The Week In Trans 11/18/19

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Sasha Velour

One of the biggest fans of the drag scene is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She got to meet Sasha Velour, and Out.com notes the mutual excitement. 

The month of November is Transgender Awareness Month, and within that month, the week of November 13-19 is Transgender Awareness Week. CNN has a story about Transgender Awareness Week and about what is happening to transgender people these days.

More than half of the staff of the National Center for Transgender Equality decided to take a buyout offered by management. The organization says that it is committed to continuing with “new protocols,” but departing staff members say that the new protocols are so vague that they don’t know what they are signing up for. There was already tension in the organization, with staffers walking out for the day on August 16, exactly as big news was breaking. You can read about this in NewNowNext. (Thanks to contributor Alyssa Washington for bringing this story to us.)

Massachusetts has become the sixteenth state to offer a non-binary gender marker on state ID cards and driver’s licenses. This was an initiative that staff of the National Center for Transgender Equality worked on with many states. Out.com has this story.

Stacy Laughton

Back in 2011, Stacey Laughton won election to New Hampshire’s state legislature, but was refused a seat because of unpaid restitution. This year, she was elected to a seat on the Nashua Board of Selectmen. She was a write-in candidate. This story comes from The New Hampshire Union-Leader.

In keeping with the spirit of transgender awareness as well as Veterans Day, retired Air Force Major Dana Delgado writes in Time magazine about how the ban on transgender people in the military affected him personally.

Last week, Rhode Island passed a bill to restore veterans benefits to people who were forced out of the military because of their sexual orientation or gender identity (or both). This week, New York passed similar legislation. The Advocate has this story.

School District 211 in suburban Chicago has been in the news from time to time for its treatment of transgender students. They were sued for not allowing transgender students access to the restroom which matches their gender identity, and when they were told that transgender students should have access to the locker room, they required transgender students to use the newly-installed privacy stalls. This week, the board voted 5-2 to grant transgender students unlimited access to the locker room which matches their gender identity. You can read about this in The Daily Herald.

Alverno College is a Catholic college for women in Milwaukee. Its first transgender student, Victoria Garcia, is finishing up her first semester, and reflected on the experience for Fox 6 News.

Xoai Pham

Teen Vogue has a piece in which transgender teenager Xoai Pham talks about her experiences of femininity as a transgender woman.

Team Trans is a hockey team full of trans players who play Boston Pride, a team full of LGBTQ+ players. Out magazine has this story.

Playing sports also helped Sammi Walker feel normal again, after being mistreated for a gender transition. She joined an LGBTQ+ football team (soccer, to North Americans), and is so glad she did. Her story appears in BBC Sport.

A new dating app called Butterfly is aimed specifically at transgender people. It emphasizes safety, data privacy, and serious relationships. It attempts to minimize fetishization. Paper magazine has this story.

We told you last week that a court struck down the proposed rule which would protect health care workers who raise religious objections to dealing with some patients. A second court also struck down that rule. Moreover, though, it turns out that few health care professionals wanted to use this rule. It seems that the Department of Health and Human Services has been padding the actual number of requests for such a rule. Most of the complaints dealt with vaccines, which are not covered by the religious-objection rule, according to research by NPR.

The American Psychological Association has come out with a new rule that requires the use of the singular “they” in papers when the gender identity of a person is unknown or unimportant. This grammatical point gives more credence to the singular “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Abby Stein

Abby Stein was once an ultra-Orthodox rabbi. Today, she is a transgender woman, and has broken with the Jewish community she used to serve. Canadian Jewish News has a story about her new book, Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman.

The Transgender Health and Wellness Center does more than just take care of health issues for transgender people. It also helps them to relocate and to get out of other problems. Some even find work through the center. WCPO-TV has the story of this place in the Southern California desert.

A blog post in Psychology Today argues for a nation-wide ban on conversion therapy for transgender people. As the post starts out, transgender youth want us to know that they don’t have a mental health problem, but the people who oppose transgender youth have a mental health problem.

Jayne Ozanne, a British LGBTQ advocate, found that even Pope Francis is concerned about conversion therapy, according to LGBTQ Nation. (Pope Francis has been known to say some supportive things to both LGBTQ advocates and anti-LGBTQ activists.)

