The Week In Trans 9/21/2020

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Sarah McBride has won her primary for the state Senate in Delaware. Given her district, she is likely to become the first transgender person elected to a state senate in the United States. The Hill has this story.

Also in Delaware, a gay man named Eric Morrison ran for the state House of Representatives, and was criticized by his opponent for having performed in drag at a fundraiser for his campaign. Mr. Morrison got 61% of the vote, beating a long-time incumbent. You can find this story at Out.com. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for a link to this and other stories.

The Human Rights Campaign has a new commercial that says LGBTQ people–“especially Black, and Brown transgender” people–are victims of the Trump administration’s failed response to COVID-19. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Another transgender candidate won a primary, but the headlines are not so positive. Aria DiMezzo, the Republican candidate for sheriff of Cheshire County, New Hampshire describes herself as a Satanist and an anarchist. She was the only Republican running for this position, but she expected the party to nominate a write-in candidate for this post. She is given a nice profile in The New Hampshire Union-Leader. She described her victory as proof that the system does not have safeguards, according to a blog post that Pink News noticed.

Police in Reading, Pennsylvania, are reviewing a confrontation with a woman holding a gun. The police shot the woman, who is in critical condition in a hospital. WFMZ-TV mentions in the headline that the woman is transgender, but does not mention that in the body of the story.

Rico Leblond admitted in court recently that he killed a transgender woman, Zella Ziona, in 2015. Now, five years after the murder, he received a sentence of 35 years in prison, the maximum allowed by law. This case has been going through the courts in Maryland for some time, according to the story by WTOP-TV.

21-year-old Gianna Lofton of Chicago was found dead in Brooklyn on September 7. Police are still investigating her death, but her family believes that she might have been murdered. Her body was found partly naked and wrapped in a plastic tarp, which seems suspicious. Brooklyn Paper has this story.

The Alliance Defending Freedom has asked an appeals court to remove the temporary injunction that allows transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports in Idaho. The AP’s story can be found at ESPN.

The Hill reports that the Department of Education is threatening to withhold certain federal funding from Connecticut public schools, so long as they permit transgender athletes to compete in girls’ athletics. The Hill has this story. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for a link to this story.

The wildfires in Oregon have forced at least 10% of the people who live in that state to leave their homes. The Wild Womyn, a group of lesbians and LGBTQ individuals, have been watching out for each other. They have a very active group of drag queens among their membership, according to The Advocate.

The Denver Channel has a long interview with Reverend Nicole Garcia of Westview Presbyterian Church in Boulder, Sable Schultz, and Star Graham. All three are leaders of Justice For All Colorado, a group of transgender people dedicated to the rights of transgender people.

September is Hispanic Heritage Month, and WABC-TV has a profile of Lorena Borjas, an immigrant from Mexico who is known as the mother of the transgender Latinx community in Queens.

Sarah Luiz, who has been in  and out of the news over the years, has come out of the shadows for an interview with Dallas Voice.

An editorial in USA Today tells why it is morally wrong to run campaign ads that turn transgender people into villains, and why the strategy won’t work.

Kimberly Acoff, a Black transgender woman who served in the National Guard shortly after September 11, 2001, writes in The Advocate that the world is a scary place, but advises that we turn fear into activism to help create a more equitable world.

Gia Romualdo-Rodriguez travelled from New York to a clinic in Miami to undergo a procedure to give her a bigger butt. During the procedure, her oxygen levels dropped, which caused her heart rate to go lower. She was transferred to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Meaww.com has this story.

Plume is offering packages to allow businesses to add transgender medical coverage to their employee benefit packages. The company says that only about 29% of employees get transgender medical coverage through their employer, according to Employee Benefit Advisor.

A study in Turin, Italy, showed that postoperative transgender women had a higher than average risk of bone fractures. Their bone density was lower than is typical. Contemporary OB/GYN has a summary of this study.

June Joplin, the Baptist minister who came out as a transgender woman during a televised sermon, sat for an interview with Baptist Global News.

WPATH Standards of Care 8 is well under way, and should be published in 2021. An article in Psychiatric Times points out that the standards for psychiatric care are changing, though some might argue that they are just being further specified.

Dr. Joe Hatfield of the University of Arkansas has received a modest grant from the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society, to study statistics on transgender suicide. This was written up in University of Arkansas News.

