The Week In Trans 8/21/17

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Tassandra Crush

The St. Louis Cardinals are having a Pride Night on Friday, August 25. Tassandra Crush, who was this year’s Queen Of Pride, will become the first openly-transgender person to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a major-league baseball game in the USA. KDSK-TV has this story.

In a new study, 53% of adults 18 and older said that they would support their child if that child said that they were transgender. While the number of people who participated in the study was rather small, that does not by itself invalidate the results. A larger study will no doubt be coming soon, and may break down that age bracket further. The poll was conducted by Harris, which has quite a high reputation, and was sponsored by the American Osteopathic Association. This story is in Pink News.

Carmen Carrera

Once a year, Jersey City, New Jersey, raises the rainbow flag at City Hall. This year, they invited three transgender people to join in the ceremony. 8-year-old Joe Maldonado, whose expulsion from his Cub Scout pack caused the Boy Scouts to make a formal statement about inclusiveness, was one of the three invitees. 10-year-old Rebekah Bruesehoff and Carmen Carrera were also there. The raising of the rainbow flag is a part of Jersey City’s Pride Week, which actually lasts for almost two weeks. This story was covered by NJ.com.

The special session of the Texas legislature has ended without the state House of Representatives voting on any of the “bathroom bills” that the Senate approved. While Governor Greg Abbott has the legal authority to call the assembly back into session to address the matter, he has hinted that he will not do so. Given that the bill failed in the regular session and failed again in the special session that just ended, calling a new session just for this would tend to call attention to the failure of the bill. That would be an especially bad idea given how many businesses and sports organizations have asked that such a bill not go into law. KBTX-TV has this story.

Danica Roem

Danica Roem, the trans woman candidate running for a seat in the Virginia state legislature, just got a big boost when a Democrat is Milwaukee, who happens to be the county executive there, donated $115,000 to her campaign. When asked why he donated to a candidate in a different state Chris Abele said that he wanted to make history by helping to elect the first openly transgender candidate of a state legislature. Read more in The Washington Post.

Gwynevere River Song of Waxahachie, Texas, was shot to death in her home following an argument. She is the seventeenth transgender person to be the victim of a homicide in the United States this year. That is more homicides than all of last year combined, and August is not yet finished. The Ellis County Sheriff’s Office is investigating. This story appears in The Advocate.

Although it was announced that White House staff, including lawyers, had created a guidance policy for the military to implement the ban on transgender people that President Trump announced on Twitter last month, that policy has not yet been received by the Secretary of Defense. In a more troubling statement, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that he was “not willing to sign up for the numbers” in the Rand Corporation’s study. It is possible that he merely meant to say that he wants a new study done by a group of his own choice.

There is a refuge for homeless LGBT youth in the northeast of Washington, D.C. that is run by a LGBT nonprofit. It gives them a transitional housing situation while they get their lives together. There is only space for eight people to live there but when you have nothing anything is an improvement. Read the story of one of the trans women living there in The Washington Post. Thanks to Jamie Roberts for the story tip.

Amanda Knox with trans child Alexis.

After a marriage of more than 20 years an unhappy husband come out as a trans woman and her wife was completely shocked. The couple had three children and the wife had no idea that her husband had any kind of gender issue. You would think that the marriage was over but Zoe and Amanda Knox worked on it and decided to continue as wife and wife. And, they have a trans child, too. Read about their family on the CBC Radio website. Thanks to Linda Jensen for the story tip.

A service based in Los Angeles is offering makeup lessons via Skype. This sound perfect for the trans girl in a rural area who has no MAC store or transformation specialist in her neck of the woods. Or for the girl who has doubts about going out of the house until she has perfected her look. It’s called Transitions Makeup & Photo, formerly Transformations by Gina. You can learn more on their website.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a statement on Friday which condemned the ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military. They write, “The President’s mere announcement of a ban on transgender military service harms all Americans by sending a message that fosters and encourages prejudice, inconsistent with our core national values.” The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an advisory board for both the Executive and Legislative branches, and does not make policy itself. While they can submit a brief to the courts regarding a case, they do not have any specific authority. Their statement can be read on their website, and an article about it is in The Hill.