The FBI has released new statistics on hate crimes. Overall, they show a slight decrease, but hate crimes against transgender people are on the rise. While some of the increase may be due to better reporting by police departments, there is no doubt that the number of incidents is increasing. The Los Angeles Times has this story.

A long piece at Vox takes a look at the possible repercussions from the legal battle over the custodianship of a 7-year-old child in Texas who was diagnosed as transgender, but whose father refuses to accept that diagnosis (at least for the present).

Vice and The Texas Standard also have stories about the case of Jeffrey Younger v. Dr. Anne Georgulas.

Rebekah Bruesehoff

Rebekah Bruesehoff is a rather loud transgender child. She doesn’t mind letting others know that she’s transgender, and that she’s not a threat to those around her. Her parents let her be this loud and visible. Her mother recently posted on social media how delighted she was to find that her husband’s insurance covers her daughter’s puberty blockers. Her husband is a Lutheran pastor. The Blaze has a surprisingly accepting story about this.

In The Brainerd Dispatch, the Rev. Leslie Moughty of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Brainerd tells us that all humans are created in God’s image, including transgender people.

Carmen Liu’s underwear designed for transgender women caught the attention of Forbes magazine this week.

A Dunkin’ Donuts in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is being sued by a former employee who says that customers and management treated her with disrespect. She says that she received insults, that customers would deliberately go to another cashier, and when she complained, she was told that she could quit. Lehigh Valley Live has this story.

Sprite has commercials for Pride in Argentina, which depict mothers helping their transgender teens to present in the gender with which they identify. You can read about it at Out.com.

In the United States, we have the Jerry Springer Show. In Britain, the Jeremy Kyle Show was similar in some ways. Guests would confess to various things, and the host would talk to them from a position of moral superiority. Well, one guest wants to sue the host, saying that the show almost destroyed his marriage–because the staff had him say that he had an affair with transgender lottery winner Melissa Ede. The thing is, his marriage nearly ended, because his wife believed that he did indeed have such an affair. You can read about this in Metro.

Kim Petras

Kim Petras’s face is on four electronic billboards in Topeka, Kansas. That may not sound like much, but the four billboards are all pointed at the Westboro Baptist Church. A source tells TMZ that the placement is deliberate.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced that Ricky Gervais will again host the Golden Globes, despite the fact that he has gotten in trouble for various nasty jokes (which had the added problem that they just weren’t funny), including several about transgender people. Having been criticized for such jokes, he went out of his way to insert more in a future hosting appearance, even though the jokes were not related to anything else in the show. Out magazine has this story.

South Park aired an episode that deals with transgender athletes, and it checks off the usual boxes. It includes the idea of the super-competitive athlete who competes against women only a few weeks after starting a gender transition. It could be seen as making fun of transphobes, but it never does anything which makes it obvious which side it is on. As a result, it is seen as transphobic. You can read a review in The Independent.

Kathleen Turner has said that, as a cisgender woman, she would not play the part of Helena Handbasket, the father of Chandler in the television series Friends. She told Andy Cohen, “[T]here would be real people able to do it,” which presumably is a reference to transgender actors. It’s nice that she is aware of the controversy and wants to avoid it, but the real problem is that the writers never decided whether the character was a drag queen or a transgender woman, or perhaps a drag queen who came to realize she’s transgender. It seemed that the character’s backstory changed to fit the desire of the particular script. NewNowNext covered this story.

Cèline Dion released a new album, and to celebrate, she performed karaoke with some drag queens who perform as Cèline Dion. This happened at Lips Drag Queen Show Palace Restaurant and Bar in New York City, and the story appears in Pink News.

Puerto Rico’s Senate is currently considering a bill which, among other things, would prevent transgender people from updating their gender markers and weaken nondiscrimination laws. But, the new bill is being opposed by one of the most important citizens, Ricky Martin. You can read about this bit of la vida loca in Out magazine.

DONTNOD Entertainment has created a video game, called Tell Me Why, in which one of the main characters is transgender. The Hollywood Reporter has this story.

Mason Caminiti in Man Made.

CNN has a review of the film Man Made, about trans men who are also body builders.

