The Week In Trans 5/11/20

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Syd Sanders

Syd Sanders is a transgender high school senior who is the top student in his class in Maine. He shows a huge interest in every subject, and he does so well at everything that he is the valedictorian of his class, as well as class president. Even his dad, the town’s mayor, is impressed. The Bangor Daily News has this story.

Nina Pop was stabbed to death in Sikeston, Missouri. She was 28 years old. She is the tenth transgender person to be murdered in the United States in 2020. You can read about this in Metro Weekly. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for a link to this story.

Last August, a Circuit Court panel of judges decided that the state of Idaho should pay for gender confirmation surgery for an inmate. This week, the state formally asked the Supreme Court to review the decision. U.S. News and World Report has the AP’s story.

Three years ago, the city of Jacksonville, Florida, voted to add protections for LGBTQ people into its civil rights laws. This week, a Circuit Court in Florida overturned that law. The problem cited is that the City Council voted to pass the bill before it was completely written. Them has this story.

A Circuit Court in New Jersey overturned a judge’s order for the Jersey City Police Department to undergo mandatory annual sensitivity training regarding transgender people. The three-judge panel agreed that the District Court judge had the right to order the training, but felt that she ruled too quickly, since the two parties to the suit were still trying to come up with a solution on their own. You can read this story at Law.com.

Little Richard

Little Richard passed away this past week on May 9 and while many know him as the hard rockin’ music star who inspired many other artists, not many know that Richard Penniman began his show business career in his late teens as a drag queen performing in traveling shows that toured the South. His stage persona was Princess LaVonne. Richard was born with one leg shorter than the other so he never managed to move gracefully in high heels. He would wait behind the curtain and when it opened he would stand in one spot and do his comedic act. Learn more about Little Richard and his early drag queen days from Wikipedia.

Like others, the Town Council of Gambier, Ohio, is meeting via Zoom these days. During such a meeting last week, they voted to pass a bill which added LGBTQ protections to its human rights ordinance. “The world seems to be on hold, but many people can’t wait to be afforded basic legal protections everyone else has,” according to Alana Jochum, the executive director of Equality Ohio. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Ohio state Representative Candice Keller was best known for saying that “transgender, homosexual marriage, and drag queen advocates” were responsible for mass shootings, despite a lack of evidence for such. She ran for a seat in the state Senate, and lost her primary vote. You can read about it in LGBTQ Nation. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for a link to this story.

Lawmakers in the state of Ohio continue to consider House Bill 513, which would deny medical treatment for gender dysphoria to patients under 18 years of age. At Cleveland.com, Emilia Lombardi, Ph.D., presents the reasons why this bill is a bad idea, and why the medical groups are right.

Emma Laslett

Emma Laslett appeared on the British quiz show Mastermind. Her specialist category was The Stonewall Riots. She did quite well in the subject, as Pink News tells us. (She did not get extra points for wearing a dress in the colors of the Transgender Pride flag, but it was noticed.)

In Wisconsin, a lawsuit challenging the Madison School District’s guidance on transgender students (a guidance in line with what the Department of Education issued during the Obama administration) is ongoing. The ACLU of Wisconsin has asked permission to join the suit, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

The clothing store Zara has settled a lawsuit by a non-binary individual who was stopped from using the men’s changing room. NBC News reports that the settlement includes a cash settlement and a new official store policy.

In his town hall with the Human Rights Campaign this week, Joe Biden said that he would make sure that PrEP treatment and gender confirmation surgery are covered under universal health care. You can find this story at Pink News.

We mentioned last week that Justin Amash is considering running for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination. Pink News took a look at his voting record on LGBTQ issues. Spoiler alert: He was not among the Republicans who voted against President Trump’s ban of transgender people in the military.

The Washington Blade reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have released data on the spread of HIV/AIDS in the transgender community. The number of new infections continues to increase from year to year.

Kim Petras

Kim Petras has released a new song and a new video, entitled Malibu. She talked about it to Out.com.

