#forced sterilization of romani women

[djuvlipen]

According to various press reports in late August, authorities in Sweden carried out forced sterilisations on 60,000 Romani women, in order to cleanse society of what they regarded as inferior racial types. The operations began in 1935 and ended only in 1976, according to a report in the online version of the Dutch news paper, De Telegraaf. The report alleges that the sterilisations were 'officially voluntary', although it goes on to add that many of the women did not understand what was being done to them.

An Associated Press release noted that the program had its roots in the pursuit of eugenics, a movement popular at the turn of the century, which aimed to 'improve humanity' by controlling genetic factors in reproduction and developed from widely-accepted 19th century racist doctrine. AP reported that the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter cited documents pertaining to the Swedish program, one of which stated "Grounds for recommending sterilisation: unmistakable Gypsy features, psychopathy, vagabond life." According to AP, the issue is even more controversial because of the fact that the sterilisations were carried out under a government of the Social Democrats, the party that built Sweden's welfare state.

[librastrai]

a larger post inspired by @tovezza's dives into the irish treatment of jews in their country cause i am an irish born jew, as well as an irish traveller & the hypocrisy i've seen from goyim regarding recent antisemitism + the i/p conflict is crazy.

they will call jews in the middle east settlers while throwing fits that minceiri, their own indigenous minority population, calls them settled & will throw out the most vile racism in opposition to it. settled irish + their government will prop up the colonization of themselves by the british as a shield against any accusations of racism (as recent as the very current riots in dublin spurred on by anti immigrant racism), & antisemitism (to denying ireland's own lack of action during the holocaust,) & the antisemitism raging in their every day society & now in government who are saying they're "more principled" regarding one of the most complicated sociopolitical conflicts in a region mired by it.

oh really? really, holohan? sympathy for palestinians is rooted in your own history of being colonized (which is used a shield consistently)? you can be more principled about the oppression of an indigenous people (which both palestinians & israelis are)?

explain the 1963 commission by the irish state, regarding the "itinerant problem" of which there was a system plan regarding the forced assimilation of irish travellers / minceiri into settled irish society.

explain how the plan was to sterilize minceiri women against their will, castrate minceiri men & forcibly steal our children, putting them into settled homes or insitutions run by the catholic church which spurred on untold amounts of abuse. abuse we are still healing from. how actions taken against us directly repeat actions taken by the nazis against romani women + men in their camps.

explain the ongoing genocide of minceiri folks that began way before this commission, hundreds of years of violent oppression, of theft, of cultural genocide & restriction to move. how the rate of minceiri folks imprisoned far outweighs our national population. how the camp sites we're forced onto, because our cultural way of life is restricted & criminalized, have no running water, no electricity, barely any food. how they're places you wouldn't even raise dogs, let alone expect humans to survive. not thrive, survive. how all of this is sounding very fucking familiar.

ireland's issue with jewish refugees from the shoah is built upon their insistence that their own indigenous minority, minceiri, refused to assimilate despite being beaten, raped, stolen & they knew they would not be able to do the same to jewish people.

i love my country, i have always loved my country & it's history & the gorgeous place it could become. it is not that place while it is perpetuating antisemitism time & time again, using it's own history of being colonized as a shield against criticism & ignoring it's own bloody, disgusting history of violent colonization & cultural genocde.

jewish people deserve better, irish jews deserve better & minceiri deserve better.

[crazycatsiren]

Do you know who might be reading your "men should be enslaved" posts? Black people who are descendants of slaves.

Do you know who might be reading your "males should be euthanized" posts? BIPOC and Jews whose families and ancestors have been through/survived genocides and ethnic cleansings.

Do you know who might be reading your "boys should be rounded up and killed" posts? Parents and families who have lost children in school shootings.

Do you know who might be reading your "male fetuses should be aborted" posts? Romani women, Jewish women, native American women, and other women of color and their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, who were put through forced abortions and sterilizations.

And you think you're being funny.

You're not a feminist.

You're a fucking terrorist.

[elfesyawildrose]

As a Romani woman, I am tired of this. Romani women are only spoken about when doing fan castings for Wanda Maximoff and Esmeralda. Please stop using us for aesthetic reasons and for your fan casting. Talk about the violence happening to Romani women too, such as prostitution, harassment, rape, human trafficking, forced sterilization, and so much more. To Europeans, please stop using Romani women's struggles as an excuse to be racist and stereotypical. Then say "I care for Romani women and girls and don't want them to get hurt". When you are spreading harmful information and stereotypes that continue to hurt Romani women. I'm saying this because me and numerous Romani women are sick and tired of only being talked about. For aesthetic reasons or to cast Wanda and Esmeralda. So, talk about the violence happening to Romani women as well. Europeans Please don't use Romani women's struggles that happen within are community as an excuse to be racist and stereotypical, then turn a blind eye to what your country is doing to Romani women. I want to get this out because I'm so tired of this and seeing and me and many more Romani women. Are tried when we are only talked about when it suits other people's agendas, for aesthetic reasons or to cast Wanda and Esmeralda. Stop using Romani women for your purposes and only mentioning them for these reasons.

