The Week In Trans 1/16/17

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Hari Nef

L’Oréal Paris has signed Hari Nef as its first transgender spokesperson. The first commercial in the campaign premiered during the Golden Globe award broadcast. She even has her own commercial with the tag line, “Because I’m worth it.” You can see the commercials on the Cosmopolitan website.

James Mattis, the retired general whom Donald Trump nominated to be Secretary of Defense, said at his confirmation hearing, “We open the door to all patriots who are eligible and meet the standards.” Asked specifically about LGBT members of the armed forces, General Mattis replied, “I believe right now that the policies that are in effect, unless a service chief brings something to me where there’s a problem that’s been proven, then I’m not going in with the idea that I’m going to review these and right away start rolling something back.” Dallas Voice has this story.

The new legislative year has brought so many bathroom bills that we don’t have space to list them all. In Indiana, there is an additional proposal which would have prevented transgender people from getting their correct gender on their birth certificates. Representative Cindy Kirchhofer of Indiana has said that she will not give this bill a hearing in the House Public Health Committee, which she chairs. She labeled the bill “mean-spirited” and said that it denied “the very existence of transgender people.” The author of the bill, Representative Bruce Borders, said, “This is not a philosophically driven thing. I just respect accuracy in all legal records.” This story is in The Indianapolis Star.

Janice Covington Allison

Janice Covington Allison, a trans woman, has launched a bid to become the chairperson of the North Carolina State Democratic Party. In the past, she has worked on various campaigns and has been a delegate at both state and national conventions. This story is in Q Notes.

If you have only been acquainted with The Wizard of Oz from the Judy Garland movie you may not be aware that there is a character whose gender was transformed by a magic potion. Now that there is a TV series called Emerald City based on the books the gender shifted character is appearing in the show. Since the series is an updated and darker version of Oz the gender shift is more complicated and modernized than how it was presented in the book. Learn more on the Newsbusters website. 

Rick Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson books and other works, says in a tweet that he “just turned down an invite to be honored by TX state legislature as a Texas author. If they want to honor me, stop all this nonsense.” He includes a link to a story on the ACLU’s twitter feed about Texas’s desire to pass a “bathroom bill.” This story is on CBS News.

Chinese drag performer.

China pops up in the news most weeks in stories about trade policy or concerns over their move to take over the south China sea with artificial islands topped with military bases. What you don’t hear about all that often is the LGBT community there.  China is a big, big country. So big that their estimated LGBT community is though to be 70 million people. And they spend around $300 billion a year on having fun. Part of that fun is seeing drag shows and while the drag shows used to attract more tourists, lately it’s the locals who are filling the place. Get more info from the Fortune website.

People in the U. S. drag community are beginning to notice a strange phenomenon. More and more drag fans are young females between the ages of 12 and 20. While the big audience for drag performers just a couple of decades ago was gay men in their 40s, the young female fans have started to pull ahead in the race to appreciate drag. Even though many of the young female fans are too young to actually go into a drag club and see a performance. What accounts for it? There are a few theories to be found on the Slate website.

A Junior ROTC instructor at East Lee County High School in Florida was fired last year for telling a transgender student that he will always be female and refusing to use the student’s initials instead of thier name. A court has now determined that these actions warranted a disciplinary act by the school, but that firing the instructor was going too far. This story is on News 4 Jacksonville.

Julie Bindel, a feminist who does not accept transgender people, has been invited to appear at the Working Class Movement Library’s event for LGBT History Month on February 4. Ms. Bidel has argued “that transwomen should be excluded from women-only spaces.” Many are protesting her inclusion in an event for LGBT History Month. Ms. Bindel called protestors “vile and poisonous.” Pink News has this story.

Anjaili Lama

In happier news, Anjaili Lama, a transgender model from Nepal, will appear on the catwalk in Mumbai for Lakmé Fashion Week February 1-5. She auditioned last year but did not make the cut then. Her story is in the South China Morning Post.