The Drag Angels

A gay man from New Zealand was visiting Sydney, Australia and went out for a fun night in the gay neighborhood. Instead of fun he ran into a large group of homophobes who taunted him with gay slurs and when he spoke up about the abuse one of them punched him and broke his jaw. As the remainder of the homophobes were about to step in and do further damage a trio of drag queens arrived and fought with the a-holes till the police arrived. Read the story of how three drag angels saved a man’s life in The Daily Dot.

The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund has hired a new staff member. Angela Dumiao is the organization’s new name change project coordinator. Her job will be to work with law firms and TLDEF’s corporate partners to help underserved transgender people secure legal name changes. To learn more about her and the TLDEF visit their Staff Page.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is about to revise Rule 1557, which requires insurers to cover transgender medical care. The ACLU and Lambda Legal say that they have not seen the new rule, but that they have been told that a change is forthcoming. This story can be found in The Hill.

The California Department of Managed Health Care has fined Health Net $200,000 because the insurer refused to cover seven transgender patients who were looking for gender reassignment surgery. This is the first time that an insurer has been found guilty of violating the state’s Insurance Gender Nondiscrimination Act. This story appears in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Holly Boswell

Transgender activist Holly Boswell has passed away. The 66-year-old is best remembered as the creator of the Transgender Symbol. An English major in college, she wrote essays including The Transgender Alternative.” Transgender Universe has an obituary on her. The Mountain Express published a letter about her from her life partner.

Nikki and Louise Draven are the parents of four-year-old Star Cloud. The family from Middlesborough, England, are all gender fluid. Star Cloud loves to wear pink and play with dolls, but also wears boy clothes sometimes. Louise is the biological father of Star Cloud, but the child sees Louise as a mother. They are Britain’s first gender-fluid family, according to this story in the Daily Mail.

What’s it like to be a drag performer in a Middle Eastern country? Lebanon has it’s share of drag performers who routinely work the stage of clubs in Beirut yet that country has a law that makes homosexual relations illegal. That means those who work in drag are okay as long as they don’t try walking the streets projecting their femme image and flirting with men. There’s a new movie that tells the story of a Lebanese man who spent several years in New York City where he could be the woman he enjoyed being. But he was forced to return to Beirut where he must confine his femme expression to the stage. The film is titled A Queen in Beirut. Learn more about it in ELLE magazine.

Russian queen and activist Mona Pepperoni.

If you think that drag queens are just all about glamor and pitching shade then you have another think coming. Many of today’s queens are also activists in the LGBT community, world wide. Not content to just be fabulous on stage these queens have taken it to the streets, and anywhere else that needs to be educated. Meet eleven drag queens who are working to make the world a better place. You can find the story on the NewNowNext website.

A strange case is unfolding in Texas. It involves twins whose parents are divorced. When the twins were with the father, one presented as male. The father claims that the four-year-old wanted to present as male, while the mother says that that child has expressed no such desire. The matter is currently the subject of a court case. The Texas Observer has a lengthy story on this.

TWITs

Kevin Swanson is a pastor known for over-the-top hyperbole. He has been heard comparing gay people to Nazis and to cannibals. He is co-host of a radio program, and on that program, he said that people should burn schools to the ground if they teach students to accept anyone’s gender identity when it differs from their “God-given sex.” He has called for someone to kill teachers who are willing to accept “gender ideology.” Kevin Swanson believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, yet he does not seem to bother with studying it in its original languages. The Talmud talks of six genders, not two. For cherry-picking the Bible to defend his politics, rather than changing his politics to match the Bible, Kevin Swanson gets a TWIT Award. Right Wing Watch has this story.

Claire Chretien of LifeSiteNews gives a defense of a mother who deliberately conflates a transgender person in the restroom that matches his or her gender identity with a person of “the opposite sex” being in that restroom. In the Bible, we are told that God does not judge by outward appearances, yet LifeSiteNews makes no attempt to see anything but outward appearances and gets a TWIT Award for it. You can find the article here.

The Federalist is at it again. This time, their article is entitled, “The Trans Juggernaut Wants Your Kids, And Public Schools Are Just The Beginning.” Its author, Joy Pullmann, is the managing editor of The Federalist, and has just written a book entitled The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids. It is obvious that she has a fixation on schools, as well as a penchant for conspiracy theories. Add in a distaste for transgender people and a lot of bombastic rhetoric, and you have her TWIT-worthy article, which can be found here.

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

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Tags: Carmen Carrera, Danica Roem, featured, Holly Boswell, Mona Pepperoni, news, Tassandra Crush, Transgender, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News