Valentina Petrillo won three gold medals at the Italian Paralympic games, and will represent her country in Tokyo next year. She says that transitioning “mercilessly” hindered her performance as an athlete. She told Thomson Reuters Foundation that she feels that transitioning to female certainly did not give her a competitive advantage.

On Tuesday, we got to see J.K. Rowling’s new book, Troubled Blood (published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith). We hate to give out spoilers, especially for what is supposed to be a mystery novel, but we would have called for a boycott had we not been sure that everyone reading this would be avoiding the book anyway. The book involves a crossdressing killer, who is far more a fetishist than a transgender person. Ms. Rowling wrote in her long blog post that she had been doing research, and this book is the result of that research. CNN reports that reaction has been quite negative. S.E. Fleenor writes in The Independent that we have seen the use of transgender people as villains before. (It should be noted that this character is less a transgender person and more like Norman Bates in Psycho–further proof that this plot-line has been done before.) LGBTQ Nation reports that screenwriter Dustin Lance Black called J.K. Rowling, “a pretender, a thief, a fraud,” saying that her ideas have always been borrowed from others.

J.K. Rowling’s new book reminds some people of another book with a crossdressing serial killer, Silence Of The Lambs. This has revived the question of whether Buffalo Bill is transgender, or just a fetishist. Pink News has a story about this debate.

A transgender woman named Katie wrote an open letter thanking J.K. Rowling. Katie says that every time the famous writer makes a comment denouncing transgender people, it stirs a passion in Katie to to reach out to and fight for all transgender people. Her blogpost is reprinted in Upworthy.

Rabble Books and Games in Perth, Australia, announced that they would not put J.K. Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith novel on their shelves, “in order to create a safe space for the trans community.” They do have some copies of the book they will sell to those who ask for it, but it won’t be on the shelves. If you do ask for it, they will donate the profits to a charity, TransFolk of Western Australia. Pink News has this story. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for a link to this story.

Jenna Bush Hager tells the story of how her grandmother, Barbara Bush, came to accept transgender people, after having met one at lunch. This story can be found in NBC News.

The new film Midnight Swan looks at the difficulties that transgender people face in Japanese society. Japan Times has this story.

RuPaul’s Drag Race won Emmy awards for hair (Curtis Foreman) and make-up (Raven), according to Out.com.

Alex Winter from Bill & Ted Face The Music got some positive feedback when he tweeted a picture of a Black transgender flag, to say that Black transgender lives matter. Pink News has this story.

Angela Chen wrote a new book about asexuality. She talked about it in an interview for the LGBTQ&A podcast at The Advocate.

A ruling against Jaguar Land Rover in an employment court in Britain has established that non-binary and gender fluid people cannot be discriminated against in the U.K., according to Pink News.

The British Medical Association has now gone on record recommending that transgender and non-binary people be allowed to self-declare their genders. Pink News has this story.

A long list of organizations and companies, including the British Army and Disney, have declared transgender rights are human rights, and 70 of the 132 are urging Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reform the Gender Recognition Act, according to Pink News.

Last week, Lance Corporal Joseph Scott Pemberton of the U.S. Marine Corps was given a pardon by the President of the Philippines, which meant that he would serve no more time for his role in the murder of a transgender woman, Jennifer Laude, six years ago. One week later, he was deported from the Philippines to the U.S. NBC News has this story.

The Women’s Equality Party is a smaller political group in Britain, but they are making a bit of news. The Guardian reports that 60 members of the group are going to have a consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act. The consultation will hear from witnesses who have differing views, and the witnesses are asked only to listen to each other and to not attack others.

Rosie Duffield is a Labour MP who has been criticized for having views that seem to be transphobic. This week, a lesbian staffer quit her employ over her remarks on transgender people, according to Pink News.

Councillor Stewart Miller has left the Conservative Party after receiving flack from the party over a meme which responded to Greta Thunberg with, “Your generation. . .can’t decide whether you’re a boy, or a girl or ‘other'” The meme received much criticism from transgender activists, and the party did not offer the expected support. Pink News has this story.

Out.com says a new report shows that LGBTQ Canadians are three times as likely to be assaulted, as heterosexual cisgender people, with transgender people especially vulnerable to such things.