[danlous]

Today (April 8) is The International Romani Day. The Romani people (also called Rromani, Romany, Roma) are Europe's largest ethnic minority with an estimated 10-14 million people, though knowing exact figures is hard because the Romani often live on the fringes of society and many Romani choose not to disclose their ethnic identity. The Romani are unique among peoples in the sense that they've never identified with any territory or claimed they have a homeland where they came from. Their origin was somewhat a mystery for a long time (the slur "gypsy" comes from Europeans thinking they came from Egypt) but later genetic research has traced their ancestry to northern India and more specifically to the casteless Dalits. The Romani arrived in southeastern Europe by the 1300s and in western Europe by the 1400s, and in modern times the live in every continent.

The Romani experience a very high level of discrimination and marginalization and are among the most persecuted groups of people in the world. The entire history of the Romani people has been filled with ostracization, deportations, slavery, and systematic abuse ranging from segregation to forced sterilizations. Anti-Romani sentiment reached its peak during the Holocaust when 25%-50% of the European Romani were killed in the genocide called Porajmos, and some countries' Romani populations were destroyed completely. After the war the communist Central and Eastern European states tried to forcibly assimilite and suppress their Roma populations. In the present day anti-romani racism continues to be extremely common, with the studies showing most Europeans (especially Eastern Europeans) have unfavorable views of Romani people, hate crimes against them being common, and many of them living in poverty and marginalized.

People have many misconceptions about the Romani that often trace all the way back to the Middle Ages. The Romani are often confused with other itinerant groups like Irish travellers which are culturally and ethnically a completely separate group. Despite being almost synonymous with the nomadic lifestyle most Romani nowadays are not migratory, and with those who are it's often not by choice but because of persecution or homelessness. Most Romani are Christians or Muslims and they don't usually practice witchcraft, and if they do it's never to try to curse of hex anyone. There is a prevailing conception that Romani are seductive and hypersexual despite that Romani communities tend to be fairly sexually conservative. Fetishization harms especially Roma women who are often victims of sexual violence. While it may be true that there's more crime among the Romani populations (there are conflicting studies about this) majority of Romani are not thiefs or otherwise criminals, and it's important to understand that the crime is a direct result of poverty and deprivation, with it often being almost impossible for the Romani people to get jobs or higher education and being generally rejected by the society around them. The Romani themselves are frequently victims of crime, for example being extremely overrepresentated among the trafficked people.

Despite all this, the Roma people have persisted for hundreds of years and managed to retain their culture and identity. The Romani populations around the world have very diverse cultures and traditions but have many similarities too. A very high value placed on the family and deep love that the Romani people have for each other is something i think has helped them to survive. Despite all the challenges i'm optimistic about the future and i believe that the Romani will continue to survive and things will get better even though it may take time.

[weepingwillow2000]

(Stole this post cause ops a terf)

Of course media representation is important, especially for children who grow up and always see their people depicted as thieves, criminals, spirits with a special bond with the devil itself, be it on TV, in movies, in cartoons, in books, etc etc. Of course it is important to give acting opportunities to aspiring Romani actors.

But media representation isn't the main purveyor of anti-Romani violence in the world. 80% of Romani people in Europe live below the poverty rate. Romani women are disproportionately impacted by the sex trade. In many places in Europe (both Eastern and Western), Romani people are still segregated in neighbourhoods and at school, our access to healthcare is poorer and our life expectancy is 15 years shorter than the European average. Every month or so, we have to hear about anti-Romani protests held by Neo-Nazis in Europe, about a Romani person killed by the police, or about pogroms carried against Romani people.

So while it is good to talk about media representation, it becomes a problem - a big problem - when it receives much more attention and engagement than actual acts of brutality against Romani people. I have seen hundreds of posts on here and on Twitter, I have seen leftist influencers talk about it on Tiktok, but where was this energy last week when a romani man was murdered in france? when romani children were stripped away from their parents in leeds? when is that energy every other day of the year when Romani people (and women in particular) have to face poverty, homelessness and segregation, are at risk of human trafficking, get discriminated against in the workplace?

