The Week In Trans 8/29/16

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Bea Sullivan-Knoff

A trans woman performance artist in Chicago has filed a lawsuit against the city in an attempt to overturn a law originally enacted in the 19th century that prohibits women from showing their breasts in any establishment that serves alcohol. Bea Sullivan-Knoff is the artist who often performs nude or semi-nude and she finds the ordinance restrictive and unfair since male strippers can show their nipples to any drinking crowd. She calls the law “sexist and transphobic.” If she wins the case a lot of strip club owners in Chicago will be filing for liquor licenses. Get the story from the Chicago Sun Times.

When it comes to being trans, is it all in your head? If you mean your brain then yes. With help from hormones. A five year long research study that examined the brains of transgender people and control subjects found that trans people’s brain structure before hormone therapy falls in the mid range between the two sexes. After hormones therapy changes occur that makes the brain more like the gender identity of the individual. This research shows that gender identity is not only a psychological phenomenon but can be determined biologically. Don’t let anyone tell you there is no scientific proof that trans people are real. Get the story from the Medical Press website.

Many “Christians” seem to be attacking transgender rights, especially the right to go to the restroom of the trans person’s choice. But does the Bible really say anything about being trans? The people marching through Target stores holding Bibles in the air and shouting hate at trans people seem to think so, but other than that part in Deuteronomy that condemns crossdressing (most probably because pagans did dress up for their rituals) there is nothing in the book against trans people. Check out an article in The Washington Post that addresses the subject.

Pageant founder So’oalo Roger Stanley.

In Samoa, an island nation in the South Pacific, homosexuality is illegal and the populace are strongly Christian. They also have a annual transgender beauty pageant that everyone looks forward to all year. The contest is called Miss Fa’afafine. It means “in the style of woman.” The “third gender” has been a accepted part of the Samoan society since the early 20th century. Learn more about the fa’afafine and the pageant on the Australian Broadcasting Corp. website.

The United States Department of Justice has created a new program to train police officers in how to treat transgender people whom they encounter while doing their jobs. There is a training video as part of the program, to help reach as many officers as possible. The Hill has more.

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Schroeder is in charge of the case which will determine if North Carolina’s HB2 is legal or not. He tipped his hand a bit on Friday, when he ruled that the University of North Carolina system cannot enforce HB2’s restroom provisions on the transgender people who are a part of the case. It seems to be a narrow ruling, but it could be an indication of which direction the judge is leaning. Of course, the trial itself has not begun, so much could change. The Washington Post has this story.

According to a newly-released PRRI poll, 53% of American people oppose laws which would force transgender people to use the restroom which corresponds to the gender assigned at birth. Only 35% nationwide want “bathroom bills.” Nearly two-thirds of Democrats (64%, to be precise) oppose such legislation, and Republicans seem to be split, 44% for and 44% opposed. Those results will vary by region. You can find this in the first paragraph of PRRI’s press release.

Courtney Act

An Australian media company sent Australian drag sensation Courtney Act to a Donald J. Trump rally and had her interview Trump supporters. What a funny idea. Possible not. Some of the answers Ms. Act got from the Trump people were troubling to say the least. Read about it and watch a video of the interviews on The Huffington Post.

Speaking of the presidential candidate, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert hauled out the old video from 2000 in which Trump runs into Rudy Giuliani in a department store but at that time the mayor is dressed in drag. Colbert ran the video and made humorous comments. Read about it and see the video on the Business Insider website.

Duke University Children’s Hospital has a gender clinic. It is the only gender clinic in the deep South that takes transgender teenagers as patients. Some families cross state borders to take their transgender children to this clinic. HB2 has affected pretty much every patient at the clinic in some way. NPR has the story.

Two years ago, a transgender woman named Mia Henderson was murdered in Baltimore. DNA found under her fingernails led to the conviction of her murderer, despite the fact that her body was nearly unrecognizable after the attack. It turns out that her younger brother, Reggie Bullock, is a reserve for the Detroit Pistons. He recently opened up about her murder. He does still use male pronouns, but then, they were closer when they were children, before her transition. Takeaway quote: “A person that can isolate the whole world out and not care about other people’s feelings is a strong person, to me. I think that was one of the biggest things that I got from him.” You can read the reaction on [in this case, the ironically-named] Deadspin.

