The Week In Trans 12/11/17

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Lea T as Venus.

Elle Brazil exploits classic art in its last issue for 2017 by recreating five famous works of art and inserting modern day celebs into the paintings. Lea T, well known as a transgender model on the international scene, replaces Venus in the recreation of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus that graces the cover of the issue. See the full cover and learn more from the Daily Mail.

The Pentagon continues to press ahead in the hope of meeting the deadline to open the enlistment process to transgender people by the January 1 deadline. Military Times reports that a panel set up by the Pentagon to advise the Secretary of Defense on the matter of transgender people in the military will submit its report by the end of December. Meanwhile, lawyers from the Justice Department filed an appeal of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s stay on the ban of transgender people in the military. The appeal argues, “Compelling the military to implement a new accessions policy while it is simultaneously completing a comprehensive study of military service by transgender individuals that may soon result in the adoption of different accessions standards would waste significant military resources and sow unnecessary confusion among service members and applicants.” Usually, though, the studies would be completed before the new policy is announced. Politico has a story on the appeal.

TGF reader Jamie Roberts let us know about more on the Pentagon’s plan to accept transgender recruits in a story in The Washington Post.

Alexandra Chandler

Alexandra Chandler is a former Pentagon intelligence analyst and she is running for Congress to represent the 3rd district of Massachusetts. In a recent interview she talks with NPR about her candidacy and gives her reaction to President Trump’s trans military ban. Read or listen to the interview on the NPR website.

A teenager in Ohio has brought a suit against his parents. The teen wants to transition to male, but the teen’s parents are insisting on Christian-based therapy which attempts to talk the child out of transitioning. The teen is in the custody of the Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services, awaiting the decision of the judge. An AP story can be found at Edge Media.

The U.S. territory of Guam recently voted down a bill which would have prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. The arguments in opposition to the bill were the usual stale bits about restroom molestation and the like. Pacific News talked with local transgender activist Scarlett Castro-Dixon about the defeat of the bill.

Star My’shay Bennett

Jamie Roberts found an article in The Washington Post that profiles a trans woman who completely changed her life by going from living as a male gang member who constantly was in trouble with the law to a woman who owns and operates a clothing store and advocates for trans people. The article is available on The Post’s website.

La Federation des femmes du Quebec, a superstructure of feminist organizations, elected Gabrielle Bouchard, a transgender woman, as its president. Internal debates continue as to whether a transgender woman should be president of such the organization, but even more criticism seems to be coming from outside the organization. The Canadian Press’s story can be found on Canoe.

Leo Bancroft is a seminarian at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary after getting a master’s degree at the Jesuit School of Theology, both schools in Berkeley, California. He is also a trans man and the subject of a profile in the Advocate.

Nika Lomazzo

The success of trans candidates running in the recent election has been inspiring to many in the trans community. One such person is 22-year-old Nika Lomazzo. She is challenging Rep. John Lombardi for his seat representing District 8 in the Rhode Island General Assembly. Learn more about her and her candidacy on the Providence Journal website.

Reports of Jeffrey Tambor leaving Transparent may be premature. On November 19, he said, “I don’t see how I can return to Transparent.” However, he did not say that he would not return, and neither the producers of the show nor Amazon Studios said that he was fired. Now, a representative for the actor is saying that he could return for the show’s fifth season. You can find more in The Hollywood Reporter.

Transgender people are being seen more on television shows, and not just as victims, criminals, or guests of Jerry Springer and Maury Povich. There are even some cases where transgender actors are asked to perform the part of a transgender character. Neal Justin of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote about this. She finally decided to speak out about the issue.

Kat Blaque, tossed off Tinder.

The dating app Tinder is apparently swiping left on trans people. It seems the app keeps deleting trans people from their database. Trans users find themselves missing from the app with no reason given so they tend to think the fact that they were out as trans could be why they have been removed. Read more on the story from Pink News.

The Constitutional Court in Turkey has declared that transgender people can change their legal gender without getting sterilized. While they still require a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” they no longer require surgery. Gay Star News has this story.

New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard has won two silver medals at the World Championships in Anaheim, California. She has received quite a few complaints that she does not belong on a woman’s weightlifting team, she meets all the requirements of the Olympics, and that’s good enough for her to qualify for the World Championships. Although she has had a habit of not addressing her critics publicly, she did finally agree to say a few words

Sasha Alister Patterson, a transgender woman and HIV activist in Trinidad and Tobago, was murdered this week. She was shot to death in a manner consistent with a pattern of murders in the area. Her body was found in a landfill. Gay Star news has more on this.