While it is good to advocate for better Romani representation now and then, media representation won't fix any of these issues. You can't place that much hope into TV shows and movies. Media and culture aren't powerful enough to get rid of social/economic oppression. Quite the contrary; it is the economical and social marginalization of Romani people that leads to racism in media and culture. And at the end of the day, it feels very callous and disheartening to see so many people care more about fictional Romani people than they do actual, breathing Romani people. If you actually want to support Romani people's rights, then you should redirect all of that energy into supporting causes that actually address the root of Romani people's oppression:

reparation and acknowledgement of the Holocaust and Romani slavery,

boosting conversations about segregation,

holding the police accountable when they kill a Romani person,

abolishing the sex trade,

supporting Romani women's reproductive rights (compensation for forced sterilization + better access to abortion facilities)

supporting homeless people's and migrant people's human rights

[s-n-arly]

I've never heard anyone say that the term "gypsy" is offensive before. I know it used to have a negative connotation, but it seems like it hasn't for a couple of centuries. Do people still identify as gypsies? I'm not arguing, but this is news to me and I would like to understand more.

Thanks for asking with the intention of understanding better! 

On my father's side, my family is Romani, the ethnic group historically called gypsies by outsiders. The name came from the misperception than we originated in Egypt (we're actually from India). Other names for us include words that literally mean unclean or untouchable (in a taboo and gross way). We have always called ourselves Roma or Romani, so it's not that we identify as gypsies, it's that others identify us as gypsies. This name or label was forced on us.

Like Native Americans, we are not a dead culture. We have become splintered, and many Romani have been pushed into inescapable poverty thanks to institutional racism. Many of us have assimilated into the dominant culture of the places we live (my family fits here).

But the negative connotation to the word is very much alive and well. Romani girls and women are among the most targeted by sex traffickers. In 2017, Fox "News" aired a scare-mongering "report" on Gypsy immigrants threatening the very fabric of the US.

Historically speaking, the Romani have been forcibly relocated, sterilized, and subjected to genocide. To address the "gypsy problem," in the 1800's, Switzerland rounded up Romani males and sent them to North America. This is how one branch of my family arrived in the US. It tends to not get mentioned in history classes, but twenty-five to fifty percent of the Romani population living in Europe in 1939 died at the hands of Nazis.

Taking a word that has been used to label and other an ethnic group, and romanticizing and using it to describe a free-spirited and mischievous nature does not erase the baggage or harm that has been done. Gypsy and its derivative gyp (to steal or swindle) are vulgar and hurtful words that need to be retired and relegated to history.

⁂

Here are some sources and articles, should they be of interest:

The Problem with the Word 'Gypsy' (this whole site can be helpful)

The Harmful History of 'Gypsy' – discusses the modern myths and the current state

Romani Genocide – Romani specific Wikipedia article on the Nazi Holocaust

Remembering the Roma victims of the Holocaust – discusses how the Romani are often excluded from historical accounts of the Holocaust, and the impact on the people – less dry than the Wikipedia article

Persecution and Politicization: Roma (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe – nice summary of the history associated with the word from Cultural Survival Quarterly magazine

The “G” Word Isn’t for You: How “Gypsy” Erases Romani Women – from the National Organization for Women (NOW) this focuses a little more on how the long-standing stereotypes and racism hurt Romany, especially the women.

[oversought]

g*psy culture, in case there’s any confusion, is suffering

[comrade-meow]

[‘Assignment to Slave Labour’, Auschwitz, Poland, c.1940. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.]

Menstruation and the Holocaust

Periods are a fact of life, but little talked about. How did women in the concentration camps cope with the private being made public in the most dire and extreme circumstances?

Menstruation is rarely a topic that comes to mind when we think about the Holocaust and has been largely avoided as an area of historical research. This is regrettable, as periods are a central part of women’s experience. Oral testimonies and memoirs show that women felt ashamed discussing menstruation during their time in the concentration camps, but, at the same time, they kept bringing the subject up, overcoming the stigma that is attached to them.

Typically, menstruation has been seen as a medical problem to be overcome rather than as a natural occurrence and a part of life. Medical historians, for example, have explored the forced experiments in sterilisation that were conducted in Auschwitz. Sabine Hildebrandt examined the research of the pathologist Hermann Stieve, who experimented on female political prisoners awaiting execution in Plötzensee. Stieve looked at the effect stress had on the reproductive system. Similarly, Anna Hájková has written about the Jewish Theresienstadt prisoner and physician František Bass’ research on amenorrhoea, the loss of menstruation, which focused on how it was caused by the shock of incarceration. Interestingly, however, almost all this research discussed ovulation (and its lack) rather than menstruation, even though both are part of the same biological function.

Periods impacted on the lives of female Holocaust victims in a variety of ways: for many, menstruation was linked to the shame of bleeding in public and the discomfort of dealing with it. Periods also saved some women from being sexually assaulted. Equally, amenorrhoea could be a source of anxiety: about fertility, the implications for their lives after the camps and about having children in the future.

A much-cited argument in Holocaust scholarship, made by Hannah Arendt, is that the totalitarian regime of the camps broke human solidarity, making them a very isolating place to be. But, contrary to this view, periods could provide moments of bonding and solidarity among prisoners: many older women gave help to teenagers, who experienced their first period alone after their families had been murdered. When we look for it, many survivors talk with great openness about their periods. Having or not having a period could shape daily experience of the camps.