As the clock ticks down to the last minutes of the Obama administration, many transgender people want to get their paperwork in to try to get their legal name and gender changes started. Some are having trouble coming up with the money for these processes, but thankfully, some nonprofits have come to the aid of poorer transgender people. In King County, Washington (the home of Seattle), there was a particular non-profit with a problem: Gender Justice League (the non-profit) was not allowed to hand out cash (because of its tax-exempt status), while the county only accepted payment in cash. The county agreed to a solution: they will take checks from the Gender Justice League on behalf of their clients, and will put the check into a special fund. They then give a voucher for that amount to the person who presented the check, and the voucher can be used in place of cash. Seattle Weekly has this story.

The Justice Department is still under the direction of Loretta Lynch and her people. This week, they filed a brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, to set aside the ruling of Judge Reed O’Connor regarding transgender access to restrooms and locker rooms at schools. The Justice Department holds that the Department of Education had a valid interpretation of Title IX, and that Judge O’Connor’s ruling was overly broad. Buzzfeed has this story.

Meanwhile north of the U.S. border Justin Trudeau, heartthrob Canadian prime minister, has vowed to let trans prisoners serve their sentences in the prison that corresponds to their gender identity. Read the story on the Pink News website.

Pamela Rose

In proof that anti-transgender bias still exists, Pamela Rose, the winner of Miss Transgender England, has said that she often finds men react badly when they find out that she is transgender. They will find a reason to move away from her after they find out, and worse, some react rather violently. Pink News has this story.

Of course many people from the conservative portion of society are uncomfortable around trans people. Especially around trans women. You can find a cartoon that outlines the different types of discrimination trans women have to put up with on cartoonist Barry Deutsch’s website.

Last month, a transgender student was selected as “king” of a dance at Derby High School in Wichita. Members of the Westboro Baptist Church decided to protest. (It took them a month to get from their home in Topeka to Wichita, even though both cities are in Kansas.) As is now common, the WBC was met with counter protestors, and the police stood guard to make sure that violence did not ensue. This story is on KAKE-TV in Wichita.

Mimi after the show.

While we were paying attention to other things RuPaul’s Drag Race star Mimi Imfurst became, appropriately,  the first drag performer from the USA to perform in Cuba. Handicapped by the language barrier and backup dancers who had never heard the songs they had to dance to, Mimi performed on New Year’s Eve in Havana. Get more info from NewNowNext.

The election of Donald Trump has sparked a lot of resistance from groups who feel that he and the Republican Party will be working to take away LGBT rights. One group in Florida is planning a Trans & LBGQ Town Hall set for January 25 at 7:00 p.m. in Steve’s Diner. The diner is located at 2900 . Washington Avenue in Titusville, Florida, 32780. For more information on the organizing event contact Regina Leigh.

TWITs

Dr. Ben Carson, in his confirmation hearing for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said of LGBT-nondiscrimination policies in housing, “Of course, I would enforce all the laws of the land. Of course, I think all Americans should be protected by the law. What I have said before is I don’t think anyone should get ‘extra rights.'” So, he says that he will uphold the law and protect everyone from discrimination, but actually protecting some people amounts to giving them “extra rights.” For contradicting himself, and failing to see a contradiction, Dr. Ben Carson gets a TWIT Award. You can find this story in Metro Weekly.

Bob Marshall, the man who introduced an HB2-style bill in the Virginia House of Delegates, was asked about the economic backlash that North Carolina has experienced since passing HB2. His response was that the reports of North Carolina’s financial losses are “a back of the napkin, fake news for consumption for people like you.” Companies decide to move projects meant for North Carolina to other states, and North Carolina has no economic loss. The state loses jobs but doesn’t lose money. For calling reality “fake,” Bob Marshall gets a TWIT Award. You can read the story on the WTVR-TV website.

