunged into a new crisis: the probable election of Jair Bolsonaro. Watch the full documentary here.
Evangelical group calls for LGBT people to be removed from anti-lynching billThe Hill, 09 Jan 2019
An evangelical nonprofit is asking lawmakers to remove language from a federal anti-lynching bill that protects Americans on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity before the legislation becomes law.
NBC News reported Wednesday that the nonprofit group, Liberty Counsel, which is designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is lobbying members of the House to remove language referring to “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in the bill, which passed the Senate unanimously last month.
India transgender gurus in landmark Hindu processionBBC News, 07 Jan 2019
The northern Indian city of Allahabad witnessed a historic procession on Sunday led by a Hindu congregation of transgender people. Photojournalist Ankit Srinivas reports.
Thousands thronged the streets of Allahabad to seek blessings from transgender sadhus (holy people), ahead of the Kumbh Mela festival, which is set to begin in the city on 15 January and will continue until 4 March.
It is one of Hinduism’s holiest events and billed as the world’s largest religious gathering.
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