Therefore, the definition should highlight this distinction between transgender persons and intersex persons enabling them to exercise the rights which they are entitled to. Some persons born or living with intersex traits can live with a non-binary identity or may choose to live as gender fluid persons. The Bill fails to account for these possibilities. Neither does it provide for the definition of terms such as gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics.

The Bill doesn’t say much about discrimination against intersex persons. Intersex conditions are termed in derogatory terms even by medical professionals. To address this, the Bill should have included a provision directing medical professionals to ensure that intersex traits are not characterised as “disorders of sex development”. Intersex traits should not be considered as genetic defects/ disorders, and terms like ‘gender dysphoria’ should be used to characterise them.

Unnecessary medical procedures

As per court-based jurisprudence, medical procedures are not a necessity for self-identification. Still, the Union Health Ministry has admitted that medical procedure including sex reassignment surgeries are being performed on intersex children. The Ministry has given the justification that this is only done after a thorough assessment of the child, with the help of appropriate diagnostic tests and only after taking a written consent of the patient/guardian. When this response was presented before the Madras High Court in Arunkumar, the court slammed the Health Ministry for its poor understanding of consent rights and imposed a ban on the practice of sex reassignment surgeries on intersex infants/children. The Bill fails to protect intersex persons from unnecessary medical intervention.

World over, the discourse around gender and sexuality has evolved a great deal in the last decade. However, the current legislative discourse on this issue suffers from lack of foundational understanding. Intersex persons are particularly vulnerable and experience barriers in access to education, employment, marriage, etc. In its current form, the Bill turns back the clock on decades of positive change brought about by intersex activists.

Prashant Singh is an advocate at the Supreme Court of India

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That was Brenda Scurlock’s last text from her son, Avery, before he was shot eight times, his body abandoned in a field in eastern North Carolina.

Scurlock had always worried about Avery’s safety. He was young and black in a society where those qualities could make him vulnerable.

And to multiply her worries, he was transgender.

Her fears came true June 5, when the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office responded to reports of gunshots and found Avery Scurlock’s body. Friends say he was meeting a man he had met on a dating website.

Avery, 23, was one of 18 transgender people slain so far this year in the U.S., according to the Human Rights Campaign . Seventeen were black transgender women , including two killed within two weeks of each other in South Carolina. A woman in Dallas who became a vocal advocate for transgender rights after she was attacked in April was killed in May in what the mayor described as “mob violence.” In Detroit, a black transgender woman and two gay men were killed in an attack that two other people survived.

The majority of transgender people killed yearly typically are black women, said Sarah McBride, the campaign’s national press secretary. “When transphobia mixes with misogyny and systemic racism, it can often have deadly consequences,” she said.

Black transgender women have been killed this year in Alabama, Tennessee, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Texas, Michigan and Florida. Advocates tracked the deaths of 26 transgender people in 2018.

Although Brenda Scurlock supported her child and was accepting of his gender identity, she used male pronouns and always called him Avery, just as everyone else did. His friends say he insisted on his female name, Chanel, only when dressed as a woman in public. Because of that, The Associated Press is using Avery and male pronouns for the sake of clarity.

Avery told his mother about four years ago that he was gay. “The way he dressed, you know, that was just him,” Brenda Scurlock said.

He would leave their home in Lumber Bridge in women’s clothes and makeup — he loved false eyelashes and his jean jacket. “He dressed how he wanted to dress,” Brenda Scurlock said. “I never really hit on the transgender part. He just dressed how he wanted to dress.”

On the evening of June 4, Avery told her he was going to a Chinese restaurant in nearby St. Pauls, then coming home. At 9:49 p.m., she texted him: “Are you Okay?” Two minutes later, he responded: “Yes Mommy.” She asked him to call or text when he was on the way home.

At 9:53 p.m., he responded: “Okay Mommy. I love you.”

