International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia
Today is IDAHO, 2009. On this date not too long ago (1992), homosexuality was finally removed from the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization (WHO). This year, in a gesture of pride and solidarity, hundreds of folks from 48 countries across six continents around the world participated in a video message produced by the Parisian IDAHO committee in conjunction with the Hong Kong-based site, Gays.com.
“Participants submitted videos in all of the world’s key languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tamil and even American Sign Language.”
Unfortunately, you can’t actually watch the video (or anything else) on the official Gays.com site right now because they’re experiencing a big ol’ DDoS attack that hit the site approximately 48 hours ago, shortly before various global IDAHO celebrations were set to begin. Coincidence? Um, no. Gays.com spokesperson Kenneth Tan, who spoke to Pitch Engine earlier today, says that “this is a well-timed, well-orchestrated assault by a large botnet with tens of thousands of PCs sending requests to our site. Engineers with our Internet Service Provider remarked they have never seen an attack of this intensity before.”
Okay, who else is getting REALLY effin’ sick of irony? Thankfully, Gays.com has been able to upload and share the video on many other sites. Ooo! AND… via Calpernia Addams’ Twitter, I just found out that (with a nod to the weekend’s worldwide IDAHO celebrations) France has just become the first country in the world to officially depathologize transexualism as a mental illness. Woot!
Two steps back, three steps forward. Let’s keep on dancing, shall we?
May 17th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
How about, ,your own private IDAHO.
May 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
What a positive message :) This really made my day!
Thanks for sharing Mer!
May 17th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
I should think that your own PUBLIC IDAHO would be better, john.
May 18th, 2009 at 4:51 am
I don’t like how the terms that they use for Gay-hate is referred to as a phobia. Some of these people may actually fear gays, sure, but some just hate them for other reasons. whatever those reasons might be.
May 18th, 2009 at 6:42 am
Skull, I tend to think that hatred of something is almost invariably a secondary result; a by-product of fear… but I understand what you’re saying. And more recently, many researchers and semioticians have started mulling over alternative words to describe prejudice and discrimination against LGBTs, right?
May 20th, 2009 at 10:10 am
This made me tear up a little bit, corny as that sounds. I am proud to be a reader of Coilhouse and I am very proud to be queer, intersex and trans.
May 27th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
When is homophobia (and homohate) going to be placed on that list of diseases?
May 27th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Amen to that, Maureen.