The Week In Trans 9/16/19

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Lucia Blayke

London England saw its first ever Trans Pride parade last week. Trans people do attend the Gay Pride events but many in the community feel that they don’t have full acceptance there. That inspired the Trans Pride organizer Lucia Blayke to create the event. Learn more from the BBC News website. Pink News has more photos.

Dan Bishop, who as a state senator wrote the bill that insisted that restrooms in state buildings should be used according to the sex listed on birth certificates, has been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He fills a seat left open after voter fraud invalidated the last election and the winner was not certified by the state Elections Commission, due to irregularities. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

The state of Indiana approved new rules earlier this year, which would allow transgender people to bring a note from a doctor to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to get their gender changed. The Attorney General of the state refused to approve the new procedure, which was slated to take effect next month. The AG feels that the health department should be involved. You can find more in The Journal Gazette. TGF user Alyssa found a report on LGBTQ Nation.

The state of Ohio has no statewide procedure to change the gender marker on a transgender person’s birth certificate. A group of transgender people have filed a class-action suit in federal court, asking the court to institute such a procedure. This week, a federal court decided that the suit has enough merit, that it should not be dismissed. This story appears in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Samantha Murphy

Transgender people in Cleveland got together for an event at Edgewater Park. News 5 Cleveland covered this story.

The state of New Jersey agreed to transfer a transgender female inmate from a prison for men to a prison for women. The union for prison guards has now opposed the move, saying that female guards won’t feel comfortable giving this prisoner a strip search. NJ.com has this story.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a speech in his home state of Kansas that he feels that some rights are a product of political “pet causes. With respect to unalienable rights, more, per se, is not always better.” Among the rights he has criticized in the past are LGBTQ rights. Bloomberg News has this story.

Bee Love Slater

The body of Bee Love Slater, a 23-year-old transgender woman, was found in her burnt car in southern Florida. She is the eighteenth transgender person to be murdered in the United States this year. NBC News has this story. As Muri Assunção of the New York Daily News reports that she told friends that she was afraid for her life not long before this incident. TGF user Alyssa found another report on the NewNowNext website.

The AP has the story of a mother’s feelings upon being told that her child was a victim of anti-transgender violence, and indeed was murdered. The story is full of human emotions, but unfortunately, it also dead-names and misgenders the victim.

Michael William Magidson, the last of the four murderers of trans teen Gwen Araujo who is still in prison, was denied parole last week. Ms. Bob Davis pointed out the story in The Bay Area Reporter.

A software developer in Spokane, Washington, developed an app which tells of businesses which are friendly towards transgender people and businesses which are unfriendly. KXLY reports that the app uses submitted reviews.

Natalie Weiss, an employee at Cultiva Coffee in Lincoln, Nebraska, was fired after telling an employee of the Nebraska Family Alliance to “leave and not return.” The employee of the Nebraska Family Alliance posted this to social media, and it went viral, according to The Lincoln Journal Star.

Ali Mcdorman

A transgender teen in Galesburg, Illinois, Ali Mcdorman, was verbally attacked by a parent for using the girl’s locker room which, by law, the student is allowed to use. WQAD reports that things escalated from there.

Freddy McConnell is a transgender man who recently gave birth to a son. He described the experience as “f—–ng awful” in a documentary film, Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth. This story appears in Yahoo Lifestyle.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry finds that transgender patients who went through conversion therapy were twice as likely as other transgender people to attempt suicide, and those who went through such therapy at or before the age of 10 were four times as likely as the control to attempt suicide. The author says that this shows that such therapy is associated with bad mental health outcomes. NBC News has this story. Alyssa pointed out a report on the study in Pink News.

A new study from the Williams Center at UCLA shows that transgender people who experienced discrimination were more likely to attempt suicide. The news release can be found here.

A new study of transgender people in the Netherlands found that long term use of hormone therapy did not result in a significant increase in bone fractures. Healio has this story.

Lyft driver Maria Standing Owl.

A transgender woman working as a Lyft driver was attacked by an intoxicated passenger. The incident is recorded at KGW-TV. The story was also featured in LGBTQ Nation. Thanks to TGF user Alyssa for pointing it out.

In conference news: The New York Coming Out conference is set for October 30 through November 3. Moving Trans History Forward is set for April 2-5, 2020 in the Victoria Conference Center. The event is produced by The Chair in Transgender Studies of the University of Victoria. They have issued a call for papers. Learn more at their website.

Transgender people are more likely than the general population to be diagnosed with HIV. Gilead has created the Gilead TRANScend Community Impact Fund, which aims to change that statistic, according to FiercePharma.

Juliàn Is A Mermaid has won another award, the Klaus Flugge Prize. This prize went to the author, Jessica Love, as best new children’s illustrator. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Sonja Morgan and Dorinda Medley of the Real Housewives of New York were criticized on social media after they called a transgender model “a guy” during New York Fashion Week. The two have since apologized, according to Entertainment Tonight. This is all the more interesting since Cindy Barshop, who was a member of the cast of Real Housewives of New York, has announced that one of her twins is transgender. “Nothing’s really changed,” according to the mother. People magazine had this story.