Mexican police officers have made an arrest in the murder of transgender activist Mireya Rodriguez Lemus. Local 23 El Paso has this story.

A French court has ruled that a transgender woman cannot be recognized as the biological mother of the child which she conceived with her wife. The transgender woman can be recognized as a mother of the child if she legally adopts the child, according to AFP. Thanks to Alyssa Washington for a link to this story.

One transgender woman was murdered and another was injured when armed men broke into a wedding in Pakistan and opened fire. Pink News has this story.

Also in Pakistan, transgender people who were at a protest were asked to move aside when a bunch of movie celebrities showed up, according to a story in The Express Tribune.

Yahoo Life has a story about a restaurant in India where the entire staff is transgender.

A news reader on Australian radio who liked several comments on Facebook attacking a transgender woman has been ordered to pay a $10,000 fine, reports Pink News.

Maria Paola Gaglione, a cisgender woman, was killed by her brother, who rammed her car with his vehicle. The brother, Michele Antonio, was upset that his sister was about to marry a transgender man. The brother says that he intended to “teach her a lesson,” not to kill his sister. Pink News has this story.

Madison Hall tried to blend in after transitioning, but eventually became confident enough to post before-and-after pictures to Twitter. The photos went viral, as she tells her story in Insider.

Pope Francis met with parents of LGBTQ+ children, and said, “The pope loves your children as they are, because they are children of God.” Many of the parents told of having been shunned from their parishes. This story appears in Out.com.

The Daily Mail has an interview with Louise Anderson, the mother who is fighting to obtain her deceased transgender daughter’s frozen sperm, in order to fulfill her daughter’s last wishes.

The story of a transgender couple and their child, whom they say “understands” them, appeared in The Daily Mail.

A Pennsylvania woman who is the mother of eight children, describes herself as a Christian mother, yet has had no trouble accepting her transgender son, Charlie. The Daily Mail says that a video made by the mother has gone viral.

TWITs

A transgender student at Carroll High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is considering changing schools after her name appeared on the ballot among the boys to be chosen for homecoming king. As if that is not enough, the ballot included her deadname, rather than the name she uses. The school board says that the list of names was computer generated, but computers only do what people tell them to do, and people did not tell this computer to put Grace Grabner in the right category with the correct name. For failing to accept the blame they deserve, the staff at Carroll High School and the Northwest Allen County Schools get a TWIT Award. WPTA-TV has this story.

The French-Belgian film A Good Man tells the story of a transgender man who decides to have a child during his transition. The film features a cisgender woman as the transgender man. For not casting a transgender person in an obviously transgender role, director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar gets a TWIT Award. You can find this story at Out.com.

Ted Cruz tried to make a joke about a gender reveal party, a joke which showed he had little understanding of the difference between sex and gender. The comment was less a joke than an attack on his political opponents. The joke backfired, according to LGBTQ Nation. For even attempting a joke which denies medical science and demeans those who believe in reducing transgender suicide and abuse, Ted Cruz gets a TWIT Award.

Joe Rogan deliberately deadnamed and misgendered Caitlyn Jenner as he launched a vile and unfunny joke about her transition. When he was criticized for the remarks, Mr. Rogan claimed that he was merely asking, “Are you sure?” Yes, we are sure that the remarks are a sign of bad character on the part of Mr. Rogan. For both making the remarks and for attempting to defend them after, Joe Rogan gets a TWIT. Pink News has this story.

While most of the cast of the Harry Potter movies, including the three young stars, have come out in opposition to J.K. Rowling’s statements about transgender people, Robbie Coltrane defended her, saying, “There’s a Twitter generation hanging around waiting to be offended.” It is one thing for him to defend her as a person, but Mr. Coltrane said, “I don’t think what she said was offensive, really.” Yes, it was offensive. It was factually wrong, and it was meant to demean others. Mr. Coltrane gets a TWIT. His remarks can be found in The Daily Mail.

Kevin Whitt appears in a political ad, in which he claims to be a “former transgender person” who “detransitioned.” An investigation into his background reveals that he did not refer to himself as transgender until after he began working for conservative religious groups. He was a drag queen, but always used he/him/his pronouns. For lying about his gender identity, and for using that lie in an attempt to demean others, Kevin Whitt gets a TWIT. LGBTQ Nation has this story. Thanks again to Alyssa Washington for a link to 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