The Week In Trans 10/28/19

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In April of 2014 India created a status for transgender and nonconforming people. The third gender official designation allowed many trans men and women to come out of the underground and join society. India Times has published a list of several people who have taken up prominent positions in the public and private sectors.

In Dallas, a jury returned a near-unanimous verdict in a contentious divorce case. Jeffrey Younger wants custody of his twin sons, but his ex-wife, Dr. Anne Georgulas, contends that one of the children is transgender. She wants her ex-husband to recognize the transgender child as Luna, and she asked the court for permission to allow the child to be assessed and, upon medically recommendation, to undergo puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. As the child is currently seven years old, such treatment is in the future, and there is time to appeal this court’s decision. Indeed, there is time to reassess this child, as some evidence points to the child is not too upset with presenting as a boy or being called James. The jury awarded the mother sole conservatorship to the mother, meaning that the father would have to address the child as “Luna” when the child is visiting. The Texan has, or had, this story. (They keep rewriting it, as it changes.) The Daily Beast has a story accusing right-wing websites, groups, and politicians of using this child as a weapon to attack the courts and anyone whom they disagree with. (More on the reaction of conservative groups can be found in the TWIT section.) Governor Greg Abbott threatened to get Child Protective Services involved. Then, on Thursday, three days after the jury delivered its verdict, the judge restored the couple’s joint custody. This restores the status quo ante, how things were before the jury verdict, as Muri Assunção of the New York Daily News explains. The judge’s ruling means that both parents share in medical decisions, which will likely mean that the matter will come back to court.

In the same week that the jury and judge in Dallas considered the case of Younger v. Georgulas, Meredith Talusan wrote in The New York Times that parents should celebrate a child’s transition rather than grieving it.

Dr. Lewis First wrote a blog article about who goes to a pediatric or adolescent gender clinic, and what they want from that clinic. His writing can be found here.

Alexander Chen looks at the reasoning used in the Aimee Stephens employment case, and finds that it could lead to a bad outcome even if the court agrees with that reasoning. His thoughts appear in Slate.

Christopher Stoll writes in a guest opinion piece for The Advocate that the Supreme Court’s opinion on the matter of transgender employment is likely to have repercussions as Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act makes its way through the courts.

Aaron Belkin wrote a guest opinion piece for The Advocate, in which he tells us that Justice Neil Gorsuch’s recent comments seem to show a concern for public reaction to a decision supporting transgender people’s employment rights, and why this is a dangerous thing for judges to consider.

Last week, Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the Affordable Care Act does not supersede the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when it comes to health care. This week, a judge in Alabama ruled that an employee cannot claim disability due to gender dysphoria unless there is “physical impairment.” This story is covered in Bloomberg Law.

The state of California wants to make sure that trans and gender nonconforming people are treated properly when they go to the polls to case their vote. To ensure that such voters are treated properly the state has instituted training for poll workers. The move is being hailed as ground breaking and will help to stop voter suppression. Learn more from the San Francisco Chronicle.

CNN uses the twentieth anniversary of the release of the movie Boys Don’t Cry as a reason to look at how things have changed, and how they haven’t, for transgender people.

Edward Thomas was found guilty of misdemeanor assault of Muhlaysia Booker. Thomas was videotaped beating her and she was found shot to death a month later. Another suspect, Kendrell Lavar Lyles, is being held for the shooting. CBS News has the story. The Advocate reports that Thomas’s attorneys constantly deadnamed and misgendered the victim.

The family of Layleen Polanco, who died while in jail, is accusing New York City’s Corrections Department of stalling its investigation of the incident. This story comes from The City.

Video of Roxsana Hernandez, who died while in the custody of ICE, has apparently gone missing, probably erased and reused, her attorney tells CNN.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin have called on the Department of Homeland Security to allow transgender migrants to remain in the U.S. while their asylum cases are processed. Out magazine has this story.

Pete Buttigieg became the most recent presidential candidate to sit down with Mara Keisling and talk about transgender issues. You can read about it in The Advocate.

Anna Foster, a transgender woman in Charleston, South Carolina, says that police watched her being beaten and did not intervene. This story appears in LGBTQ Nation.

A transgender woman in South Carolina was asked by the manager of a local restaurant to use the men’s restroom. WSPA-TV has this story.

A man in Ohio attacked a transgender woman in a parking lot. He seems to have had a knife. When police intervened, they asked the man why he was fighting, and his response was, “I don’t know, other than the fact that she’s a chomo [child molester].” This is not the first time that the man has been charged with menacing, and the two have had a history of disagreements. Metro Weekly has this story.

Police in Washington, D.C., are investigating an incident in which two transgender women appear to have been lured and attacked by a man with a knife, after meeting the man through a dating app. This story comes from LGBTQ Nation.

Tinder has problems with transgender people, despite its multitude of gender options. Pink News has details.

An amazingly high percentage of homeless LGBT and black youth in Atlanta were victims of human trafficking, being pressed into labor or sex work, according to a report in Pink News.