It has been noted that many autistic people are transgender or gender-diverse, and many transgender and gender-diverse people are on the autism spectrum. A new set of medical guidelines has been developed to help medical and mental health professionals deal with those who have both autism and gender dysphoria. Entitled “A Clinicap Program for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Neurodiversive/Autistic Adolescents Developed Through Community-Based Participatory Design,” it appears in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. Some of the very patients it is designed to help contributed to the project, along with some of the professionals who work with them. It is the subject of an article in News Medical.

A new survey asked transgender adolescents about fertility. It found that parenthood was important and unimportant to roughly the same number of adolescents. It also found that the participants had a higher confidence in the ability of doctors and nurses to determine their fertility than the limited studies permit. Healio has this story.

Dr. Z. Ph.D. has an article about the five most common complications following vaginoplasty.

A parent with a twelve-year-old transgender daughter wrote an article in The Daily Beast. The article is about their daughter’s love of tennis and efforts to stop transgender athletes from competing, but it also provides some insights into other areas of the life of a family with a transgender child.

Netflix is adapting Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels The Sandman into a television series. Among the characters there is a transgender woman. Neil was asked about that, and told Winter Is Coming that he hopes that transgender writers will be in the room when it comes time to deal with that element of the story.

Lucas Santos

Lucas Santos comes from a very famous and very religious family in Brazil. His father, Eyshila, is an Evangelical singer and pastor, while his uncle is a televangelist named Silas Malfaia, who is known for his anti-LGBTQ preaching. Lucas is different, though. He is a drag queen. He is profiled in LGBTQ Nation.

Fiddlehead’s Restaurant in Michigan City, Indiana, has curb-side service, allows customers to phone in their orders ahead of time, and has a drag queen deliver the food and give a bit of a show. LGBTQ Nation hs this story.

Gabrielle Union appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, via video app. She said, “To us, it’s a little odd to get any kind of recognition for doing what you’re supposed to do, which is to love and accept and embrace your kids.” She makes raising a transgender child sound so easy. In Style has this story.

Egyptian actor Hesham Selim appeared on a talk show, where he talked about accepting his transgender son. In Egypt, transgender people are nominally accepted in the law, but are certainly not supported by the government. You can find this story in Egyptian Streets.

Saff Saffery of Tiger King fame has said that he didn’t mind his character being misgendered during the series, because it happened at the time. However, he now says that using the right pronouns for a transgender person is important. Pink News has this story.

Aimee Stephens

Aimee Stephens made national headlines when she sued after being fired from her job at metro Detroit-based GR & RG Funeral Homes in 2013 after coming out as a transgender woman. Her case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court but she may not live to hear their ruling. She is in hospice care due to kidney disease. Get the story from Metro Times.

An article on Vice tells of how YouTube can be a positive influence on transgender people, even calling it a “mentor” in the title.

Oxfordshire County Council has decided to withdraw the Trans Inclusion Toolkit it sent to schools last year, in light of a lawsuit by a cisgender girl who felt the guidelines were unfair to her. You can read about this in The Herald.

Two weeks ago, Liz Truss came out with a plan for reforming the Gender Recognition Act, which included “protecting” minors from “making a life-altering decision.” Access to medicine or surgery for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not covered in the Gender Recognition Act, but that technicality won’t stop the Conservative Party from broadening its reforms beyond what the public comments covered. In the two weeks since, in spite of the lockdown separating people, her comments have been roundly condemned by other parties, and even by some members of her own party. Pink News has the reactions here and here.

We told you last week about a transgender woman who set herself on fire during a protest in Tblisi, Georgia. This week, another transgender woman in Georgia has come forward to say that she was beaten by the police later that same evening, when she was accused of breaking curfew. Pink News has this story.

Luz Clarita

Luz Clarita, a transgender woman, was found beaten to death in La Cieba, Honduras. It appears that her attackers swung concrete blocks against her head. You can find the gory details in Pink News.