What Brenda Scurlock didn’t know was that Avery — presenting as Chanel — had connected with someone on a dating website who wanted to meet that night, said his best friend, 19-year-old Shania Aguirre. He left St. Pauls and first met with Aguirre at a hamburger joint in nearby Lumberton, Aguirre said.

They discussed the man who wanted to meet him, she said, and Avery told Aguirre that he had decided against it. She reminded him that another person whose friends said he was bisexual had been murdered in that same area in May 2018.

Then Shania uttered words that she wishes hadn’t come true: “I said if something happened, we’re not going to find out until the next morning or whenever.”

Aguirre said she left the restaurant parking lot about 11:50 p.m. Avery had pulled out a few minutes ahead of her. At 12:13 a.m. June 5, she texted him and got no response. A few hours later, she said she learned police had responded at 12:07 a.m. to a report of shots fired.

About 20 minutes had passed since Aguirre saw her friend pulling out in his car, she said. Before leaving, he had asked to be godfather to her 2-year-old daughter and told her he wanted eventually to have sex-reassignment surgery, she said.

Avery’s absence leaves an empty place in Aguirre’s life. She said she alternates between being too depressed to leave her home and too afraid.

“He was very supportive, always there,” she said. “We were there for each other.”

Meanwhile, Brenda Scurlock wants the death penalty for Javaras Hammonds, the 20-year-old charged with first-degree murder in Avery’s death. He’s being held without bond in the Robeson County Detention Center. Neither his attorney nor the district attorney responded to email or phone messages from the AP about the case.

She also wants authorities to charge Hammonds with a hate crime. However, Capt. Forest Obershea of the sheriff’s office says authorities believe robbery was the motive because Avery’s car and other belongings were stolen.

McBride, the Human Rights Campaign spokeswoman, says that’s another part of the safety issue for transgender people, who are more likely to live on the edges of society and take chances. While the killer might have planned a robbery, he also probably knew that a transgender woman named Chanel was more likely to risk meeting a stranger in the dark along a lonely road, McBride said.

Avery had told Aguirre he knew he took too many chances and worried his mother. He knew he had to change his ways soon, she said.

“I had told him not to meet up with anybody,” Brenda Scurlock said. “I told him it was dangerous.”

She’s learning more about what it means to be transgender and getting support from LGBTQ advocates, some of whom go to court with her. She’s determined to get justice for Avery’s memory.

“That was my child. And I had to accept him, whatever he was — gay, bisexual, whatever,” she said. “That was my child. And it shouldn’t give nobody a right to kill him.”

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A law put up by Victoria’s Andrews government could expose women offering intimate services such as pubic waxing or underwear fitting to discrimination complaints if they reject trans women customers who still have penises, veteran human rights lawyer Moira Rayner has warned.

The new law would allow self-declared trans women, who possess a penis and have not undergone any sex-reassignment treatment, to change the sex that appears on their birth certificate, giving them access as women to equal opportunity protection.

Ms Rayner, a former state and federal human rights commissioner, said that, if enacted, the legislation could allow a Down Under version of Canada’s Jessica Yaniv case, in which a trans woman has lodged anti-discrimination complaints against 16 beauticians who did not want to handle her penis and testicles in order to grant her wish for a brazilian wax.

Ms Rayner said a female sole trader could come under pressure from a Yaniv-style action.

The Labor government said the current state law demanding surgery before any change to a birth certificate “sends a painful and false message that there is something wrong with being trans or gender diverse that needs to be ‘fixed’ ”.

Victorian Attorney-General Jill Hennessy said: “Everyone deserves to live their life as they choose, and that includes having a birth certificate that reflects their true identity.”

Critics of the new bill complain of a lack of robust debate, and Ms Rayner said Ms Hennessy “should be asked to make sure she is given proper advice” on its possible unintended effects.

The bill returns to parliament next month.