What is a woman?

After deportation to camps and ghettos, due to malnutrition and shock, a significant number of female Holocaust victims of reproductive age stopped menstruating. Many were afraid that they would be left infertile after their bodies were forced to their limits, making the intrinsic link between periods and fertility apparent and increasingly central to their lives. Gerda Weissman, originally from Bielsko in Poland and 15 years old during her incarceration, later reflected that a key reason she wanted to survive was because she wanted to have children. She described it as ‘an obsession’. Similarly, the French publicist, resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo mentions a discussion that took place among a room full of women:

“It’s upsetting not to go through those unclean period … You begin to feel like an old woman. Timidly, Big Irene asked: ‘And what if they never come back afterwards?’ At her words a ripple of horror swept over us … Catholics crossed over themselves, others recited the Shema; everyone tried to exorcise this curse the German were holding over us: sterility. How could one sleep after that?”

These reactions reflected both religious and cultural diversity, showing that regardless of faith, culture or nationality, it was a worry all could relate to. The historian of Holocaust literature S. Lillian Kremer argued that, in addition to the fear of becoming infertile, the prisoners’ uncertainty over whether their fertility would return if they survived made the loss of menstruation a ‘dual psychological assault’ on female identity.

Upon entry into the camp, prisoners were given shapeless clothing and had their heads shaved. They lost weight, including from their hips and breasts, two areas commonly associated with femininity. Oral testimonies and memoirs show that all of these changes compelled them to question their identities. When reflecting on her time in Auschwitz, Erna Rubinstein, a Polish Jew who was 17 when in the camps, asked in her memoir, The Survivor in Us All: Four Young Sisters in the Holocaust (1986): ‘What is a woman without her glory on her head, without hair? A woman who doesn’t menstruate?’

[Untitled drawing by Nina Jirsíková, 1941. Remembrance and Memorial Ravensbrück/SBG, V780 E1.]

It is only due to the commercialisation of a natural physical occurrence that we now have resources such as pads and tampons that are specifically geared towards easing the ‘inconvenience’ of menstruation. Terms such as ‘sanitary equipment’ show that menstruation is treated as a health and hygiene concern - something to be sanitised. The reality of the camps, however, meant that menstruation was hard to avoid or hide. Its suddenly public nature took many women by surprise and made them feel alienated. An additional obstacle was the lack of rags and the lack of opportunities to wash. Trude Levi, a Jewish-Hungarian nursery teacher, then aged 20, later recalled: ‘We had no water to wash ourselves, we had no underwear. We could go nowhere. Everything was sticking to us, and for me, that was perhaps the most dehumanising thing of everything.’ Many women have talked about how menstruating with no access to supplies made them feel subhuman. It is the specific ‘dirt’ of menstruation more than any other dirt, and the fact that their menstrual blood marked them as female, that made these women feel as though they were the lowest level of humanity.

The humiliation was furthered by the struggle of finding rags. Julia Lentini, a 17-year-old Romani from Biedenkopf in Germany, spent her summer months travelling through the country with her parents and 14 siblings. She was placed on kitchen detail during her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Schlieben. She discusses in her testimony how women had to learn tricks for survival when it came to menstruation in the camps. ‘You took the undergarment slip they gave you, ripped it and made little rags, and guarded those little rags like they were gold … you rinsed them out a little bit, put them under the mattress and dried them, then nobody else could steal the little rags.’ Rags were precious and, being so, they were not immune to theft. Some people compensated by using other materials. Gerda Weissman recalls: ‘It was a hard thing because you had no supplies you know. You had to find little pieces of paper and some things from under the loos.’

Rags could almost be considered to have their own micro-economy. As well as being stolen, they were given away, borrowed and traded. Elizabeth Feldman de Jong’s testimony highlights the value of second-hand rags. Not long after she arrived at Auschwitz, her periods disappeared. Her sister, however, continued to menstruate every month. Experiments involving injections in the womb were common, but if a woman was on her period doctors often avoided operating, finding it too messy. One day, Elizabeth was called to have an operation. There were no clean clothes as opportunities to wash were limited, so Elizabeth put her sister’s underwear on and showed the doctor, telling him that she had her period. He refused to operate. Elizabeth realised she could use her sister’s situation to save herself from experimentation and did so another three times at Auschwitz.

Shame and salvation

Livia Jackson, barely old enough to menstruate, felt repulsion at seeing blood flowing down the legs of another girl during roll call: ‘I would rather die than have blood flowing down my legs.’ Her reaction conveys a common attitude: although the lack of access to supplies to stem their menstrual flow was not their fault, many women still felt ashamed.