A study by a charity called Ditch The Label has revealed that transgender people get a lot of abuse online in both Britain and the United States. BBC News has this report.

While trans people are getting online abuse drag queens in Louisiana draw record crowds with the fourth annual drag show they presented at Louisiana State University. The show drew 400 students last week. Read more on the student news site, Reveille.

The city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin has declared November 14-20 as Transgender Awareness Week. They further have designated November 20 as Transgender Day of Remembrance. Learn more from the WQOW website.

During a debate with Danica Roem, her opponent, Kelly McGinn, said that that the state legislature needs “more moms.” Ms. Roem mentioned in her closing comment that she is a mother, to which the Republican Party of Prince William County’s Twitter account asked, “Is there a new definition for that term as well?” Ms. Roem replied on her Twitter account, “Either @PWCGOP is blatantly transphobic or they don’t recognize step-moms as moms.” The party has since deleted that tweet. InsideNoVA has this story.

A human rights commissioner in Virginia won’t be giving up his position even after he posted hateful messages about LGBTQ people to social media – and his fellow members won’t be pushing him out. Find out what that’s all about on the LGBTQ Nation website. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for pointing out the story.

KENS-TV in San Antonio takes a look at breast cancer risks in the transgender population.

WESA public radio promoted a free showing of a new documentary about a transgender man’s experiences, with emphasis on reproduction and menstruation.

A Jewish trans woman author tells her story of transitioning late in life and how she found elements in her faith that helped her decide to live as the person she knew herself to be. Read Yiscah Smith’s story in The Huffington Post.

Period poverty is an issue which affects a lot of people, including transgender males and gender-nonconforming people, according to an article in Teen Vogue.

Proctor & Gamble announced this week that it will redesign the packaging of Always, removing the Venus symbol that is associated with females. (If it seems like there’s a lot of menstruation-related stories this week, that may be due to National Period Day.) This caused some uproar from the usual suspects, as can be seen in the TWIT section. USA Today carried this story.

This week, a tribunal in British Columbia ruled that a beautician did not have to do a Brazilian wax on a transgender woman’s pre-operative genitals, just because she will do such a procedure on a cisgender woman’s genitals. This story appeared in The Vancouver Sun.

Trans pro wrestler of Oneida heritage, Nyla Rose, was defeated in a recent match by a 100 pound, 5’4″ woman. That should calm down people who object to her appearing in the ring by saying she has an advantage since she was formerly male. Rose is no stranger to performing. She was the star of a Canadian show titled Switch which features an all transgender cast. Learn more about Rose on the LGBTQ Nation website. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for the story.

A study in Quartz found that transgender and non-binary people are posing a problem for facial recognition software.

Nonbinary people are popping up everywhere. There is even one in Pokemon Go. The character is Blanche and they are only mentioned by name or with gender neutral pronouns.

We often think of passing as a privilege, and it is. But it is also a privilege to look like you are transgender, when you feel comfortable enough to present in that way, as an article in The Alestle tells us. (This is from the student newspaper of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.)

The tech industry has a reputation for being progressive but when it comes to transgender people they’re not quite as progressive as you might think. People who were working in computer tech field as males experience a decline in status when they transition. People who were in the industry as women get higher pay and better job offers when they come out as male. For more on this visit the Tech Republic website.

Jenna Myers Karvundis, who created the first gender reveal party, has come to feel that it’s a bad idea. The fact that the child whose gender she revealed is now not so firm in that gender played a significant part in her education, but so did the lengths to which some people would go to reveal their child’s gender. Pink News has this story.

A new lesbian, gay, and bisexual group has formed in England and they specifically state in their debut announcement that they are opposed to transgender people. It seems they were no prepared for the immense backlash they got — from gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Read some of the backlash on the Pink News website. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for pointing us to the story.

Trans woman runner June Eastwood, a University of Montana senior, has been named Female Athlete of the Week by the Big Sky Conference on Tuesday after excelling in a race held on October 19. The Big Sky Conference said she clocked a time of 20:86 in the 6km race and was instrumental in helping the team place seventh in the overall event. Get the whole story from the Daily Mail.

Donald Trump Jr. used the occasion of Rachael McKinnon’s win in at the Masters Track Cycling World Championship as a reason to badmouth transgender athletes. She tweeted back to remind him that she was cycling under the old gender requirements. CBS News has this story.

Olympic sprinter James Ellington tweeted that the new gender regulations in sports are unfair, and that he could use them to break women’s records. People pointed out to him that sports do not use the same self-declaration that is found in the Gender Recognition Act. You can read about the exchange in Pink News.

Buzzfeed reports that a transgender man who does construction work has filed a complaint against Rosario Dawson and her parents, saying that they verbally abused him as he worked on their home.

Prince Harry recently showed up at the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, as the topic turned to gender in the British Commonwealth. His wife thanked the women attending the conference for allowing her husband to “crash” the event. She added that gender discussions “can’t happen without men.” BBC News had this story.

Eureka O’Hara, a veteran of RuPaul’s Drag Race, talks of how they personally experienced gender in the latest of edition of the LGBTQ&A Podcast.

