The Week In Trans 8/26/19

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Kim Petras

Transgender pop singer Kim Petras performed at Manchester Pride in England, which is reason enough for Metro to run an article about her.

The National Center for Transgender Equality has come out with some videos of interviews with three Democratic candidates for president. Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand were two of the first three candidates to sit for interviews. The interview which sparked the most comment was with Cory Booker. His brother has a non-binary child, whom the New Jersey senator refers to as his “nie-phew,” combining “niece” and “nephew.” Newsweek has this story.

The Gloucester County School Board has decided to appeal the decision in the case of Gavin Grimm. This news comes from WTKR-TV.

Maurice Willoughby Jr. was in love with a transgender woman named Faith Palmer. In the street, he was verbally attacked for his love of this woman. A short while after this verbal attack he was found dead. Initial reports said he committed suicide, but in fact, he died of a drug overdose. Out magazine has this story.

What happens when a trans woman of color uses a pistol to defend herself from her abusive husband? She gets sentenced to 33 years in prison. Toni Nanette Hartlove is now 70 and is the only transgender prisoner housed in a women’s prison by  the Virginia Department of Corrections. Learn more about her interesting life in The Fresno Bee.

Lana Wachowski

Lana Wachowski has co-written a script with Aleksander Hemon and David Mitchell for The Matrix 4, and Wachowski will direct. Lilly Wachowski’s participation is unknown at this time.  The Washington Blade has this story.

The man charged with killing Zoe Spears, Geraldo Thomas, has had his preliminary trial. His lawyer said that he feared for his life, while prosecutors admit that their case is missing a motive. The judge ordered Thomas to stand trial, as reported by NBC News Washington.

In memory of Tracy Single, the most recent transgender murder victim, Houston lit its city hall in the colors of the transgender flag. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

At the twenty-second annual Black Pride Festival in New York City, several activists called out to pay special attention to the fact that transgender murder victims are almost all transgender women of color. ABC News has this story.

A federal judge has permitted several transgender people to sue the military over the ban on trans people joining the armed services, but has struck out five of the original six people on the lawsuit. The five people who were removed are people who are allowed to remain in the military under the latest version of the ban. This story comes from War Is Boring.

While the Trump administration keeps working on undermining trans people’s rights many of the Democratic candidates for the presidency have come out with their visions for assuring transgender rights. Learn more on the CBS News website.

Judi Brown

Judi Brown is suing her employer Circle K, a chain of gas station convenience stores. In the suit she says that she was discriminated against because she is a black transgender woman. According to her manager, she was just bad at doing her job. The Chicago Sun-Times has this story.

A federal judge in Wisconsin struck down a provision of that state’s Medicaid program shich forbade the state from paying for surgery related to gender dysphoria. The Madison State Journal has this story.

A federal appeals court ruled that prison officials cannot be sued for refusing to pay for an inmate’s gender confirmation surgery, because they could not have fully anticipated that a judge would rule that the prison must pay. This story comes from The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

In reviewing a case that will be before the Supreme Court soon, Rewire points out that there can be a thin line between being fired for being transgender and being fired for refusing to follow a company’s dress code. (Yes, the case that the Supreme Court will hear is more complicated than just that, but it is in there.)

Jamie Roberts pointed us to an opinion editorial in The Washington Post that states the obvious; Donald J. Trump is out to destroy all protections for LGBTQ people, and the writer says his “fake news” smoke screen lets him contradict himself all the time.

ACLU attorney Chase Strangio argues at NBC News Think that allowing discrimination against transgender people to continue could allow all sorts of discrimination based on sex to occur.

Antonio Bandaras tells the story of a motorcycle accident leaving him wounded in a ditch, where he was rescued by a drag queen. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Divina De Campo

RuPaul’s Drag Race is coming to England and all the participating queens are doing everything to promote it. Divina De Campo led the Manchester Pride Festival Parade on August 24. Learn more about her from BBC News.

Speaking of RuPaul; her gowns are often fantastic works of art and for years and years they have been made for her by RuPaul collaborator Zaldy. In an interview for Entertainment Weekly Zaldy talks about his almost telepathic connection the Miss Charles and how he comes up with the many gowns and dresses needed for all of her appearances on Drag Race. There are many photos Miss Charles wearing Zaldy’s creations.

