The Week In Trans 7/2/18

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Jazz with her surgeon Marci Bowers (L.).

Jazz Jennings is recovering from her gender confirmation surgery. She posted a photo to Instagram. A story appears in the New York Daily News.

Starbucks has announced that, in addition to covering gender confirmation surgery for transgender employees, they will also cover such things as electrolysis and facial feminization surgery. Starbucks was the first company to consult with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health on what to include in a package for transgender employees. Chain Store Age has this story.

As the controversy around The Atlantic’s cover story about desisters continues, Buzzfeed makes note of the new guidelines for transgender children in Australia, and the fact that they go beyond even the recommendations of WPATH.

The first court case against the ban on transgender people in the military, Doe v. Trump, has reached the point where plaintiffs have filed a motion for summary judgment. The motion would create a permanent injunction against the ban on transgender people in the military. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who already issued a temporary injunction on the ban, will rule on the motion. Metro Weekly covered this story.

Angela Ponce

Angela Ponce is the first transgender woman who has won a right to compete in the Miss Universe pageant. She was crowned Miss Universe Spain on Friday night. GMA Network carried this story.

We have far too much sad news to report. First, there has been another transgender woman of color murdered in Jacksonville, Florida. She was first identified using her deadname and with mention of two previous arrests. Eventually, it came out that her name was Cathalina Christina James, and that she is the third transgender woman of color to be murdered in Jacksonville this year. Police are investigating the three as separate incidents. Several local transgender people, including members of the Stiletto Sisters Society attended the Jacksonville City Council meeting Tuesday evening to discuss how the police are handling these incidents, as well as one in which the transgender woman has survived. On Wednesday, there was a rally to push for action in these investigations.

Police in Cleveland, Ohio, found the body of a transgender woman who had been murdered. Keisha Wells is the third transgender woman to be murdered in that city in the last year. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a story.

In Brazil, Thalia Costa Barbosa, a trans woman, was found murdered, and the primary suspect is a soccer player named Douglas Gluszszak. One report says that the suspect has confessed to the crime. This story comes from Telesur.

Chloe Sagal walked into a public park in Portland, Oregon, and set fire to herself. She later died from injuries she sustained in this act of political protest. Oregon Live has this story.

Judge Victoria Kolakowski

Judge Victoria Kolakowski talked with KPIX-TV in San Francisco about her memories of growing up trans and her memories of the Pride Parade.

As Britain continues to go down the road to a revision of the Gender Recognition Act, newspapers such as the Times and the Independent came out with stories that said that the new act would leave in place the ability to ban people from sex-specific spaces based on the sex assigned at birth. While the government did say that it would not reform the Equality Act, which allowed for certain spaces for one sex only, the Gender Reform Act will determine who counts as being a member of the sex that is allowed into that space. Pink News has more on this, though they were polite enough not to ask why it took weeks for these newspapers to write these stories.

While the U.K. government is giving mixed signals of what lies ahead, Scotland is going ahead with its own reforms. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said, “It is unacceptable for anyone in this day and age to face discrimination because of gender, gender identity or sexual orientation.” The First Minister spoke to Pink News.

The BBC noted that the Scottish government has shown support for a guidance for transgender students which was written by LGBT Youth Scotland. Schools are not required to comply with the guidance, but the support from the government does put some pressure on school councils.

Both of those last two stories came out just before a new drama played out in Scotland. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the appointment of Gillian Martin as Education Minister. It came out that the appointee had written some rather discouraging things about transgender people a dozen years ago, including a reference to “hairy-knuckled, lipstick-wearing transitional laydees.” Although the offending items were removed from her blog, they still could be found through Internet archives. MSP Martin apologized for the remarks, but even so, by the time the evening papers came out, her nomination to the Education Ministry had been withdrawn.

For several years, a woman known only as MB has been waging a court battle to be recognized as a woman and receive a woman’s pension despite the fact that she was still married to a woman — something which the British government said prevented her from being recognized as a woman. (Same-sex marriage was illegal in Britain when she began the lawsuit.) The European Court of Justice this week announced a decision in agreement with her. The BBC covered this story.

Take a tip from Pixie Aventura.

We’ve said it before and will probably utter the words again; if you want beauty tricks listen to a drag queen. While drag queen makeup is often over the top and wouldn’t go over well on a shopping trip at the mall the techniques they use can be adopted and adapted for more low key looks. Stylecaster.com got beauty tips from 7 drag performers.

The City of Vancouver Archives in British Columbia houses a large amount of material related to the city. Now, thanks to queer rights activist Ron Dutton, who donated more than 750,000 items item from his collection, the Archives has loads of stuff documenting the LGBT history of Vancouver. Thanks to Jamie Roberts for the story tip. You can learn more from Library Journal.

KRQE-TV in Alburquerque, New Mexico reports that there is a new thrift shop in town which has a transgender staff.

Cynthia Nixon shared a picture of herself with her transgender son Seph on Instagram. Seph just graduated college, and his mother is proud of him, reports the New York Daily News.

Nikole Cabeza

At a time when transgender athletes seem to be encountering a lot of opposition, it is nice to see the Hudson Reporter write a nice story about Nikole Cabeza, a transgender student at a local high school who starred in softball with little opposition.

Triangle Magazine posted a very nice article on Michael Dillon, one of the first trans men, who tried to get away from publicity back home by becoming a Buddhist monk. His autobiography was published last year.