Scholar Breanne Fahs argues that women’s bodies are viewed as ‘leaky and troublesome’ and their bodily functions are seen as inconvenient, distasteful and unhygienic. Men, on the other hand, tend to receive praise for their secretions: urine, flatulence and semen can be seen as humorous, even sexy. Yet the very notion that periods are repulsive could save women during the Holocaust from being raped. Doris Bergen’s classic discussion of sexual violence in the Holocaust includes an interesting example of two Polish-Jewish women assaulted by Wehrmacht soldiers:

On 18 February 1940 in Petrikau, two sentries … abducted the Jewess Machmanowic (age eighteen) and the Jewess Santowska (age seventeen) at gunpoint from their parents’ homes. The soldiers took the girls to the Polish cemetery; there they raped one of them. The other was having a period at the time. The men told her to come back in a few days and promised her five zlotys.

Similarly, Lucille Eichengreen, a young German-Jewish prisoner, recalled in her memoir that during her imprisonment in a Neuengamme satellite camp in the winter of 1944-5, she had found a scarf and was thrilled: she planned to use it to cover her shorn head. Worried that she would be punished for owning a prohibited object, Eichengreen hid the scarf between her legs. Later, a German guard took her aside and, while attempting to rape her, groped her between her legs and felt the scarf. The man exclaimed: ‘You dirty useless whore! Phooey! You’re bleeding!’ His error protected Lucille from rape. In discussing these stories, we must discern the irony at hand: it is rape that should be viewed as disgusting and menstruation as natural and acceptable.

Camp families

Some teenagers experienced their first period in the camps alone, separated from their families or orphaned. In such cases, older prisoners provided help and advice. Tania Kauppila, a Ukrainian in Mühldorf concentration camp, was 13 when she started her periods. She did not know what was happening and shed many tears. She was scared that she was going to die and did not know what to do. Older women in the camp taught her and others in the same position about periods. The girls were taught how to handle it and what they needed to do in order to cope with the blood flow. It was a different learning process than they would have had at home: ‘You tried to steal a piece of brown paper, you know, from the bags and do the best you can’, recalled Kauppila. This story reoccurs across numerous oral testimonies. Many orphaned survivors who had just started mentioned the help of older women, who took on both a sisterly and motherly role in helping these young girls, before they experienced potential amenorrhoea; older women usually lost their period within the first two or three months of imprisonment.

Feminist scholars such as Sibyl Milton have pointed out the female ‘camp families’ that formed. It is striking, however, that the sisterhood of menstruation has not been written about. As Lentini highlights, if a girl got her period and did not know who to talk to, an older woman would usually ‘explain it very simply’. Twenty-year-old Hungarian Vera Federman spent time in Auschwitz and the Allendorf. She and a friend were able to get work in the kitchen, a precious job. Eating extra potatoes caused their periods to come back and then both girls stole rags from the female guards. This theft, of course, put them in great danger (not to mention the threat of losing their job), but Federman stressed the solidarity with her friend as they teamed up to help each other. In the often violent world of the camps, older women were willing to help educate unknown young girls, expecting nothing in return.

Gendered social networks of support and help developed in the camps. Arendt wrote that ‘the camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behaviour’. The female solidarity brought about by the shared experience of menstruation, however, tells another story.

After the liberation, the majority of those who suffered amenorrhoea during their time in the concentration camps eventually started menstruating again. The return of periods was a joyous occasion for many. London-born Amy Zahl Gottlieb was, at 24, the youngest member of the first Jewish Relief Unit ever posted overseas. While discussing her work with liberated camp members in her interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Gottlieb described how women began to lead normal lives and started to menstruate again; they were thrilled to be able to start having children. Menstruation became a symbol of their freedom. One survivor spoke of it as ‘my womanhood returning’.

The study of menstruation, a topic that has until now been perceived as irrelevant, or even disgusting, gives us a far more nuanced view of women’s experience of the Holocaust. We can see how notions of menstruation, rape, sterility and sisterhood changed in the camps. It seems that periods, a long-stigmatised topic, became, sometimes in the space of only months, a legitimate topic for women in camps.

Following the recent turns to cultural history, the history of the senses and the history of the body, we also need to recognise menstruation as valid and as defining victims’ experiences during the Holocaust.

(via)

European Network of Migrant Women

[awed-frog]

I find China's treatments on uighurs and tibetans is disturbing than holocaust

The scary thing is, what is going on is actually quite standard. Nothing creative or unique about it. For instance, this new thing we’re learning about forced sterilizations and forced abortions - everyone’s done that. Australia did it to First Nations people, the US to Native Americans, Peru to the Quechuas and the Aymaras, Scandinavia to disabled women, Switzerland to Romani, Yenish and the poor, India to indigenous and lower-class women, Israel to African migrants, Japan to criminals and those ‘with criminal tendencies’. The list goes on, and we’re not talking about ancient history. Most of this stuff was going on well into the 1970s and 1980s; some of it is still going on today.

