The Society of Medieval Feminist Scholarship joins those other communities around the globe in unequivocally deploring the anti-LGBTQIAA laws and initiatives recently instated in Indiana, Mississippi and North Carolina. SMFS utterly rejects these retrograde developments that serve to deny LGBTQIAA persons their human right to access medical and other services within a non-prejudicial environment and prevent them from using those facilities in the workplace and other public spaces with which they identify. SMFS therefore speaks out strongly against any such initiatives permitting covert, open or legal discrimination against LGBTQIAA people and threatening both their safety and wellbeing.
As a long-standing international society of scholars working within the context of sex and gender diversity, SMFS here reasserts its commitment to valuing diversity, difference and inclusivity, and to opposing most actively any form of discrimination based on gender, gender identity, race, religion, disability or sexual orientation. As such, we continue in our policy of supporting students and faculty suffering discrimination for these or other reasons, particularly those who now inadvertently find themselves subject to these abhorrent and dangerous discriminatory laws.
As a further response, SMFS announces a new funding initiative open to our LGBTQIAA students and colleagues, streamed from sales of its new merchandise and from member donations. The SMFS Trans Feminist Fund will take immediate effect after our Advisory Board meeting at Kalamazoo, having been established to offer financial support for conference/research-trip travel and accommodation for members of the medievalist LGBTQIAA community who may wish to receive such assistance to enhance their safety and wellbeing whilst going about their academic lives.
Liz Herbert McAvoy, President
Linda E. Mitchell, Vice President
Dorothy Kim, Secretary
Vickie Larsen, Treasurer
