The Week In Trans 4/16/18

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Marvia Malik

Pakistani news anchor Marvia Malik made the news agains last week for being the first transgender news anchor in that country. By the age of 21 Ms. Malik worked her way up from being a makeup artist to a sought after fashion model and then a news presenter for Kohenoor News channel in Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s eastern province of Punjab. Learn more about her from The Business Times.

NCLR and GLAD have asked U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to force the White House to turn over emails which would show communications with the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation regarding the ban on transgender people in the military. While discovery of such emails might make it more obvious that the ban does not fill an “exceedingly persuasive justification,” the matter of who helped create the policy is less important than what is in the policy. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has said that he will defend the ban on transgender people in the military, but he told the Armed Services Committee that he will follow the decision of the courts. There was speculation that Secretary Mattis might sign off on the policy but not defend it. This report comes to us from Stars And Stripes.

Meanwhile, on Friday a federal court in Seattle ruled that President Trump’s “new” ban on transgender people in the military which he issued last month was not really new. It was just the same as the first ban his administration issued — and was therefore still unconstitutional. The case will go forward and trans advocates want the ugliness of the ban to be exposed in court and fully documented. Learn more at Think Progress.

Laila Ireland

A trans woman military veteran will appear in a documentary film titled Transmilitary that is set for release later this year. Laila Ireland and her husband were featured in a New York Times op-ed in 2015. Now they work to educate the public about the reasons trans people want to serve in the military and why they should not be barred from service. Learn more from the Kansas State student paper The Collegian.

The National Coalition for Men is suing over the Military Selective Service Act, saying that having males sign up for a potential draft while females are exempt is a form of sex discrimination. The lawsuit prompted this article in LGBT Nation, which mentions that trans women do have to sign up for the Selective Service but trans men do not.

The Department of Justice is exploring the possibility of removing questions about sexual orientation and gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The survey asks randomly-selected households about the frequency of crimes. Mother Jones makes the case that by eliminating these questions, the Department of Justice is turning a blind eye towards the cause of many crimes, especially violent crimes.

Bomer in character.

The film Anything, produced by Mark Ruffalo and starring cisgender actor Matt Bomer as a transgender sex worker, is scheduled for release in May. It has aroused the ire of trans activists who are upset that a cisgender actor is playing a transgender role. Ruffalo has said that he recommended Bomer for the role after being very impressed with his acting while working with him on the film The Normal Heart. Keep up with the conflict in Pink News.

The Houston Police Department is training its officers to “treat people the way they want to be treated,” including transgender people. Texas has led the nation in hate-related homicides involving LGBTQ people last year, and this is how the Houston Police Department is responding. The Houston Chronicle points out that this announcement was timed to recognize Crime Victims’ Rights Week.

Trans runner Amelia Gapin.

The Boston Marathon will be held today, April 16. Transgender runners are allowed to run in the gender in which they qualified, so a trans woman who ran a qualifying marathon in which she registered as female may run as a female. Runners World points out that runners still have to show ID to run in the Boston Marathon. The Boston Herald found that the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon supports transgender runners qualifying in their preferred gender. This came to light when Canadian Running magazine profiled three transgender women who will run in the race as women; the Boston Athletic Association says that five transgender women will run this year.

An attack on a transgender woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, was caught on video. The video has been seen by quite a few people on the Internet. The Charlotte Observer tells us that Jayla Ware has been released from the hospital, after being treated for various injuries including a broken jaw.

An Op-ed in The New York Times by Nathaniel Frank reveals the What We Know Project, a research initiative at Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality, which correlated peer-reviewed studies on transgender people found 56 studies which met their criteria. Of those studies, 52 showed positive effects from transition, and the other four showed mixed or unclear results. That means no peer-review study showed worse results from transitioning than from not transitioning. They also found that regrets about transitioning were very small indeed. Think Progress also wrote about the findings of this composite of studies.

Transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard withdrew from the Commonwealth Games in Australia when she hurt a ligament in her left elbow. She says that the injury could mark the end of her career.

Tiffany Abreu

Tiffany Abreu will compete in Brazil’s top women’s volleyball league again this year. Volei Bauru, her club, has extended her contract for another season, according to the AP story in the Washington Post.

Buzzfeed ran a story this week about the Transgender Boxing Collective, which meets in Manhattan.

In a story which needs more explanation, the Michigan Supreme Court this week reinstated a case in which a woman in Midland sued Planet Fitness after they cancelled her membership when she complained about a transgender woman in the changing room. It is unclear why the case was reinstated, although the court did mention the Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status, or marital status.” (Gender identity and sexual orientation are not specifically mentioned, but religion is.) This story comes from M-Live.

Stock photo model Dani James.

When websites and newspapers need a photo to illustrate a story but don’t have any photos shot at the time the story occurred they turn to stock photos. These are photos taken of models portraying everyday people in all sorts of everyday situations. Now when publications need stock photos of transgender people they will have some available since a British photographer has taken a series of photos of trans women in everyday settings. Learn more from the Mashable website.

The TransYouth Project, the first large-scale national study of transgender children, is about to expand its scope with a five year, $1 million grant which was awarded last week. The grant comes from the National Science Foundation and was awarded to University of Washington psychologist Kristina Olson who is the director of the TransYouth Project. Learn more from CTV News.

Uppingham lads sporting their skirts.