The BBC has created a new documentary about transgender children. The title is Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? — a question that, by its very existence, shows a lack of understanding by the producers. There are two possibilities — they will present opposing opinions, or they will only present an opinion opposing transgender children transitioning. That they do one of the two is confirmed by the fact that they feature Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who deliberately misunderstands transgender people. This article in the Guardian talks about the reaction from several activists, including Susie Green of Mermaids. This article in Gay Star News says that a mother who was interviewed for the show felt blindsided by the presence of Dr. Zucker. For giving legitimacy to a fringe participant like Dr. Zucker, the documentary’s producers and the BBC share a TWIT Award.

Dr. Kenneth Zucker has a theory regarding the rise in the number of children seeking help for gender-related issues: they’re autistic. Maybe not all, but enough to explain the rise in diagnoses. The obvious problem with this theory is that there is also a sharp rise in the number of children diagnosed with autism. The sharp rise in autism diagnoses gets explained by the fact that doctors are more familiar with the autism scale, and therefore recognize patients who are on it more readily. That same explanation is used to explain the rise in children being diagnosed as transgender. This raises the question asked by the BBC documentary’s title: Who knows best, the doctor who sees the child in a clinical setting, or some theoretician who got fired from his work? For general bad thinking, Dr. Zucker gets a TWIT. You can read Dr. Zucker’s theory in The Telegraph.

Dr. Zucker is not the only one with this theory. Dr. Susan Bradley, a former colleague of Dr. Zucker, has written an article in which she goes one step farther, accusing transgender activists of “unethically influencing” autistic children to change genders. Does she really think that mental health professionals cannot spot the difference between a transgender child and an autistic child? (Granted, some children are both transgender and autistic, so there is that category as well.) And how does she explain that the children who are being pushed to be transgender don’t seem to mind changing genders? As we saw in the case of David Reimer (the subject of the book As Nature Made Him), cisgender children don’t take well to changing genders. For general nonsense, Dr. Bradley gets a TWIT. The National Post has this article.

Some people just cannot accept that there are more than two genders or that gender can shift over time. The very idea of a child saying they feel like the opposite of their birth sex makes them go off about “child abuse” and “trans agendas.” Well, it can be difficult to wrap your head around the whole idea of trans if you don’t have trans as part of your mental processes. So we can forgive some for not getting it. But we can’t forgive someone who is on the trans spectrum and goes to work spreading lies and misinformation about the nature of the transgender experience. Walt Hyer, the “former” trans woman who returned to living as male, has published an article inspired by the cover photo of Avery Jackson on the special issue of National Geographic. Hyer pulls out the usual anti-trans arguments and says that the magazine is trying to “legitimize cross-dressing” and says “surgically created sex changes and cross-dressing boys are as fake as a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill or a cubic zirconia.” Never mind that for the majority of trans people living in their proper gender presentation creates peace of mind, to Hyer trans is only a “mass delusion.” One he failed to make work for him so he must delegitimize it for the rest of the world. Read his latest TWIT Award winning screed on the conservative Life Site News website.

A mocking movement has oozed up out of internet chat boards and taken on a social media life. The movement pretends that there is a condition called “clovergender,” purportedly what happens when a boy doesn’t develop mentally past the age of 13. They supposedly become children who remain trapped in adult bodies. And they only are attracted to children. It’s a hoax condition that mocks both trans and gay people and links them to pedophilia. Martin Shkrelli, the pharma CEO who raised the price of a necessary AIDS medication astronomically is one of the people who has been spreading the idea of clovergender on social media. To the creators of the hoax and to Shkrelli we present a large TWIT Award. Read about it in the Advocate.

TWIT is edited by Angela Gardner who also supplied additional content.

Tags: Amjaili Lama, clovergender, Emerald City, Hari Nef, James Mattis, Janice Covington Allison, Mimi Imfurst, news, Oz, Pammy Rose, Rick Riordan, Transgender, TWIT, Walt Hyer, Zucker

Category: Transgender Community News