The Lady Bunny

Yesterday (8/28/16) drag was rollin’ on the river in New York City. Wigstock, the cruise, set sail from Pier 40 and chugged its way around Manhattan. On board was Wigstock’s founding queen, Lady Bunny along with several other queens including Linda Simpson and San Francisco performer Glamamore. Read Michael Musto’s review of the cruise on the W Magazine website.

The City of Juneau, Alaska, has approved a new nondiscrimination law. It protects people from discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, familial status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or national origin. While some of these protections already existed in federal and state laws, protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity are new. The Juneau Empire has this story.

The West London Mental Health Trust of the NHS Trust has gone through the legal steps to notify the Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross that it is taking steps to terminate its relationship with that clinic. The Trust intends to move the service to a new provider. Given the backlog of prospective patients, it might be good to add another provider while keeping the one that is already open, and advocates worry that patients and prospective patients could get lost in the changeover, but they chose to do it this way. The Trust says that things will continue as they are until a new provider is able to come on board. The Gender Identity Clinic says that they initiated the break, and that they did so in order to align with a different trust which is not related to mental health. They say that the Gender Identity Clinic is not closing. The Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross has been providing help to transgender people since 1966. Pink News has more.

According to Gay Star News, the change in providers is an opportunity, rather than a crisis. (Can’t it be both? Having to find a new place to live in a hurry can be both a crisis and an opportunity.)

Elijah Cross is a fifteen-year-old high-school student in the Battle Creek, Michigan, area. He transitioned to male last year, and he transferred schools during the year, but he found a place where he felt welcome. His story is in the Battle Creek Enquirer.

Kendra Bell

Kendra Brill is a transgender woman living in Virginia. She has not led an exemplary life, and she had a criminal record. Since her transition, she has behaved much better, and has had no run-ins with the law. She was able to change the gender marker on her driver’s license, but she has had trouble getting a name change. The judge in this case feels that it is important for parole records to be consistent. (Don’t they use something like Social Security numbers, to differentiate the various people named “James Johnson” who are in the system?) WHAG-TV in Hagerstown, Maryland, has a profile of her.

The State of Michigan has become the latest to allow transgender people to change the gender marker on a driver’s license or state I.D. without sterilization surgery. An applicant can present a valid passport, and the state will copy the gender marker from it. This move was previously announced, and now it has been implemented. This also settles a lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. The Detroit Free Press has this story.

Caster Semenya is a middle-distance runner from South Africa. She won a gold medal in the 800 meter race at the Olympics in Rio. There is controversy, because it was discovered that she has a high testosterone level. She has had to take medication to try to suppress her body’s natural production of testosterone. Yahoo Sports has a profile of her.

Audrey Tang

Audrey Tang is a 35-year-old transgender woman who is a consultant with Apple in Taiwan. She now has another job — on October 1, she will become the new Digital Minister for Taiwan. She is in charge of making data about the government available to people, so that the government can be “more transparent.” A profile of her is in Quartz.

NYU’s online masters in Communicative Sciences and Disorders program is working to educate the transgender community about the importance of leveraging a clinical guide in their process to finding their most authentic voice. The NYU faculty worked with the school’s communications department to publish an important resource for those seeking voice modification, Authentic Voices: Voice Modification for People in the Transgender Community. The article discusses finding an authentic voice in a safe and healthy way by working with a Speech-Language Pathologist.

A new report has been published titled LGBT Older Adults Highlighting Isolation, Discrimination, and Health Disparities. You can learn more and view the report on The Williams Institute website. Thanks to Josy C for the tip.

Those who monitor things like consumer spending have noticed an uptick in sales as people become more confident after a long recession. But while consumers are buying more there are some stores that are not doing so well. Among them are several women’s apparel stores like Banana Republic and Ann Taylor. Why aren’t their sales numbers up? Women, and those who dress like women, seem to hate their fashion offerings. Thanks to Jamie Roberts for the tip. You can read about it in The Washington Post.

Jamie also let us know about the steps being taken by officials in Maryland to create a more welcoming foster-care system of LGBT children and adolescents. It seems that many foster families were not treating the LGBT children placed with them very well. Learn more in The Washington Post.

Artist Henry Faulkner in 1940.