Gia Gunn, who appeared on both RuPaul’s Drag Race and on Drag Race All Stars, tells Lemon Pop Culture Podcast that she postponed surgery to appear on Drag Race All Stars.

Stars has a list of “21 Brave Gender-Fluid Celebrities Who Are Breaking The Mold.” Some might argue with some of these people being described as “gender-fluid,” but they actually have 33 celebrities on their list (or perhaps more now).

Ballroom “Realness” is about portraying archetypes associated with straight culture through dress and dance; to be considered “real” at a ball, a performer must “pass” as straight if they are gay or as cisgender if they are transgender. Changing attitudes about gender and sexuality are affecting the Ball Realness category. Read the story in The New York Times.

Buzzfeed has a list of fourteen transgender television characters, seven done well and seven that missed the mark.

Natalie Wynn, the woman behind ContraPoints on YouTube, was profiled in her hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun.

A four-year-old boy with autism named Evan McLeod had a great time being a Disney princess in Disneyland, and Out magazine has the story.

Law And Order SVU had a story involving a transgender woman who was thrown out of a car. You can read about it at Pop Culture.

Mary Burke, the senior nurse at a privately-run gender identity clinic in the U.K., says that many transgender patients are unable to get the medical attention that they need because some doctors won’t work with a gender clinic that isn’t part of the NHS. Pink News has this story.

A new group called LGB Alliance is attempting to split transgender people out of the LGBT community. In response, the hashtag #LGBTQFamily was created. You can read about it at Pink News.

Pinki Khatun was elected to the town council in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is the first hijra elected in the Muslim-majority nation, according to Straits Times.

A transgender woman in Pakistan was kidnapped and raped. Five men have been arrested in connection with the crime. Dawn has this story.

Here’s a story for linguists. While many languages assign genders not only to people and animals but even to inanimate things, Farsi, the language of Iran, instead distinguishes between living things and inanimate things. All humans get the same pronoun in Farsi. Skrift says that travel advisors need to learn which countries are transgender-unfriendly, so that they can help transgender clients to avoid problems.

According to Forbes, Canada is the friendliest country to LGBT travelers. The U.S. is tied for 47th place. On the bad side, the U.S. is tied with Cuba, but on the good side, the U.S. is tied with Thailand.

TWITs

We mentioned above about the parental custody case in Texas. The father in that case is known to have lied about his income in the past, among other things. (His dishonesty was brought out when the marriage was annulled.) He has created a website to promote his side of the case, and the site is filled with lies and exaggerations. He claims that the child is about to be “chemically castrated” if he loses. While a form of estrogen was once used in chemical castration (especially famously in the case of Alan Turing), estrogen is not prescribed for seven-year-olds, even if they are transgender. Puberty blockers are prescribed when the first signs of puberty are seen; recently, it was said that this could be as young as age eight, but it is exceptional for puberty to begin that early. If it does, the child could be prescribed puberty blockers, even if the child is cisgender; the same drugs can be used to keep cisgender students from going through puberty ahead of their classmates. Sites including The Federalist, CBN, The Washington Examiner, Epoch Times, Rocochet, Christian Post, Christian Headlines, and LifeSiteNews all bought into some misinformation, much of which came from the father. For passing along bad information, and for slanting the news, all these sites get a TWIT Award.

The Daily Mail has long talked about the mythical “transgender lobby,” blaming it for so many different changes to life. This week, they blamed the “transgender lobby” for a change in packaging design by Proctor & Gamble for Always sanitary napkins. It turns out that the “transgender lobby” behind this is–one person, an activist named Ben Saunders. He is the only person whom the Mail On Sunday name in the article, and they do not show that others were involved. (Of course, the executives at the company who made the decision were involved, but the Daily Mail pretends that they caved in after such tremendous pressure from this one customer, whose business they just can’t possibly afford to lose.) For laughable logic, the Daily Mail gets a TWIT Award. (By the way, Dame magazine points out that the same people who are now complaining about the redesign of this packaging have complained about other package designs being too feminine.)

A company named Thinx makes menstrual hygiene underwear. In an ad, they asked what the world would be like if everyone experienced periods. This drew the ire of One Million Moms (which is not nearly as large or as unisex as their name would indicate). They responded, “Women and men are different. Men do not menstruate. . .ever. Period.” The original piece was a request for thought, but these people turned it into an attack on transgender people. For total denial of transgender men, as well as failing to think when presented with a think piece, One Million Moms get a TWIT  Award. You can read about it in LGBTQ Nation.

A man named Nathan Hogg nearly convinced Durham University in Britain that he was a graduate, who had changed genders. He managed to show them a forged document of some sort, but just before they would have issued the new degree, the woman in question happened to contact the university, inquiring about a reference for a job. For identity theft and fraud, Nathan Hogg gets a TWIT. You can find this story at Chronicle Live.

TWIT is assembled by Cecilia Barzyk with additional content and editing by Angela Gardner. Care to make a comment on this post? Login here and use the comment area below.

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Category: Transgender Community News