Reuters has a story about the gender-based quarantine rules in some Latin American countries.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many have been using the rainbow as a symbol of hope, a sign of something good that comes after something bad. In Turkey, however, the government told schools not to ask children to draw rainbows, as the government claims it is a plot to turn children gay. (We thought about giving them a TWIT, but we decided to just laugh at this instead.) LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Although the United Nations has condemned the practice of using the pandemic as a cover for instituting laws punishing LGBTQ people or other groups. India has joined the list of countries doing just that. India has been pondering a reform of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act. Many advocates have condemned the specific proposals for reform that have been made by the Modi government, and the lack of discussion with those affected by the law has been quite troubling as well. Recently, the government released the draft rules, and gave people twelve days to respond. The entire time for accepting public comments was during the lockdown. You can read about it in The Print.

Lewis the “trans” cat.

Have you ever heard of a “transgender” cat? This poor creature could not pee properly, due to some skin that covered its urethra. The surgery a vet performed was surprisingly similar to gender confirmation surgery, according to an article in The Daily Mail.

No nation has used the current crisis to deny transgender people their rights more than Hungary has. The United Nations High-Level Political Declaration on Ending AIDS has issued a statement condemning Hungary’s moves as not in keeping with international standards. They have an article about this on their website.

The Advocate has an article about how the COVID-19 lockdown is affecting transgender people in Bangladesh.

TWITs

WNG has an article praising Liz Truss’s statement that the British government would prevent minors from making “irreversible decisions” regarding their gender. The article takes the side of desisters, pretending that they are a huge percentage of transgender youth, and taking their information not from medical authorities but from a group which describes itself as Christian. Then, they tie in online pornography, as though somehow there is a connection between a search for information about gender identity and a search for pornography. For using bad authorities and misinformation to produce its editorial, WNG gets a TWIT Award.

The Safe School Alliance is attempting to keep transgender students out of the rest room that aligns with their gender identities. Of course, there is nothing unsafe about allowing transgender people to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identities, but the Safe School Alliance does not believe that. They are also pressuring for a redefinition of hate crime. For attempting to get the law to follow their bigotry, the Safe School Alliance gets a TWIT Award. You can read about them in Pink News. (Also note that this group was instrumental in getting the Oxfordshire County Council to remove the guidance that they gave to schools regarding transgender students.)

Indonesia has long been among the worst places to be a transgender person, especially because the government is so supportive of the local Muslim authorities. The brand of Islam practiced in Indonesia tends to be built on the native religion, and still has some traces of that religion in it. Those traces can be seen in the exorcism ceremony that many transgender people are forced to go through. For making transgender people go through a religious conversion therapy, these religious authorities get a TWIT Award. Pink News has this story. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for providing a link to this story.

Indonesia is also the site of a horrible practical joke. A man named Ferdian Paleka gave boxes to transgender women. Inside the boxes were rotting vegetables and stones that were painted to look like food. Paleka filmed the reactions as they opened the boxes, and posted the results on YouTube. For belittling others and laughing about it, Ferdian Palek gets a TWIT Award. This story comes from Pink News. Paleka may be getting more than our Award. Newsweek reports he is looking at 12 years in prison.

We have told you of young drag queens before. 8-year-old Mill Blackburn is one. Manige Blackburn, Mill’s mother, reports getting quite a bit of unsolicited mail, condemning her for allowing her 8-year-old to do drag. Most of those cite the Bible, which had absolutely nothing to say about drag. Most of those writers also confuse drag with gender transitioning. For criticizing what they do not understand, many of the critics of Mill Blackburn get a TWIT Award. The Sun has this story.

Michelle Obama has released a documentary on NetFlix title Becoming. As a result of the increased publicity surrounding the film the old charges from the right wing that our former First Lady is a trans woman have resurfaced. There would be nothing wrong with her being a trans woman but, she’s not. A woman named DeAnna Lorraine whose big claim to fame was losing the election for California’s 12th Congressional District primary in March 2020 tweeted the title of Mrs. Obama’s film and asked what she was “becoming.” A big TWIT Award goes to Ms. Lorraine and to all the right wing people who believe the lie about Michelle Obama. Another TWIT Award goes to anyone who thinks calling a woman a trans woman is an insult. Read the whole story in Pink News. 

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