While gender dysphoria itself is not a mental health problem, it is sometimes accompanied by mental health issues. College students have had trouble finding someone to help, as Sarah Lipson of Boston University told WGBH.

Transgender teens have a high incidence of homelessness. CityLab takes a look at the problem.

The headline in The Independent refers to Casey Brown as “a transgender parent in Trump’s America.” So, does that mean that Casey Brown is transgender and a parent, or that Casey Brown is the parent of a transgender child? As it turns out, both.

After running a column from a parent who refused to accept his child as transgender, USA Today ran reader responses this past week.

Street Roots has a long article about a complicated legal case in which a transgender parent is being kept from seeing his son, despite court orders.

A group of U.K.-based drag performers with Down syndrome have been barred from performing at an event space in Grand Rapids, Michigan on September 7. The group, Drag Syndrome, were booked into a venue owned by a Republican congressional candidate. The owner canceled the performance. Learn more from The Mighty via Yahoo.

Marsha P. Johnson

Stonewall icon Marsha P. Johnson gave a journalist an interview before she passed away in 1992. The audio-only recording upsets some of the myths that have grown up around the Stonewall Riots. Listen to it on the BackToStonewall website.

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot happened three years before Stonewall. On Monday, August 26, the San Francisco Police Department and the Glide church in the Tenderloin will hold a reflection and reconciliation session timed to the 53rd anniversary of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot. Thanks to Ms. Bob Davis for the story tip. Read about it in The Bay Area Reporter.

A transgender woman who was staying at a motel in San Luis Obispo, California, says that a man offered her money for sex, and when she declined, he and a group of his friends attacked her. She calls it a hate crime, according to Pink News.

After some time on hormone replacement therapy, it can be difficult to produce viable sperm. However, BioTechnique says that there is a new therapy which could make that easier.

As we reported last week, the U.S. Justice Department has submitted a brief in the case of Stephens v. R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, in which they argued that it is legal to fire a person because the person is transgender. This week, we discover that, although the brief is 110-pages long, it never uses any pronouns to refer to Aimee Stephens. The American Bar Association Journal told us of this.

Recently, some newspapers said that Australian doctors were going to investigate the medical treatment of transgender children. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians has stated that it has not been asked to do such a study, according to The Guardian.

Thanks to Jan Brown for letting us know about a transgender makeover service in the U.K. that is run by a trans woman who started her transgender journey in the 1970s. She and a cisgender friend believe makeup is a good thing for trans women’s self esteem. The story can be found in Pink News.

Americans think of Canada as a very polite place, but an article in The Conversation says there is a growing tendency to mistreat transgender people, including misgendering and other violations of common courtesy.

Katherine O’Donnell

Katherine O’Donnell, a transgender journalist who worked for the Scottish edition of The Times, lost her discrimination suit in which she said that she was unjustly let go. The paper closed its office in Scotland, and did not offer her a job at their office in London. The Guardian has this story.

New rules which allow transgender children to use the restroom of the gender with which they identify are making a stir in Portugal, according to The AP.

When you’re at summer camp there’s no worry about which restroom to use. The concern is which latrine to use. Fortunately for some campers that’s not a problem. Gender-nonconforming campers, at new all-gender Camp Tawonga get a rare respite from the outside world, where bullying and the feeling of not fitting in can make growing up difficult. Get the full story from The New York Times.

Baptists are not known to have the friendliest attitude towards transgender people, but the First Baptist Church of Oberlin, Ohio, is preparing to welcome a transgender pastor. Baptist News has this story.

A transgender woman did a web search for a year, to find every news story containing the word “transgender.” (Who knew that there were two of us?) She found some rather disturbing trends in the journalism, and she tells her findings to Mashable.

Veronica Klaus

It’s been several years since singer Veronica Klaus, for many years a fixture on the San Francisco cabaret scene, departed for new adventures in upstate New York. On August 31 and September 1, Klaus returns to the city where it all began. Ms. Bob Davis pointed us to the story in The Bay Area Reporter.

