The Week In Trans 4/29/19

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Pam Rocker

Pam Rocker is a transgender woman in the race for the position of President of the United States. Needless to say Rocker is running on a very progressive platform. You can read about her on GayStarNews.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in the case of R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Home v. Aimee Stephens, a case in which a funeral director was fired because she is transgender. While the Supreme Court could decide the case on the grounds of whether gender identity and sexual orientation are covered by Article VII of the Civil Rights Act, the funeral home has been arguing that they should have an exemption from the Civil Rights Act because of their religious beliefs, and that could be the basis for a narrower decision in this case. The Detroit Free Press has this story.

SaVanna Wanzer of We The People has announced the theme: “May Is? All About Trans.” The project will bring a focus on information and political action about transgender people in the Washington, D.C., area. Metro Weekly has this story.

One of the things that that the transgender community has needed is more long-term studies by health experts. Dr. Guy T’Sojen of Ghent University Hospital in Belgium has been conducting such a survey for the European Network for the Investigation of Gender Incongruence (ENIGI), and it is starting to produce some answers, even as it continues to follow patients for longer-term results. Nature takes a look at what this study means.

Vana (L) and Gillibrand.

Last week we told you that presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand spent an evening hanging out with the drag performers at a Des Moines drag club. She even wore one of the performer’s dresses at one point. This week we learn that she will be appearing onstage May 2 with a drag activist named Kirsten for a conversation on the issues affecting the LGBTQ community and America as a whole. Get the story from Georgia Voice.

What do drag artists do on Easter? They have a brunch to raise awareness about the effects of homophobic and transphobic bullying. At least, Teen Vogue reports that is what some drag artists in Alabama did.

The CDC reports that one in seven transgender women has HIV. They blame a lack of access to medical resources for this problem, according to World Health.

At a time when transgender people have trouble accessing health care, the Trump administration is aiming to make access to health care for us even harder. They want insurance companies to be able to deny our claims, and they want doctors and others to be able to refuse to deal with us because of “deeply-held religious beliefs.” Politico has this story.

We are familiar with the work of Dr. Lisa Littman of Brown University, who used a survey of parents to come up with her own idea of a new type of gender dysphoria. Dr. Littman had trouble getting her study published, but a grad student at Brown was able to publish a paper which criticizes Dr. Littman’s study. The article appears in Archives of Sexual Behavior, and you can read about the paper in Buzzfeed.

Writer and star of the play Darrin Hagen.

A Canadian drag queen was instrumental in decriminalizing homosexuality in that country. In 1958 ted northe (who used lower case letters in his name) ascended the steps of Vancouver’s courthouse in full drag holding a sign that read “I am a Human Being.” Then he began a massive letter writing campaign in support of the decriminalization of homosexuality that caught the attention of  justice minister Pierre Trudeau. Now ted’s story has been turned into a play. Learn more from CBC News.

We reported last week that the National Guard in California would not follow the Pentagon’s new Mattis Plan to implement President Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military. This week, the National Guard of Oregon, Washington state, Nevada, and New Mexico all announced that they, like California, will not implement the Mattis Plan. Samantha Allen of The Daily Beast reports on this development.

At a time when Sarah Huckabee Sanders is being called on to resign due to lies about what was in the Mueller Report, GLAAD is calling on her to resign due to lies about the ban on transgender people in the military. She is not going to resign, but the calls do publicly shame her. This story comes from Pink News, and you can find the tweet from GLAAD here.

Tennessee is one of four states with no statewide method for changing gender on a birth certificate. Last year, Idaho agreed to follow a federal court order to change the gender marker on two birth certificates. This week, a lawsuit was filed against the governor and health commissioner of Tennessee, seeking to order them to change the gender markers for a group of transgender people. The Tennesseean has this story.

Muhlaysia Booker

KTRK-TV has an interview with Muhlaysia Booker, the transgender woman who was attacked in Dallas last week.

The opening of a shelter for homeless transgender teens in San Francisco prompted a somewhat long article in The San Francisco Chronicle.