As for the flooding of someone’s land with ‘ethnically majority’ people, that’s also fairly common, and is currently ongoing in Indonesia, for instance. And the destruction of cultural heritage - there’s so much of that going on, it’d take me two weeks to even start a list. But ask any Jewish person living in Europe how they feel about their graveyards being vandalized basically twice a month.

The problem of ‘What do we do with people we don’t want’ has been a thing since Antiquity, and - depressing enough - our solutions haven’t changed all that much. While Odysseus simply advised his friends to kill every Trojan child they could find, modern Chile resorted to butchering their parents and giving their babies to more politically-friendly people. This was in the 1970s, and it caused untold grief (that’s still not fully resolved).

So while I think what’s going on in China is horrific, I’m also wondering about the causes of this sudden interest in it. Trouble between the West and China has been brewing for some time; and while Western public opinion generally doesn’t need encouragement to despise the Chinese, every little bit helps, doesn’t it? Back in the 1980s and even 1990s, when China was destroying Tibet, only hippies and weirdos were speaking up; the whole thing was seen as a shame, surely, but also an internal matter. There was some sympathy for the Tibetans, but little political will to mess things up with China. But now China’s actively competing with us, flexing its muscles abroad, and buying up half of Africa - now all of a sudden we all care about its abysmal human rights record.

Sometimes, the world is an ugly place.

(And tbh I wouldn’t start comparing tragedies and genocide and ranking them to see which one was worst. Did the Jews deserve to die more than the Tibetans? Was the loss of Romani people in the Holocaust better than the killing of millions of Cambodians? Those are disturbing and useless questions. As a reminder: I'd say that it's one short step from 'Wizards first' to 'Purebloods first,' and then to 'Death Eaters’. We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.

[robynqueenofstuff]

Forced sterilization of Romani women – a persisting human rights violation

Forced sterilization of Romani women – a persisting human rights violation

[djuvlipen]

/!\ 11/07/2022. Czech Health Ministry has REJECTED compensation to a woman whose Romani origin is listed as the reason for her sterilization

This is what RACIALIZED MISOGYNY looks like. This is awful. This Romani woman was threatened by authorities that her children would be taken away from her if she didn't undergo the operation. Her Romani origin was even listed by the health authorities as the reason for her sterilization.

Because she was a **ROMANI WOMAN** she had her reproductive rights taken away from her and was sterilized against her will. Yet the Ministry is disregarding her account of the events and their own documents to deny her any form of justice

Romani women and feminists have been fighting for YEARS to receive justice from the Czech Republic with regards to forced sterilizations but to no avail. Fighting for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy is so important for Romani feminists because Romani women were forcibly sterilized in the Czech Republic (from 1966 to 2012), in Slovakia (from 1966 to 2003 at least), in Hungary (case from 2001), in Sweden (1935-1976), and throughout history, most notoriously during the IIIrd Reich (specifically, from 1935 to 1945)

This is scandalous

[nightcoremoon]

ethnic genocide is... kind of worse than the criminalization of queerness because like. if you kill all members of an ethnicity, like tutsis or palestinians or armenians or something, that's it, their culture is gone, they're dead. people of different ethnicities can't just rachel dolezal their way into it. the yahi died with ishi and the only remnants of the yahi are through works of the le guins' chronicling his life. it's tragic and it's unfixable. if hitler succeeded in decimating the jews and the romani, they would no longer exist. there are dozens, no, hundreds of native american tribes that were exterminated by the colonists. an estimated hundred million natives lived here before columbus came. and now? there's five million. there are less natives alive today than there were jews murdered during the holocaust. the white invaders killed about 8 times as many people as hitler did. even if the forced sterilizations didn't happen, and even if every single native american alive today got someone pregnant or been impregnated, and even if every single one of them did so with a person of a different ethnicity, and even if the infant mortality rate was zero, even including twins at 3%, even rounding up, even blessing all of them with immortality, even assuming all of them were old enough to consent to and have sex, there is still only a maximum of 6 million native americans able to be born every year. it would take a constant 15 years just to replace who was lost. an estimated 24% of women were sterilized so that's 17 years. if half of all babies had both a native mother and father, that's 24 years. infant mortality for natives is 9%, so that's 25. assuming minors comprise 1/6 of the population, that's 27 years. and keep in mind this doesn't even take into account all of the natives who were born FOR THE PAST 500 YEARS. it's disgusting what was done to them, but this isn't about just the natives even though holy shit I never put it into actual mathematical perspective before and I am significantly more enraged on their behalf than I was before, and that much more understanding of their own righteous fury. giving the land back is the bare fucking minimum for reparations. but anyway.