On June 10, 1922 Judy Garland arrived on the planet and who knew the effect she would have on gay men in the coming decades? She also made an impression on several female impersonators. One of them being TGForum contributor David de Alba. David did Garland in his act and was inspired to collect all the Judy Garland memorabilia that he could. That added up to a substantial amount. In honor of Judy Garland’s June birthday the local TV station in Las Vegas visited David in his home and filmed his collection.

TWITs

LifeSiteNews has published articles from Jonathan Van Maren and Dorothy Cummings McLean, both of whom express astonishment that transgender people would be upset at the article Jesse Singal wrote for The Atlantic. Both start by using the word “balanced” to describe the article. Suppose that someone wrote an article about teenage Catholics, but began with the story of a girl who went to Catholic grade school, but never received any of the sacraments of initiation (baptism, first communion, or confirmation). As a high school student, she now says that she was mistaken to think that she was a Catholic, and she says that she has no interest in joining the church. After profiling her, the article goes on to talk of several others who had at least been baptized, but who had lapsed in their practice of the faith. At the end, they talk of two people who still attend Mass and still believe. Would such an article be described as “balanced?” For being deaf to the lack of balance, as well as other mistakes, Jonathan Van Maren and Dorothy Cummings McLean get TWIT Awards. (For those looking for a fuller rebuttal of Jesse Singal’s article, there is Amanda Kerri’s column in the Advocate, as well as the articles mentioned last week.)

LifeSiteNews also republished an article by Michael Hanley which originally appeared in The Catholic Thing. In the article, entitled “What happens when transgenderism and pedophilia become a “condition,” Mr. Hanley asks and attempts to answer the question of what support for transgender people will lead to. Anyone with any knowledge of informal logic will quickly see that this is very likely to be a slippery slope argument — “if we don’t stop this thing now, there will be no stopping until that thing happens.” He starts with polygamy — which he claims “Muslims in the West” are requesting, without any citation. He then goes on to say that incest and pedophilia are about to be normalized. His proof of this is that there are terms for these conditions — terms other than the common language terms. For engaging in bad logic, Michael Hanley gets a TWIT.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council wrote an article entitled, “Army Gives Trans Training the Boot.” The first sentence reads, “Finally, the military is announcing a kind of transitioning we can support!” Unfortunately, the news behind this story is not quite what Mr. Perkins thinks it is. The Pentagon announced that it has completed the task of seeing to it that everyone gets the initial, mandatory training in how to deal with transgender troops. It’s not that they are abandoning the training, as Mr. Perkins wishes you to think — it’s just that they have given this training to everybody. For slanting the news until it becomes something other than what it is, Tony Perkins gets a TWIT Award. You can read his article here.

OneNewsNow, the news site run by the Family Research Council, ran a story about how the International Classification of Diseases is reclassifying transgenderism from a mental health issue to a sexual health issue. The brunt of the story is about how the World Health Organization was bowing to pressure from transgender activists. It totally ignores the fact that doctors, especially psychiatrists, had been leading the push for reclassification, based on the fact that those patients who received treatment for a sexual health problem had significantly better outcomes than did those who were treated for a mental health problem. As expected, rather than talking to anyone from the World Health Organization about why they reclassified transgenderism — or even talking to someone from the American Psychiatric Association, the article quotes Peter LaBarbara — an anti-LGBT activist. For ridiculous amounts of slant, OneNewsNow gets a TWIT. Here is the article.

Simon Marcus, who describes himself as “a former advisor to the coalition government,” wrote an article entitled, “Is transgender ideology making the U.K.’s mental health crisis worse?” He uses the rhetorical device of asking a question rather than making a statement with his title, so that he can deflect charges of bias by saying that he was only asking a question, and the one charging him is the one with the bias. In the article, he claims that transgender people often have other mental health issues — issues other than gender dysphoria itself. (He does hint that these issues could be related to being transgender, without comment on what that relationship could be.) In fact, the diagnosis of gender dysphoria should come from a mental health expert. This person typically does check the patient for other possible mental health problems. As a result, people diagnosed with gender dysphoria are likely to have been given more mental health screening than the general public would receive, rather than less. For writing a “scholarly” warning from a very nonfactual basis, Simon Marcus gets a TWIT Award. His article appeared in The Spectator.

Charlotte Clymer attended a bachelorette party for a friend at Cuba Libre in Washington, D.C. She was having a good time until she was told that she could not use the ladies’ room. When management insisted on this, she pulled up the city’s nondiscrimination act on her phone and showed it to the manager. Police were called, and after hearing her story, they agreed with her that she had the right to use the ladies’ room. She has since received an apology from the co-owner of Cuba Libre, who also promises that staff (including the manager in question) will receive training on the subject of transgender people. The manager gets a TWIT. WJLA-TV has more on this story.

The GOP members of the legislature of Ohio are getting a TWIT Award. Why? They have introduced a bill that would allow parents to block their children from getting treatment for gender dysphoria, preventing kids from being their true selves, and also preventing schools from affirming a child’s gender identity. And, it doesn’t end there. This mean spirited bill, if passed into law, will be another intrusion of government into people’s private lives. Get the details from Cleveland Scene.

TWIT is assembled by Cecilia Barzyk with additional content and editing by Angela Gardner.
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Category: Transgender Community News