Preserving LGBT history is often a daunting task. So often people “back in the day” spent their lives trying to not become known as LGBT. Take for example the state of Kentucky. Many of the people who lived in that state, all the way back to the Civil War, were LGBT but they were not “out” and so they left the Earth without leaving any contributions to LGBT history. One individual who was out and did not care what people said or thought was an artist by the name of Henry Faulkner. Faulkner was ofter out and about in drag. And he knew a lot of the LGBT people who were keeping things on the down low about their gender and sexuality. Now much of his photos and memorabilia as well as many interviews with GLBT people in Kentucky are being made available through the Faulkner-Morgan Pagan Babies Archive of LGBTQ. Learn more in the Lexington  Herald Leader.

TWITs

A new Monmouth poll shows shows Pat McCrory losing by nine points (CNN has him down by 6 points) in his bid for reelection as Governor of North Carolina. So, Mr. McCrory’s campaign has come out with a new ad which again gives us the lie that allowing transgender people to use the restroom of their preferred gender will allow sexual predators to enter the ladies’ room. (And what will keep others from entering that public restroom, witnessing the sexual predator in action, taking pictures with a smart phone, and notifying the police? That possibility would scare off any sexual predator who thinks, but thinking is not something that Governor McCrory does a lot.) Given that 74% of those who back HB2 support Mr. McCrory, while 72% of those who oppose HB2 support Mr. Cooper, this is hardly likely to get many new voters to his side, but it might motivate those who like HB2 to come out to the polls. (They are likely to do so anyway.) For spreading lies and debasing others, the McCrory Campaign gets a TWIT Award. Andy Towle has this ad.

A rodeo in Michigan apologized for comments made by a clown during their show. Lost Nations, the production company behind the event, says that they did not fire Robbie Hodges, but that he is no longer employed by them. It seems he was a local who was hired just for this one event. He claims that the comments (which were about who should use which restroom) were supposed to be entertaining, but they were hardly so. For not knowing the difference between entertainment and bigotry, Mr. Hodges gets a TWIT. If you really want to read his comments, they are on WILX-TV’s website.

The Ken cake.

What kind of a world do we live in? The kind of world where people get worked up about the darnedest things. Like The TWIT Award winning residents of Sacramento, California who have attacked a bakery on social media over a “truly disgusting” cake it produced at the request of a customer. What was it that made scores of people so angry they posted “ugly” comments on the bakery’s Facebook page? Something pornographic or violent? No. The cake is question was built around a Ken doll. It is a cake dress, which looks lovely as well as delicious. The Ken cake haters have started to back off but getting all worked up over it is why they got their TWIT. Read the whole story in The Washington Post. There’s more coverage on the Fox News website.

The owner of a Nissan dealership in Montana has a YouTube channels where he posts videos called Robert Allen Rants. Allen says that the videos were inspired by Tim Allen’s character on Last Man Standing. In his rants Robert Allen, not Tim, vents about various issues of the day. Nobody was saying much about why a car dealer was making opinion videos and not just keeping his head down selling cars until he posted one talking about the restroom issue. He said if “a transgender guy comes in my store, he’s sure welcome to spend his money and buy a car, but he probably ought to go in the men’s bathroom, not the ladies’, because if he’s in the ladies’ we’ll throw him out of the store.” Of course Allen means a trans woman as it would be perfectly fine for a trans man to use the men’s room. We’re awarding a TWIT Award to Robert Allen to go along with the derision he has gotten from local people and the order he got from Nissan to remove any links to his videos from the dealership’s website. The story is in the Independent Record.

Up above we told you about the new training video created by the DOJ that shows officers how to handle situations when someone complains that there is a trans woman in the ladies’ room. Of course it’s a great idea but Breitbart doesn’t see it that way. The right wing website headlines their story “Obama’s Transgender Video: Cops Must Ignore Local Laws, Science.” In the first place it isn’t “Obama’s video.” We don’t think he directed it himself. In the second place, they go on to say the video endorses “the transgender ideology” and that all Americans are being forced by the government to accept whatever anyone claims about their gender. The object according to Breitbart is to “blur, stigmatize and bar” Americans from recognizing the “diverse differences between the two sexes, male and female.” Or just possibly the point of it might be to let trans people use the restroom in peace. Another TWIT Award is hereby handed out to the twits at Breitbart for their continuing efforts to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Tags: Audrey Tang, Bea Sullivan-Knoff, Courtney Act, Elijah Cross, featured, HB2, History, Miss Fa'afafine, news, Rudy Giuliani, Stepen Colbert, Transgender, TWIT, Wigstock

Category: Transgender Community News