The Week In Transgenderism 3/16/15

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Can’t get a job.

A young woman in England claims she can’t find a job since she lost a factory job for “wearing too much makeup.” Is it being trans that is keeping her from finding work or is it lack of skills and the austerity depressed British job market? Or is it that she has been invited to appear on the reality TV show Big Brother and not being able to get a job got her picture and name in the papers? Read and decide. The story is in the Daily Mail.

The unspoken part of the Restroom Wars is the role of “passing” in a trans woman’s ability to use the lady’s facility without incident. What strikes terror into the hearts of those who would bar us from the lady’s? “A man in a dress” being in there. How do they determine that they are sharing the facility with a “man in a dress”? By looking around and noticing that one of the other women is a few inches over six feet tall and has a 5 O’clock shadow. If you’re 5’5” you can use the lady’s room with impunity. Larger trans women and those with a more masculine aspect will have problems. Read about the 6-foot-2 woman in Charlotte, NC who was escorted out of the restroom by police. The story is in the Charlotte Observer.

Excluded from using the restroom because you don’t present as your birth sex? There’s an app for that! Adaptability is a human skill that really helps when you are presented with obstacles. With “bathroom laws” on the rise some people who noticed how hard is was getting for trans people to relief themselves in public facilities created an app for iPhone and Android that lets you know the nearest restroom facility to your location that is a trans safe space. Learn more in Pink News.

The flap over trans people using public restrooms is mostly coming from older legislators. Older people in general are having a hard time adapting to the idea that people can be born transgendered or be gender fluid, and what people don’t understand they tend to demonize. But as the old haters die out there are young people who are far more accepting. One of them wrote an opinion piece about the restroom wars for her student newspaper, The Cougar.

Jazz Jennings

Trans teen author and TG activist Jazz Jennings has a new job. She will be the face of Clean & Clear’s new ad campaign. Clean & Clear markets skin care products and promotes progressive causes like acceptance of trans people by society in general. Read about Jazz and Clean & Clear in the style section on Yahoo.

As if that wasn’t fab enough we’ve also learned that Jazz will be starring in her own reality show

on TLC. It’s called All That Jazz and it will run this summer. Get more details from The Hollywood Reporter.

Transgender support has come to Alaska. Back in February the first meeting of a support and social group for trans people was held in Juneau, Alaska’s capital city. They had 12 people attend that first meeting. Read about it on the Alaska Public Media website.

Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, a media outlet is assembling the stories of the state’s trans residents. If you live in Pennsylvania and want to share your story with the world (anonymously if you prefer) you can do so by checking out this article on pennlive.com.

Some people get a reality TV show. Others have there’s put on hold. The reality television show that would follow Bruce Jenner’s transition is one that has been put on hold. It has been reported that Jenner called a halt to the show because he wants his three sons to be psychologically ready to handle their dad becoming a woman. Another reason the show has been stopped is Jenner’s involvement in a multi vehicle crash last month in which a woman died. Read about it in the San Jose Mercury News.

Avery Edison

Last February a trans woman from the U.K., Avery Edison, was detained when she arrived in Canada because she had overstayed her visa on a previous visit to that country. Being detained for wanting to stay in a country longer than you originally planned is bad enough (she must have enjoyed Canada) but they held her for 20 hours in a men’s correctional complex. She was then moved to a women’s facility and deported two days later. We have learned that the human rights complaint she filed against the Ontario government has been settled to her satisfaction. Read the details in The Star.

FtM b-baller.

In life you often have to do the thing you need to do, even if it goes against the beliefs of the majority of your people. While this is true universally there is one place on the planet where being yourself is more dangerous than any other. The country of Uganda is near the top of the list of the most homophobic you will find. Read the story of two FtM basketball players who are playing the game they love on a women’s team while worrying about being attacked for being gay. Which they are not. The story is in The Guardian.

There are many instances of trans people becoming homeless when they come out to their family and employer. Already dealing with their gender transition these people find themselves dealing with the major problem of having no place to live. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to help trans women, who are often turned away from single-gender women’s shelters, by mandating that any single-gender shelter that gets Federal money cannot turn anyone away because they are trans. Get the story from The Washington Post.

Former trans couple pen books.

A transgender couple who made news while they were still teens — for being a teen trans couple — have since broken up, as often happens with young couples. After the breakup they both wrote books about their lives. The books were published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster and now the authors are on a book promotion tour. The pair will be at Oklahoma State University on April 11 to talk about their lives and sign copies of their books. Read more in the Stillwater News Press.

At the other end of a life span another author has a book out about her transition from male to female at the age of 64. Her name is Grace Stevens and her book is titled No! Maybe? Yes! Living My Truth. After hiding her true gender for her whole life she has, as she puts it, come to make peace with the male person who used to control her body. Learn more about her and her book in The Huffington Post.