Although the child who was the subject of the first ‘gender reveal” party turned out to be less feminine than the gender reveal indicated, people still keep trying to outdo each other in gender reveals. This week, a plane that has just dumped 350 gallons of pink water in a reveal stunt crashed. Fortunately, no one was injured–this time. This story appeared in LGBTQ Nation.

A gas station in Russia announced some free gas for any customer who came wearing a bikini. They didn’t expect men to show up wearing bikinis — but they did. Many of them also wore high heels. Bored Panda carries this story.

Great Britain has an election coming up, and seven of the candidates running are transgender or non-binary. Pink News has profiles of them.

Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain, said that reform of the Gender Recognition Act “can’t wait,” and that if the party wins, they will make it an immediate priority. This story appears in Pink News.

Sabreena Lachlainn of Australia wants to be the first transgender person to sail solo around the world. Her story appears in Q News.

Topsie Redfern

A drag queen named Topsie Redfern was assaulted and mugged in London, but she was right back performing the next day. This story can be found in LGBTQ Nation. A world of thanks to Alyssa Washington for alerting us to this story.

The Armenian Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports financed a documentary about Meline Duluzian, who was a member of Armenia’s women’s weightlifting team. Since Duluzian has come out as a transgender man and left the country, political opponents accuse the ministry and the Prime Minister of undermining family values. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian came out this week in support of the minister who approved the documentary, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Sweden has awarded $177,000 to develop “creative fairy tales” performed to children in the Among Dragons and Drag Queens project. Out.com has this story.

Hillary Clinton continues to side with the TERFs. In an interview with the BBC, she said, “I do think there is a legitimate concern about women’s lived experience and the importance of recognizing that, and also the importance of recognizing the self-identification [of transgender individuals]. This is all relatively new. People are still trying to find the language for it.” She seems to be oblivious of how her comments on transgender people are being used by conservative websites. LGBTQ Nation has this story. Many thanks to Alyssa Washington for contributing a link to this story.

While Hillary Clinton urges sensitivity to women who are afraid of transgender women in the lady’s room, Donald Trump Jr. says that he likes the idea of one big restroom for everybody. “We’re real estate people. If I don’t have to build dual bathrooms, I could save a lot of money.” He also said that “no one cares” which restroom transgender people use. (Apparently, some people spend a lot of time and energy talking about something that they don’t care about.) You can read about this in Out.com.

As a part of Transgender Awareness Week, CNN posted a list of transgender people who made history this year.

TWITs

The “diverse classroom libraries” installed in elementary and high schools across the Northern Virginia school district were intended to expose students to stories about young people of different cultures, races, religions and those who were members of the LGBTQ community. Of course what some find to be diversity others look on as sin. Angry parents have spoken out at school board meetings demanding that “sexually explicit” books be removed. Perhaps if the parents read the books they would be less quick to condemn them. A TWIT Award is issued to the Northern Virginia parents. Thanks to Jamie Roberts for the story tip. Learn more in The Washington Post.

A show on Japanese television outed a transgender woman. The show has since apologized, and it says that it didn’t mean to do anything wrong, but they said quite clearly that they were going to reveal this person’s secret, so obviously, they knew that she had not let everyone know that she is transgender. For pulling this stunt when they should have known better, Shumatsu Chigumaya Kazoku gets a TWIT Award. Pink News has this story.

The Utah Department of Motor Vehicles told a transgender woman to remove her make-up, or they would not take her picture for her driver’s license. Given that the point of the photo is to have an accurate representation of the individual to whom the license is issued, forcing the person to remove make-up would defeat the purpose of taking a photo. For defeating the supposed goal of the photo, the Utah Department of Motor Vehicles gets a TWIT. This story comes from The Salt Lake Tribune.

Piers Morgan, who has been called out by pretty much everyone with any knowledge of gender issues for his lack of understanding, now claims to know more than Munroe Bergdorf. He referred to a valid point acknowledged by scholars as “gobbledygook,” which is another way of saying, “I disagree with what you said, but cannot refute it with logic.” He then said, “I say that with great respect, as a non-conforming 2-spirit penguin,” which translates to, “my soul is so diseased that I think it is morally acceptable to make fun of people because I do not accept what they say.” That wins Piers another TWIT Award. Pink News has this story. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for calling this story to our attention.

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