A transgender man in Oklahoma tried to commit suicide, but doctors at a Tulsa hospital saved his life. The cost for that hospital trip was $93,000. The New York Post got a look at his bill.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary has added 640 new words and phrases, including new definitions for old words and phrases (such as “snowflake” and “goldilocks”). Among these new entries, three which they highlighted are “gender nonconforming,” “top surgery,” and “bottom surgery.”

Claire Bow

Texas Standard has a profile of Claire Bow, an attorney who advocates for transgender people.

Filmmaker George Zuber, who previously made a documentary film about transgender people entitled Just Gender, has a new film about the problems transgender people face while in prison. The documentary Where Justice Ends debuted at the Outshine Film Festival in Miami. The Huffington Post has this story.

The co-writer of the new film Little has disowned a transgender joke in the film. Tracy Y. Oliver says that the joke was added after she had turned in the script, and that she was disappointed to see the joke added. You can read more in The Advocate.

Nicol Garcia

Nicol Garcia, a transgender woman from Honduras, has been granted asylum in the United States, after almost a year of waiting. Arizona Public Media has this story.

A character in the television show Good Girls has had a coming-out-as-transgender scene. A teenage character, assigned female at birth, announces that he identifies as male. The Huffington Post has this story.

The reboot of The L Word has put out a casting call for transgender men, according to The Advocate.

Trans Pride in London is happening, and planning is well under way, according to Pink News.

Prince Harry recently had some kind words to say about Mermaids, the charity for transgender children in the U.K. He invited them to a charity roundtable, Harpers Bazaar reports.

There is a story going around that a doctor in Russia dismembered and cooked the remains of his lover, after discovering that she had once had gender confirmation surgery. This story seems to originate from some media sources that are not among the most trustworthy, but you can find the story in The Toronto Sun.

Shahzadi Rai, 29, a transgender woman and activist hopes to join the force.

The police in Pakistan’s Sindh province have announced they are going to recruit transgender people into the force. The announcement came from Syed Kaleem Imam, Inspector General of the Sindh police who told Reuters “They are good God-gifted people. Citizens like us. We should stand by them.” Learn more from NBC News.

Os Keyes is an A.I. expert who happens to be transgender. Keyes says that A.I. programmers rarely consider transgender people when developing facial recognition software, and that such software could pose major problems for transgender people. VentureBeat has an interview.

TWITs

When writing a story, it’s a good idea to have multiple points of view. However, The Daily Telegraph of Australia published a story about “doctors” being “concerned” about a rise in the number of patients seeking specialists about gender issues, and they only talked to two doctors–both of whom are known to have a very negative view of people changing their gender. For one-sided journalism, the Daily Telegraph gets a TWIT Award. Out In Perth has this story.

Dame Jacqueline Wilson, who writes children’s books, has said that she is worried about transgender children getting medical treatment. The thing is, her concerns show she does not know what treatments transgender children do and do not get. For coming out with an opinion before she researched the issue, Dame Jacqueline Wilson gets a TWIT. You can read about it in Metro.

LifeSiteNews has two articles about transgender people. One article complains about what it says is happening in schools in Britain, and what it lacks in depth, it makes up in one-sided rhetoric. The other article complains about a video on Teen Vogue, which says that there is a scientific consensus that does not conform to the views of LifeSiteNews. The fact is, the consensus of science is that gender is not always identical to sex, and that there are indeed intersex people. For repeating ill-informed opinion and not bothering to find out facts, LifeSiteNews gets a TWIT.

A comedian named Joe Rogan had a disagreement with Adam Conover, on the show Adam Ruins Everything, regarding transgender children. Rogan said, “There’s no reason to give kids hormones, and there’s no reason to decide before a person’s frontal lobe is completely fully developed, which doesn’t even take place until they’re 25.” For starters, it’s hard–sometimes impossible–to undo the effects of puberty after it has happened. For another, a too-high percentage of transgender people who don’t receive medical care do not live to see their twenty-fifth birthday. For uninformed opinion, Joe Rogan gets a TWIT Award. His comments were carried in The Blaze.

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