The Week In Trans 11/5/18

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Caitlyn Jenner

Caitlyn Jenner has established the Caitlyn Jenner Foundation which is helping groups working for the transgender community. Last week she was in Phoenix, Arizona to hand a $60,000 check to the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS, one of four groups her foundation has given grants to. Learn more about the story from azcentral.com.

Last week a protest over housing assignments of trans women held in the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania resulted in 11 arrests. Around 50 protestors took over the street outside the jail in Pittsburgh and those arrested were charged with blocking a city street. The protest was sparked by the jail’s practice of housing trans women with male prisoners. Learn more from Penn Live.

Jessica Lynn

Jessica Lynn, a trans activist and a Kinsey Institute Global Ambassador and Stonewall School Role Model, will speak on issues important to  transgender people at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs on November 12. Learn more from the Colorado Springs Independent.

If you are a trans woman, either full or part time, you would probably like to have a voice that matches your feminine image. Over the past few years as more trans women came out in public there have been more and more voice coaches offering lessons on how to achieve a voice that you are happy with. You can even get voice coaching over the phone. Read about one such service on the Qnotes website.

TransLatin@ Coalition unfurled a banner at the final game of the World Series which read, “Trans people deserve to live.” The banner was unfurled from the upper deck during the fifth inning and quickly removed, as it blocked the view of the field for those below it. Pictures were taken nonetheless. SBNation has this story.

Brianna Titone

Brianna Titone is seeking election to represent House District 27 in Jefferson County, and is hoping to make history as the first openly transgender person to hold state office in Colorado. She hails from the town of Arvada which has had transgender people elected to the city council back in the 1990s. Learn more about the story from the Highland Ranch Herald.

The Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia is a funder that supports women and trans artists. In 2016 they hired a nonbinary person to run a project to create “trans inclusion documents,” a resource guide for the foundation’s panelists to use before making decisions about Leeway grants. The guide was completed and is now titled TRANSforming Inclusion. The project director hope that this guide will serve other organizations that seek to be trans inclusive. Learn more from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The day after the pro-transgender banner appeared at the World Series, a giant transgender pride flag was unfurled at the Lincoln Memorial by the National Center for Transgender Equality. This story comes from The Hill.

Conway

Lynn Conway, professor emerita of electrical engineering and computer science, and an internationally recognized transgender advocate will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree and deliver the commencement address at 2 p.m. Dec. 16 at Crisler Center Winter Commencement 2018 on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. Thanks to Kristina Mayhem for pointing out the story in The University Record.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was invited to speak to The Federalist Society in Boston. His speech was interrupted by a transgender protester who held a transgender pride flag with the words “not erased” on it. Some in the crowd also interrupted the Attorney General to shout verses from the Bible and to call on him to repent. The calls for repentance were odd, as the theme of his talk was “religious liberty.” The Huffington Post brings us this story.

ABC News reports that the attempts to redefine the word “sex” have caused a lot of concern among transgender people and among health professionals. They start their story with the example of a trans man who is scheduling top surgery that he had not previously wanted.

ABC News also ran a story on the reaction of various possible 2020 presidential candidates to the “sex” memo.

Liz Lyke

Two trans women have already won election in Alaska, where some local elections are held early. Liz Lyke won election to the North Star Borough assembly in Fairbanks, while Kathy Ottersten was elected to the Fairbanks City Council. Gwendolyn Smith of LGBTQ Nation has more.

The Human Rights Campaign and other LGBTQ advocates have filed Freedom Of Information Requests, attempting to determine the exact wording of the memo which would define “sex,” as well as who had input on this and related things. Samantha Allen of the Daily Beast says that so far, they aren’t getting much information.

Calls to Trans Lifeline, the suicide prevention phone line for transgender people, quadrupled in the days after The New York Times reported on the memo that tries to redefine “sex.” This got the attention of The Advocate.

Every year for the past 32 years Washington, D.C. has hosted the 17th Street High Heel Race. What started as a few dudes putting on high heels and running for four blocks has grown over the years into an extravaganza of drag costuming. Everything from a drag Theresa May to the Wicked Witch of the West and a 20-year-old man who never wore heels before took a stroll and then a run down the streets of D.C. Take a look at the costuming in 26 photos on the NBC 4 website.