Travis Coles

Travis Coles, a genderqueer actor who appears in David Makes Man, is the latest person to be interviewed on the LGBTQ&A podcast.

A new documentary video on legendary female impersonator David de Alba is now available for viewing on Youtube. It’s titled The Ambassador of Love for Finocchio’s.

Parker Brothers, looking for a new way to market Monopoly, has created Ms. Monopoly. In this game, any female-identified player gets $240 for passing Go, while male-identified players still get $200. Instead of properties, the board has various inventions and innovations created by women, according to LGBTQ Nation.

The BBC notes that the long wait to see a gender specialist in Britain is “putting people at risk.”

The Australian Psychological Association has felt the need to tell people that there is no “social contagion” that is influencing children to become transgender, according to QNews.

A police force in India set aside some positions at their academy specifically for transgender people. So many applied that it was harder to get one of those positions than it is to get into Harvard. The New York Times has this story.

China is not a good place for transgender people, but NDTV reports on a choir of transgender people performing there.

Two years ago, a non-binary student named Scout Schultz was shot to death by campus police. Scout’s parents are now suing for wrongful death. Pink News has this story.

Mexico has become the second-deadliest country for transgender people, after Brazil. Many transgender people in Mexico are afraid, and hoping that law enforcement takes this problem more seriously. This AP story can be found in The Los Angeles Times.

Sam Smith

British singer Sam Smith, who has expressed a love of wearing women’s high heels, has announced a change to their preferred pronouns. Henceforth they will be known by they/them. Learn more on this move from Newsweek.

A building in the city of Juarez, Mexico, which was used as a shelter for transgender people has been damaged beyond repair, due to heavy rain. KXAN-TV has this story.

Houston Public Media has the story of one transgender migrant from Honduras, who came through Mexico to get to Texas.

Alejandra Barrera had been held by ICE for 20 months. She has finally been released but she is still awaiting an immigration hearing, according to Pink News.

We have been told that nice girls do not swear, but Amanda Kerri in The Advocate says that that is not true.

TWITs

In their daily prayer, the Family Research Council prayed for an end to Drag Queen Story Hour. Not only do they think that drag queens are somehow leading children to be transgender, they also still think that being transgender is a form of homosexuality, which in turn means that it is all about sex. They quote Jon Uhler, a counselor who claims to help “serial predators,” as saying that Drag Queen Story Hour is “the greatest grooming program ever devised,” and that predators “are laughing all the way to the bank.” (The people who make money from sexual predators are professional counselors.) For a lack of research, the Family Research Council gets a TWIT Award. Joe My God has this story.

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, sent out a press release defending President Trump’s claim that Alabama was in the potential path of Hurricane Dorian, when weather forecasters said that the hurricane would not hit there. “Even experts have trouble forecasting a storm’s path.” He quickly deflects to, “Especially, as many of us would point out, based on the Left’s flat-out denial of the real science about gender, creation, conception, and medical research.” He claims that “gender is defined by biology at birth,” and that those who think otherwise are “ideologically-driven.” For using name-calling instead of logical arguments, Tony Perkins gets a TWIT Award. This story comes from Joe My God.

The Weekend Australian presents Douglas Murray as an expert, when he says that we have to be especially careful of being too tolerant of transgender children. This “expert” all but repeats the claim of a “social contagion” turning children trans, especially in “full-on affirming” schools. He also writes, “Not least because there is a growing awareness of children who may have identified as having gender dysphoria but who then grow out of it–many of them to become gay.” There is no evidence of any significant percentage of children who self-identify as transgender de-transitioning or saying that they have grown out of it. It’s as though this newspaper, after being scolded for the talk of a “social contagion” turning children transgender, wants to say, “Don’t listen to our critics; we are right, and we have an expert who says so.” For arguing that one crackpot, who cites one de-transitioner, outweighs the entire psychological association, The Weekend Australian gets a TWIT.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy was the subject of recent articles in The College Fix and The Federalist. The College Fix, even has in its headline the fact that she has seen 1,000 transgender children as her patients. They neglect to mention that this is over a significant period of time, during much of which, few other doctors were seeing transgender children as patients. Both articles leave the impression that she was rubber-stamping the diagnosis and prescriptions, acting as psychiatrist, dispensing physician, and endocrinologist all in one (and perhaps even adding in some surgery on the side). For being too busy with being pejorative to bother caring if they gave a false impression, The College Fix and The Federalist get a shared TWIT.

One America News Network (OANN) host Liz Wheeler claimed that “transgender penguins” at the Sea Life London Aquarium could lead to the destruction of gender, traditional marriage, and family. This destruction of family would in turn cause people to rely on the government for support, which she claimed is the “goal of liberals.” Liz, an ignorant statement like this is how you get a TWIT Award. Read more about it on the Media Matters website.

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