Another writer, an Englishmen who writes for television, almost didn’t write a script for the BBC competition to come up with a comedy TV show featuring a positive trans character in the lead role. He was fascinated by the idea of such a show but knew nothing about transgender issues. He decided to go ahead and he won the competition. His show, Boy Meets Girl, is now being produced. Learn how he was able to write the script in Prolific North.

A “San Francisco style” drag queen has won the Mr. San Francisco Leather competition. We guess it just goes to show that all clothing is drag, be it a dress or a pair of leather shorts. Jem Johova hosts parties around San Francisco as an androgynous queen wearing makeup but sporting a beard (that’s what SF style is) and entered the contest expressing an abiding love for leather. Jehova, whose male name is Trevor Wisnieski, will now represent San Francisco in the International Mr. Leather contest in May. Read more in SFist.

A Jewish queen.

Since crossdressing is banned for Jews as well as Christians by the words of Deuteronomy 22:5 how does an orthodox Jewish man express his inner drag queen? The same way a follower of Christianity does. He gets dolled up and takes to the stage. And his drag persona will make you some kugel. Meet several orthodox Jewish drag queens in The Guardian.

Interview with a crossdresser.

A lot of emphasis has been placed on transgender or trans as a term that applies only to those who present themselves as the opposite of their birth sex all the time. The term makes it seem as if anyone identifying as trans has transitioned. Crossdressers fall under the transgender umbrella and with the media concentrating on people who have transitioned there isn’t much education going on about part time girls. Author and television producer Terri Lee Ryan recently interviewed a member of the Chi Chapter support group in Chicago to learn what it’s like to be a crossdresser. The interview is available in Chicago Now.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that requiring sterilization prior to gender reassignment surgery violates the right of privacy. While it would seem that in the case of male to female GRS the organs involved in procreation have to be removed or remodeled thereby assuring no sperm will be produce, there have been enough cases of pregnant trans men for the original prohibitions to be have been dreamed up in the first place. That seems to say that law makers decided it was better that “those people” don’t make more like themselves. Thanks to the new ruling the sterilization requirement is a thing of the past. Learn more from KaleidoScot.

TWITs

Dr. Keith Ablow is at it again. With the story of the female Planet Fitness member who was kicked out for complaining about a trans woman in the locker room circulating in the media Fox & Friends felt they needed to do a segment about it. Ablow was on the guest list along with a legal analyst. The legal opinion was that Planet Fitness had every right to exclude the woman from their gym. Ablow, on the other hand, kept going on about how crazy it is for men to maintain that they’re women and it’s nothing but “political correctness” that lets TGs keep up this fiction. We give Ablow yet another TWIT Award and ask him what sort of political correctness allows him to get away with claiming he’s a psychiatrist? The story and the video are available at mediate.com.

Meanwhile the ignorant crusade to ban TGs from public and school restrooms and locker rooms continues to gather steam. Texas, Kentucky and Minnesota have all introduced bills to ban trans students from the bathroom. None of the bill authors seem to see the problems their legislation will cause. The Kentucky bill would empower anyone who was in the school restroom when a trans person entered to sue the school for $2500. How could that go wrong? The Texas bill would allow those who had to bear the presence of a trans person in the restroom to claim $2000 plus associated legal costs. TWIT Awards to all three states and a TWIT Award to the website Life Site for characterizing the bills as protection for children.

At least when Keith Ablow and state legislators make derogatory remarks about transgenderism they are open about it and you know who they are. Recently the Patriot-News newspaper announced a ban on negative commenting about LGBT and race issues. An anonymous blogger with the username Anonymous Attorney posted his thoughts about the ban on a blog site called VDare.com. Mr. (or Ms.) Anonymous expresses the feelings of the ignorant masses by commenting that he doesn’t like anyone telling him how to comment on stuff, first of all. Then he goes on that he’s not going to embrace Laverne Cox just because the media tells him too, and that just because homosexuality isn’t defined as a mental illness anymore that doesn’t mean it isn’t. Oddly enough if you want to comment on our TWIT Award winner, Anonymous Attorney’s post you can’t because vdare.com doesn’t let you submit comments. If you can figure out how to make a comment maybe you should let him know what you think.

So you and your wife are in Thailand and you approach a ladyboy on the street, uninvited, and engage her in conversation. Your wife is looking on as you talk and she becomes involved, then “creates a scene.” The “scene” is negative enough to cause the ladyboy to become angry and you don’t want to make a ladyboy angry. More words are exchanged and then the ladyboy takes off her heel and attacks the wife with it. The end result is the ladyboy is arrested. Her shoe is confiscated as evidence and a tourist’s wife ends up in the hospital. The TWIT Award goes to the Polish tourist who decided he should approach a ladyboy. Read all about it and see photo of the shoe wielder in the Bangkok Post.

Tags: Avery Edison, crossdressing, featured, Jazz Jennings, news, restroom wars, Transgender, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News