Just to show that relationships and gender issues can be complicated we point to the story sent to us by Jamie Roberts about a couple who met while they were both identifying as lesbians. One of them transitioned to male a couple of years ago and they left the lesbian scene and made new friends who knew nothing of the transition. Now the femme partner feels she is living a lie because she is not expressing her queer identity while her trans man mate is happy with how people treat him as one of the guys. Read more in The Washington Post.

TWITs

Ralph Abraham is a three-term member of Congress who is now running for governor of Louisiana. He has an ad in which he claims to tell the truth, then says, “as a doctor, I can assure you there are only two genders.” I can assure you that he is out of step with the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and several other medical organizations. For being unable to discern the truth while claiming to speak it, Ralph Abraham gets a TWIT Award. NBC News has this story.

Thomas Caggiano, a math teacher at Sandalwood High School in Jacksonville, Florida, lashed out at a transgender student, writing, “I will NOT refer to you with female pronouns. If this is not acceptable for you change classes. I will call you any reasonable name you like, but the pronouns are not a negotiable thing for me.” The email was forwarded to the principal, who required the teacher to undergo counseling. For forgetting that he is an employee of the school, and that as such, subject to its regulations, Thomas Caggiano gets a TWIT Award. First Coast News had this story, and for some perspective, they talked to Drew Adams, who has sued another Florida school district over its policy regarding transgender students.

BBC Sport recently ran a story about Kelly Morgan, a transgender woman who plays rugby. Although she is larger than is common in her league, her teammates and opponents accept her. However, you wouldn’t be so certain of that from the version of the story which ran in The Blaze. They chose to headline their story, “Transgender rugby player–born male and nicknamed ‘Beast’ by female teammates–once collapsed ‘girl’ opponent ‘like a deckchair.’” For clearly slanting their story, The Blaze gets a TWIT Award.

The Washington Examiner has a column entitled, “No, the Trump DOJ is not trying to ‘legalize anti-trans discrimination'”. Their reasoning starts with the fact that the authors of Title VII did not mean to include “gender identity” under the category of “sex,” and never even acknowledges that courts have ruled that indeed Title VII does protect from bias based on gender identity. For pretending that what it does not like does not exist, The Washington Examiner gets a TWIT.

Two trans women were forcibly tossed out of a Los Angeles bar by the bar’s bouncers. This happened after the women were harassed with anti-trans name calling from a heterosexual couple who were not (allegedly) removed  from the bar. Video of the incident can be viewed along with the story on the ABC News website. The video brought protestors to the TWIT Award winning establishment.

The very name Patriot Post is an inductive logical fallacy, poisoning the well. It implies that everyone who disagrees with them is unpatriotic, without bothering to provide any real argument to support that claim. Their recent article, Transgender Fascism, is interestingly titled, since the original fascists were opposed to transgender people, too. (The original fascists also referred to their opponents as “unpatriotic.”) They then retell the story of Jay Keck, the father who wrote the USA Today article mentioned above, which showed both a lack of sensitivity towards his transgender child and a lack of understanding about transgender people in general. They also include a meme which builds on the idea that gender identity is “a choice,” to point to other things which children are not allowed to choose. Of course, they never even acknowledge the actual argument that is used by doctors as they support transgender people, but just force their own views upon others–precisely the sort of behavior that they label “fascism” when others do it. For doing what they accuse others of doing, The Patriot Post gets a TWIT.

Binary Australia is complaining about a book called Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out. They complain that one of the stories mentions having performed oral sex as a six-year-old. The incident mentioned in the book is described by the teenager as sexual assault, although the teen admits to not seeing it as such when it happened. For trying to ban a book because one of its storytellers was sexually assaulted, Binary Australia gets a TWIT Award, which they share with such outlets as RT, who help to spread their bias.

A man in Ottawa, Ontario, burst into a library to stop Drag Queen Story Hour, screaming something about a lake of fire. For creating a public disturbance, this unidentified man gets a TWIT Award. This story comes from LGBTQ Nation.

Holley Gerelds, a senior at Springville High School in Alabama, was left out of her yearbook, because she decided to wear a tuxedo rather than a dress for her senior picture. The yearbook has her name, and next to it, says that she is “not pictured.” For censorship post facto, Springville High School gets a TWIT. Pink News has this story.

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