so yeah, ethnic genocide is really bad. and so is, you know, just for example, the aids crisis. 125,000 AT LEAST people died from aids. most were gay. half as much as corona victims, and 0.5% of the american populace. several people from that time period have said that it wiped out entire swathes of gay people. the entire gay community was decimated. but here we are 25 or so years later and the united states is just... absolutely saturated with queer people. lil nas x is the most popular musician right now. this is a good thing. we've bounced back. we've rebuilt. and we've been able to do so because cishets can give birth to queer kids, who grow up to become queer adults. you cannot get rid of us, because there will always be more of us.

homophobia is horrible of course, and every single government that criminalizes being gay should be erased [not the people because that is genocide which I have previously established as BAD, but governments are not people, they are just the artificial systems developed by the people in power], I don't condone any mass murder of any sort, and civil rights are human rights. I'm not disputing that. white gays don't fuckin REEE at me, I'm literally one of you.

but our experiences are incomparable to theirs.

and when I say "our", I obviously fucking know that there are plenty of Native American, Black, Latine, Asian, Middle Eastern, Slavic, Pacific Islander, and other various people of color who are also queer. I'm not a moron. I don't think that there's only white queers. if you had any reading comprehension at all you'd know that I'm comparing the experience of the white gay directly to the experience of the person of color because a predominant majority of people of color are cishets. and if "they're not cishet if they're from a culture that views gender and sexuality differently from us" then obviously their definitions of homosexual lesbian bi and trans are also different you dumb fuck so shut up and don't drum up any bullshit semantics discourse because I'm not reading any of it. when I say "our" I mean specifically people who have ONLY experienced discrimination based on their gender or sexuality and not any based on their ethnicity (and in the specific sphere of relevance in this post I'm only discussing queer affiliation and ethnicity, and this isn't to suggest that religion and ability and misogyny don't also affect these but I'm not going to talk about that right at this moment), for the sole purpose of making a point that is specifically about gender or sexuality and ethnicity. okay? you got it?

racism is an exponentially bigger problem.

they're both problems but they're not equal in scope. white queers have privilege over cishet poc in the same way visibly abled people have privilege over invisibly abled. you can't look at a person and immediately know if they're gay or trans but you CAN look at a person and know they're brown.

and you could theoretically kill every single queer person alive right now, but in 20 years there's just gonna be more of us. we're like a zucchini farm in that respect. we've always been here and we always will be here.

but you can't say the same for people of color.

ethnic genocide is a very real and very pressing matter that is currently affecting millions.

so it's our duty as white people to at the very goddamn least pay attention to what people of color are saying, and not say dumb shit that's racist, and point out to other people when they say dumb shit that's racist. and it's really easy to just, NOT fight brown people because you're gay and therefore just as oppressed. no. it just doesn't work that way.

black lives matter

protect asian lives

[jewish-privilege]

Being an ethnically ambiguous person comes with a lot of privileges; however, answering the constant questions about my identity is not one them. Like many other exoticized women, I am asked on an almost daily basis: “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” followed up with “No really, where are you from?” after I reply “Brooklyn” to their line of questioning.  

When you tell folks in America that you are Romani, nearly 100 percent of the time they will ask if you mean Romanian. Often times, I will reply “No, Romani, which is gypsy but please don’t call us that because it’s a slur.” I’ve learned that Americans are familiar with the word “gypsy,” using it to describe a vagabond, free-spirited lifestyle, and have a faint idea of us as mythical creatures, but are ignorant to the plight of actual Romani people.

So, who are Romani? More importantly, why do we need to remove the word gypsy from our vocabulary?

Simply put, Romani are the largest ethnic minority in Europe, originating from northwest India, migrating through the Middle East, and some through North Africa, to Europe. There are Romani living around the world, with estimates of 10 and 12 million living in Europe and another million in the US. Europeans imposed the word “gypsy” on Romani when they came to Europe, believing that we originated from Egypt because of our dark features. Romani have a history of persecution in Europe; it is estimated by Roma historians that over 70 to 80 percent of the Romani population was murdered in the Holocaust, a fact that is little known or recognized. Even lesser known, Romani experienced chattel slavery in Romania for over 500 years ending in 1860.

Although it is rarely talked about, the situation for Romani has not improved much; we are still victims of hate crimes, receive inadequate health care and housing, experience segregated education, and die in prison. While policies in the US systematically discriminate in covert ways, many of the policies against Romani in Europe are overt, which is apparent through opinions from political officials. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, co-founder of the Fidesz Party in Hungary, said, “A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals. When they meet with resistance, they commit murder. They are incapable of human communication. Inarticulate sounds pour out of their bestial skulls. At the same time, these Gypsies understand how to exploit the ‘achievements’ of the idiotic Western world. But one must retaliate rather than tolerate. These animals shouldn’t be allowed to exist. In no way. That needs to be solved — immediately and regardless of the method.”