Artist known as Hungry.

Performers who use drag in their art have been around for ages but lately some performers are beginning to transcend the traditional boundaries of drag. Both in live shows and on social media platforms people are using makeup and prosthesis to redefine their existence by not just transforming from one gender to another but shifting into an alien species. Learn more about this trend in The New York Times.

Victor Madrigal-Borloz has been named the new United Nations Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. He is the second person to hold that position in the U.N. Human Rights Council, replacing Vitit Muntarbhorn, who is stepping down for reasons of health. This story comes from Metro Weekly.

We all know that misgendering hurts, yet we also all know that some people will do it. Deliberate misgendering says more about the person doing it than it does about the person being misgendered. Samantha Allen wrote about why deliberate misgendering is so bad in the Daily Beast.

Clair Farley

The mayor of San Francisco has appointed Clair Farley as the Mayor’s Senior Advisor on Transgender Initiatives. Ms. Farley who has been a leader in the city on LGBTQ issues will advise the Mayor of those issues and lead the city’s efforts to address issues of transgender policy in all city departments. Learn more on the appointment from the San Francisco website.

Julian Eltinge

San Francisco is known as a city that has always enjoyed a good female impersonator. But were you aware that drag performers first appeared there in the 1800s? We all know of Finocchio’s nightclub which featured female impersonators exclusively from the time it opened in 1936 but what of those early beauties who trod upon the stages of the City by the Bay? Read up on some drag history in the San Francisco Bay Times.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a delayed obituary for Dr. Richard Ball. He was a psychiatrist who had an interest in transgender people as well as in the use of medication to help mental health issues.

TWITs

In Britain, there is a service which provides drag queens to libraries and schools to read stories. While the drag queens do have some children’s books with LGBT themes that they can read, they are willing to read whatever the library or school desires. When word of this got to the Daily Mail, they wrote a most unflattering story about it. They claim that the program asks children to “question their gender,” even though the drag queens often read something like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The readers are drag queens — they play over-the-top characters. The readers are not being themselves, a point which the Daily Mail seems to have missed. For playing on the fear of the unknown, the Daily Mail gets another TWIT Award.

We mentioned above that Gabrielle Bouchard was elected the president of Federation des Femmes du Quebec, and we mentioned that there was some criticism of this from outside the organization. We also mentioned deliberate misgendering. Both of those come together in the reporting of this by LifeSiteNews. Indeed, they went so far as to put use scare quotes (single quotes to make it seem more normal or something) in the headline, describing Ms. Bouchard as “a ‘transgender’ male.” They would feel offended by someone who used scare quotes around the word “Christian” in describing them, even though they are further removed from the Jesus of the Gospels than a transgender female is from a cisgender female. For rudeness, as well as for having more slant than fact, LifeSiteNews gets a TWIT. The story can be found here.

A teacher in England who identifies as a Christian is taking the school that suspended him for calling a trans boy a “girl” to a tribunal. First he claimed that it was a mistake that happened one time and he had apologized to the boy. Then he said that he thought that being made to treat someone who was born female as a male was a breach of his human rights. It is this kind of upside down logic that gets people like Joshua Sutcliffe a TWIT Award. The student identifies as a male. Mr. Sutcliffe identifies as a Christain. Which one is really oppressing the other? Read the story in The Sun.

A move by the legislature of Pennsylvania that was aimed at stopping Medicare and CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, from paying for gender confirmation surgery and other trans related services was stopped from going to a vote. That’s the good news — but the roadblock that caused Republican Rep. Jesse Topper, the sponsor of House Bill 1933, to pull the bill was learning that the legislature’s medical plans all covered gender confirmation surgery and other trans services for their families. Republicans quickly realized that they couldn’t keep a benefit they were trying to deny to citizens. What wins them the TWIT Award though is that Topper and others are now hard at work trying to ban state funds from being used for any trans services, even by their own families. Learn more on the Penn Live website.

TWIT is compiled by Cecilia Barzyk with additional stories and editing by Angela Gardner.

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Tags: Alexandra Chandler, Clair Farley, featured, Gabrielle Bouchard, Jeffrey Tambor, Julian Eltinge, Lea T, news, Transgender, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News