Uppingham School in Britain, once an all-boys school but now an expensive co-ed school, has joined the many schools which will allow any child to wear either a uniform with ta skirt or the uniform with pants. One alumnus, who is now a doctor who appears on television, says that he would have worn the skirt mostly as a sign of rebellion, but that assumes that his parents would buy him the skirt. This story comes from The Express.

A group called A Woman’s Place U.K. which advocates for preservation of “women only spaces” was going to have a meeting at a hotel in the Mercure Hotel in Cardiff, Wales, but the hotel cancelled the group’s room reservation. The group moved the meeting to an undisclosed location, but Pride Cymru and Wales Equality Alliance held a protest. The BBC covered this story.

Nikolle Contreras

A caravan of people trying to escape Honduras (and other countries in Central America) for the United States has been held in Mexico. Among those in this caravan are a bus full of transgender people, including Nikolle Contreras, who agreed to talk with a reporter from CNN.

Recently, some news sources made much of the fact that a court in Cincinnati sided with the grandparents of a transgender child, who were willing to let the child get medical treatment for gender dysphoria, despite the parents’ objections to that medical treatment. Some sources made the case out to be about custody, even though the parents were not asking for a return of custody. The Arizona Republic tells of court cases in which divorced parents fight over whether a child should be allowed to transition genders, and finds that usually the courts have sided with the parent who is opposed gender transition. (The study on such cases is getting old, and may be missing recent trends.)

Karen Topham

Karen Topham transitioned in 1998 and returned to her teaching job at Lake Forest High School. This gave her the title of the first out transgender teacher in the United States. She retired from teaching two years ago, but still gives talks about her experiences. In connection with one such talk, she gave an interview to the Kankakee Daily Journal.

TWITs

The story of transgender women registering for the Boston Marathon as women could be expected to get the usual treatment from the conservative press, and OneNewsNow and LifeSite each posted an article which was unsurprisingly short on medical opinion. The headline in OneNewsNow mentions Biology 101, despite the fact that the 101 suffix indicates a college-level course, and at that level, they do note that intersex people exist. For ignoring facts, these people get TWIT Awards.

Jamie Shupe, the first American to get a gender-neutral status approved by a court, wrote a piece in The Federalist recommending that people not transition while in the military. Sadly, Jamie starts out with this observation: “Doctors who treat gender dysphoria in children harbor a dirty secret: to achieve “best cosmetic results” during gender transitions, the treatment must begin before their patients reach puberty.” While that is true, it leaves the impression that doctors recommend transitioning early for cosmetic reasons. Actually, early transition is recommended for mental health reasons; many studies have shown that mental health outcomes are significantly better for patients who transition early. Sadly, Jamie goes on from there to malign the Rand Study for not looking into whether “hormones or surgeries actually cure or even alleviate gender dysphoria.” That was covered in medical studies — the ones that the What We Know Project brought together. For twisting reality, Jamie Shupe gets a TWIT.

Also in The Federalist, Nathaniel Blake writes about “How to respond with reason and compassion to transgender bullies.” Unfortunately, his idea of “reason” is to ignore peer-reviewed studies when he disagrees with their findings, and as for “compassion,” in the words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” For not realizing how far he is from the two things he claims to be advocating, Nathaniel Blake gets a TWIT Award.

Among the events happening around the Diocese of Providence is a talk entitled, Switching Sexes? The Transgender Agenda. It can be argued that the question in the title indicates that the person giving the talk does not understand the topic; a transgender person switches genders, and about five minutes in some chat rooms would tell you that transgender people are far too splintered to ever agree on an agenda. The fact that the speaker is Dr. Michelle Cretella, the president of the American College of Pediatricians (the splinter group with about 1% of the membership of the American Academy of Pediatrics) is enough to signal that this is not going to be a fair examination of gender dysphoria. But, if you still did not get the hint, the announcement says, “Last year, the State of Rhode Island made it illegal for a licensed medical professional to counsel a child away from the desire to change his/her gender identity, yet it remains legal to inject that same child with hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones.” The first half refers to a ban on “reparitive therapy” (a.k.a. conversion therapy), a law which was of questionable need as licensed medical professionals know that such techniques do not work, and only cause more psychological harm. For hosting a talk of biased misinformation, the St. Pius V Parish gets a TWIT Award. The Rhode Island Catholic has the announcement.

A university in Malaysia has received a great deal of criticism after allowing the Muslim Students Association to hold a forum on how to “convert” LGBT students. For advocating therapy that is shown to not do what it is advertised to do but which does often create a lot of harm, the Muslim Students Association of Universiti Sains Malaysia gets a TWIT. This comes to us from the Huffington Post.

For anyone who thinks that there is such a thing as a “transgender agenda,” Miranda Yardley provides some disproof. She is an LGBT expert for her local Labour Party in Britain, and is a post-operative transgender woman. Yet, she attacks Lily Madigan in social media in a manner reminiscent of a TERF. On social media, she engages in name calling and deliberate misgendering, and insists that Ms. Madigan is “not really transgender.” It’s a terrible thing when transgender people are attacking one another so openly. For creating such a hostile atmosphere, Miranda Yardley gets a TWIT Award. The story can be found in Pink News.

We told you last week about Dr. Rajith Kumar, a lecturer in botany from Kerala, India, who has come out with a theory that women who wear “male” clothing — such as jeans — will give birth to transgender and autistic children. We gave him a TWIT last week. Now India Today makes fun of him.

TWIT is assembled by Cecilia Barzyk with additional content and editing by Angela Gardner.

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Category: Transgender Community News