These ideas are not reduced to words; according to a study by the National Federation of Gypsy Liaison Groups and Anglia Ruskin University, 9 out of 10 Roma children have suffered racial abuse in the UK. In Hungary, 60 percent of Romani live in secluded rural areas, segregated neighborhoods, and settlements. The fact that 90 percent of Romani in Europe live below the poverty line is an even more extreme illustration of current living conditions for Romani.

We cannot have a conversation about the use of “gypsy” without mentioning what it specifically means to be Romani and a woman facing racism, classism and sexism, excluded from traditional feminist and Romani activist movements. Romani women experience particularly disparate treatment in the areas of education, reproductive health care, and in the labor market. Only 1.6 percent of Romani women attend college in Romania, while 90 percent of Romani women are unemployed in Hungary. Romani women in Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were victims of forced sterilization, a practice that ended less than 10 years ago. Romani infant mortality remains an issue; it is double the national average in the Czech Republic. These policies that impact actual lives of Romani women are upheld by cultural attitudes, some of which people don’t notice they are perpetuating.

...The media offers two stereotypes of Romani women: the beggar, who is dirty and exploiting social welfare, and a hypersexualized magical being who threatens the patriarchy. So, while the use of the word “gypsy” seems innocent, it is dangerous to Romani women. It conjures up a romanticized image of poverty and sexualization, which doesn’t acknowledge that there is nothing romantic about being a victim of institutionalized racism. There is nothing romantic about the link between perceived uncontrollable sexuality and forced sterilization. There is nothing romantic about being a victim of domestic violence but afraid to speak out because law enforcement won’t believe you or it will further oppress your community. There is nothing romantic about lacking political power and representation, and being left out of both anti-racist and feminist politics.

However, that doesn’t stop the rampant consumerism and pop culture references associated with “gypsy.” Just to name a few examples: The Gypsy Shrine, Gypsy Warrior, Shakira’s song “Gypsy,” Fleetwood Mac’s song “Gypsy,” Cher’s song “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,” and the latest, Netflix’s original series Gypsy. There are over 2,000 “gypsy” costumes on Amazon and over 250,000 “gypsy” items for sale on Etsy. When folks unknowingly or knowingly profit off of the word “gypsy,” claim they have a “gypsy soul,” or use “gypsy aesthetic” for a day at Coachella, they are reinforcing racist stereotypes of Romani women and dehumanizing us. People in the US must recognize the link between the language we use and how cultural depictions inform public policy for marginalized groups. Beyond language and the word gypsy, this is about how gypsies are struggling for liberation, and how Romani women suffer while gadje (non-Romani) profit off of our likeness. So before you put on that coin skirt and scarf, or proclaim your “free-spirited gypsy-ness,” remember that we already exist and will be always be gypsies and Romani.

---

I’m sick of seeing celebrities who are so good with anti-racism (and even antisemitism, which almost never happens!) “reclaim” the g-word when they, as non-Romani, have no right. When they are confronted with the history and present of the word, they either ignore it or scoff at the possibility that they are acting in a racist manner. I’m not Romani and it feels like a slap every time I see it; I can only imagine how painful and exhausting it is for a Romani person to deal with it on a daily basis.

[pojkflata]

Like how the rules were up until 5 yrs ago and what SD wants to bring back is ”you don’t HAVE to get sterilized but if you’re gonna transition... we’re gonna need to violate your rights” so it’s a Morton’s fork there

You need to understand that forced sterilization is to us what lobotomies are to americans, except lobotomies were only widespread for like a decade whereas forced sterilization is far more pervasive. It was done to PoC in general but especially romani and sami, disabled people, even Swedish able bodied nt women who were deemed to be ”promiscious”

It was largely abolished in the 70s but the sterilization of trans people lingered for a bit longer because it had an illusion of choice

[rationalisms]

really disheartening to see how much romani are being left out of the conversation regarding neo nazism considering

a) we were and always have been a primary target of nazis (read up on this.)

b) we have historically been one of the two groups, alongside jewish people, who has suffered the most under their boot. (70-80% of europe’s romani population is estimated to have died during the holocaust, and that’s not even getting into how we were legislated against and experimented on before that.)

c) we still have to deal with the fallout of the porajmos today especially considering many laws that were put in place by nazis are either still in effect, have only very recently changed or are still enforced unofficially (e.g. forced sterilization of romani women being an example of all three depending on the country).

i’m not surprised, because suppression of our genocide has been the status quo ever since it happened (it took 40 years for anyone to acknowledge our holocaust happened, and even then it was only west germany that did and we got zero reparations either way. before that they literally claimed we were exterminated based on criminal grounds, not racial ones.)

it’s a deliberate tactic in order to keep us subjugated, and they do this with everything else as well-- the deportations, the police violence, the mass protests against our very existence. (seriously. read up on it.) if it doesn’t exist, no one has to acknowledge it or do anything against it.

that’s why it’s imperative to include is in this conversation. every person who leaves us out of it is helping our oppressors do their work.