University of Melbourne philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith agreed a Yaniv-style anti-discrimination complaint would be possible in Victoria — “exclusion from being hired to fit clothing to women in a shop, or from admission to a girls’ school, or to a women’s room in a dormitory, or hospital ward … you name it, if it’s women-only, there could be a case”.

She urged outright rejection of the bill, which makes a statutory declaration sufficient proof of official sex status, and allows birth sex to be changed every 12 months.

“Sex should not be a matter of belief,” Dr Lawford-Smith said. “If progressives want to disincentivise sex-reassignment surgery, they should protect gender expression, or gender identity, or trans status, separately — rather than trying to shoehorn it into sex.”

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Newswise — Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, a longtime faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, globally recognized AIDS researcher and advocate, and former president of the International AIDS Society (IAS), is among five finalists to lead the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

Beyrer has been at the forefront of AIDS advocacy and research since the start of his career. An outspoken advocate and champion of human rights, Beyrer has extensive experience conducting international collaborative research and training programs in HIV/AIDS and other infectious disease epidemiology, HIV preventive interventions, including vaccine clinical trials and preparedness studies, and in health and migration and health and human rights. His work spans Africa, Asia and throughout Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Approximately 36.9 million people are currently living with HIV, and tens of millions of people have died of AIDS-related causes since the beginning of the epidemic. While significant progress has been made on HIV, with global deaths decreasing significantly in the past decade and longer life expectancies for patients who receive treatment, several regions are experiencing sharp increases in new infections and are struggling to expand both prevention and treatment.

“Chris brings extraordinary insights to the fight against HIV as a researcher, an advocate and a human being,” says Bloomberg School Dean Ellen J. MacKenzie, PhD, ScM. “Chris is a natural leader whose decades of experience in science and advocacy for human rights make him an inspired choice for this position.”

In addition to serving as president of the IAS from 2014 to 2016, Beyrer has held numerous high-level positions. He served as co-chair of the Epidemiology and Natural History Planning Group of the Office of AIDS Research at the National Institutes of Health. He also serves on scientific advisory committees for UNAIDS and the World Health Organization. He served on the Scientific Advisory Board for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) from 2011 to 2014. Beyrer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He is the author of over 320 scientific papers, six books and numerous other publications.

Beyrer received his MD from SUNY Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn in 1988 and a master of public health from the Bloomberg School, then the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, in 1991. He joined Johns Hopkins in 1992, to serve as field director for Hopkins HIV research in Thailand. Beyrer is a professor of Epidemiology, International Health, and Health, Behavior and Society at the Bloomberg School and also professor of Nursing and Medicine. He is the founding director of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights. He is associate director of the Hopkins Center for AIDS Research and an associate director of the Center for Global Health. In 2016, Beyrer was installed as the Desmond M. Tutu Professor in Public Health and Human Rights at the Bloomberg School.

“Chris has earned the deep respect of those who have fought and are fighting to save so many lives in the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” says Joshua Sharfstein, MD, vice dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement at the Bloomberg School. “He can bring together advocates, scientists, and policymakers in the U.S. and around the world in support of a vision of eliminating this terrible disease.”

UNAIDS, founded in 1995, works to achieve zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths. UNAIDS encompasses 11 UN organizations—UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP, UNFPA, UNODC, UN Women, ILO, UNESCO, WHO and the World Bank—and collaborates with partners across the world towards the Sustainable Development Goal of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030.

The outgoing UNAIDS executive director, Michel Sidibé, has served since January 2009. He was appointed the Minister of Health and Social Affairs of Mali in May.

The UNAIDS’ 44th Programme Coordinating Board (PCB) was presented with a short list of candidates for the executive director position in late June. The PCB search committee chair was next to send the committee’s report to the Committee of Cosponsoring Organizations, which will make a recommendation to the United Nations Secretary-General. The UN Secretary-General will make the final decision about the appointment of the next executive director of UNAIDS.

The full list of finalists for the UNAIDS executive director position has been reported in several news outlets.

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