So far, 56 companies have signed onto an open letter stating that these companies support legal protections for transgender workers. The companies say that diversity and inclusiveness are good things. Out And Equal has this letter.

We have seen various articles telling us that the Trump administration’s proposed definition of “sex” is simplistic and will not work. A particularly good article with specifics on some intersex conditions appears in Scientific American. It was written by Dr. Kristina R. Olson, who studies transgender youth, and Dr. Sheri Berenbaum, who studies neurological aspects of gender.

Bobbi, one of the participants.

A social worker and a photographer got together in St. Louis and began to explore the experience of aging for trans people, and for trans women who had transitioned later in life. They have published their work as a book that features over 65 portraits of older trans people. It is titled To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults. Thanks for Jamie Roberts for telling us about the story in The Washington Post.

Transgender anti-discrimination is on the ballot in Massachusetts this week. A nonbinary 15-year-old has been hitting the campaign trail for the measure. You can read about it in Into More.

Remember that transgender student who was left unprotected during a drill that practiced what to do in the event of an active shooter? Her mother talked about her reaction to both the Trump administration’s proposed definition of “sex” and that active shooter drill in an article she wrote for Refinery 29.

The ACLU has released a series of three short films about transgender people. One looks at seven-year-old Kai Shappley and her problems getting her school to accept her gender. Another looks at a transgender woman of color and her problems with the law. The third looks at a trans woman who transitioned during her career and her problems with her job. Into More has a story on these videos.

Tra’Vez Perry

A transgender high school student was arrested and charged with assault as a result of a fight in school. Tra’Vez Perry admits that it was wrong to resort to violence, but she also claims that she was the victim of weeks of bullying by her fellow students. KTRK-TV Houston has this story.

Quartz has an interview with Chris Mosier, who talks about what being a man is, and how he got a place on the U.S. mens’ duathlon team, making him the first transgender athlete on a U.S. Olympic team.

Owl and Fox Fisher have been spearheading a media project called My Genderation. As a part of this project, they have made a documentary in which 70-year-old Josie talks with 11-year-old Poppy, discussing how different it was to grow up transgender decades ago. Pink News has this story.

In The Conversation, Dr. Antonis Rokas of Vanderbilt University discusses how mushrooms have thousands of sexes.

(L.-R.) Zuri Jones, Lilly Curran and Fiana McKillop.

The Mirror has a story about three friends in Texas who, at age 11, are transitioning together and supporting each other during their transitions.

TWITs

The Wellington Sexual Abuse HELP group in New Zealand invited Sally Dellow, a scientist and a transgender woman, to join a six-member panel for a discussion. She is also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, so she has some credentials for being invited. Nonetheless, anti-transgender activists from around the world heard about her inclusion on this panel and wrote some astounding, negative comments. The HELP group had to get four people working on deleting overly-negative, nasty comments. For a huge campaign of hate, these anti-transgender activists get a TWIT. Pink News has this story.

The Advocate ran down the many ways that the Alliance Defending Freedom have attacked transgender people, and also how the ADF has now made inroads into the Trump administration. The organization has claimed that if a transgender fourth-grader was treated like any other little boy, this would “jeopardize” the other students. This kind of stupid cruelty wins the ADF a TWIT Award.

The Cellar Door bookstore in Riverside, California had a Drag Queen Story Time for children recently. The reading was interrupted when a woman in the audience was told to stop recording the proceedings on her cell phone. Rather than stop the woman, Genevieve Peters, began a rant about the “homosexual agenda” which frightened the children and resulted in her removal by the police. For spoiling the children’s day and exposing them to raw hate we award Peters a large TWIT.

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

Tags: Brianna Titone, Caitlyn Jenner, Chris Mosier, featured, High Heel Race, Jessica Lynn, Kathy Ottersten, Liz Lyke, Lynn Conway, news, Tra'Vez Perry, Transgender, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News