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The Week In Trans 9/9/19

ceciliab | Sep 9, 2019

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Marti Gould Cummings

A New York City drag queen announced her candidacy for the New York City Council, where they hope to represent Manhattan’s District 7. Marti Could Cummings is a longtime activist who sits on Community Board 9 or Upper Manhattan and the mayor’s Nightlife Council. Learn more about Marti from the Out website.

Julián Castro is the latest Democratic candidate for President to sit down with Mara Keisling to talk about issues that affect transgender people. LGBTQ Nation has a story, while the National Center for Transgender Equality has the video.

Four years ago, Kyler Prescott was constantly misgendered by staff while he was on suicide watch at Rady’s Children Hospital-San Diego. Five weeks after he left the hospital, he committed suicide. His mother sued the hospital for not training its staff in handling transgender patients. Recently, the case was settled out of court, according to LGBTQ Nation.

A transgender woman in Japan was granted a long-term residency permit. Such a permit is granted to a foreigner who has married a Japanese person, but Japan does not recognize same-sex marriage, and requires gender confirmation surgery before it recognizes a transgender person in the gender with which the person identifies. CNN took notice of this story.

In Newsweek, Gillian Branstetter exposes the prejudice behind the anti-transgender briefs in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Home v. Aimee Stephens, and makes the case that the law should protect transgender people from discrimination. However, as an article in The Detroit News points out (as it introduces the people arguing for the funeral homes), the law as it stands does not specifically protect gender identity, and the Supreme Court could make it up to Congress and the President to act.

Drag Race winner Aquaria.

RuPaul’s Drag Race Live! is coming to the Flamingo Las Vegas in early 2020. Villains and victors from the television show will be live on stage in a Las Vegas residency with shows Monday through Sunday with a rotating cast of queens. Learn more from The New York Post.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation announced it would start offering gender neutral driver’s licenses in 2020. A Pa. Republican State Rep. wants to stop the change by introducing a bill that would stop PennDOT from officially offering gender-neutral licenses. PennDot believes it has the authority to make the change. Learn more from the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

A long article about TERFs, who call themselves “gender-critical feminists,” appears in Vox.

Black actor Malik Yoba of Cool Runnings and Empire shared a video to Instagram of a man defending his transgender girlfriend while being taunted by a group of people. (The man was found dead later, an apparent suicide.) Yoba defends trans attraction in the text he sent with the video. Learn more from Yahoo Entertainment.

Video gaming company SoaR has severed its association with TheRealKenzo, a YouTube gaming celebrity, for comments he made to a transgender woman last year. He has since apologized to the transgender woman, EeveeA. LGBTQ Nation has this story.

Bailey Reeves

Bailey Reeves was a transgender teen and a high school senior. She is the seventeenth transgender person to be murdered in the United States this year, and the third to be killed in Maryland. She also continues the trend of transgender women of color being especially vulnerable. The Baltimore Sun has this story.

Fred Joseph Costanza has been arrested after severely beating a transgender woman named Lauren Jackson at a park in Oregon. The reason for the attack was that Ms. Jackson had used the lady’s restroom. This story comes from The Oregonian.

We mentioned last week that an Appeals Court ruled that the state of Idaho must pay for a transgender inmate’s gender confirmation surgery, saying that the surgery was for a known medical condition. This week, CBS2 Idaho reports that the cost for the legal work in that case is over $300,000, not counting an appeal to the Supreme Court. It is said that five additional inmates are requesting gender confirmation surgery.

The state of Illinois has passed a law which requires schools to teach something of LGBTQ history. The law is very vague, and leaves a lot to the school and school district, according to The Chicago Tribune.

9-year-old drag queen KweenKeeKee.

The kids are alright. The drag queen kids that is. Just a few decades ago doing drag was illegal but in the 21st century more and more young people are able to act on their drag urges without fear. They are starting as young as 9, if there hasn’t already been one who started being fabulous younger than that. Get the story on a few of the young drag queens from The New York Times.

The Marin Independent Journal had an article about the various services available to transgender people in the northern San Francisco area.

Some trans women, who cannot afford HRT or other medical care, still resort to silicone pumping, according to NPR. It is a very dangerous practice, and we do not endorse it.

Some trans men, who cannot afford “top surgery,” resort to a GoFundMe campaign. Charlie Allan of Scotland raised more than £4,000 in a campaign to “get boobies sliced off.” The Scottish Sun had this story.

Willam Belli

Willam Belli has come out with a line of makeup for the art of drag and it’s called Coverboy. Belli is also designing a “drag house” that people will be able to rent through Airbnb starting in November. Learn more from the Fast Company website.

A film that premiered at the Burbank International Film Festival last week features a trans male character played by a trans actor. The film is titled Relish and is a road trip story telling the tale of 5 teenage outsiders who break out of rehab and head to a music festival. Learn more about the film from The Huffington Post.

Many people took notice of June Eastwood’s debut in NCAA women’s cross country, running for the University of Montana. She actually finished seventh, as Let’s Run noted, nineteen seconds behind first place. While the debate is far from over, she hardly dominated in the way that some said she would.

Ezekiel Acosta is a transgender teenager, and a video of him with his dad giving him a haircut. did a story on this.

Shakina Nayfack

Shakina Nayfack is the guest on the latest episode of the LGBTQ&A podcast. She can be seen on the finale of Transparent, later this month.

While Star Trek presents a progressive and utopian future, one thing that is missing is LGBTQ representation. Attempts to include LGBTQ characters often get censored. The Mary Jane explains why transgender fans identify with Jadzia Dax of Deep Space 9, even though the character is not really transgender.

Britain is in a bit of a political mess right now, with the possibility of a new election. Some see Boris Johnson using transgender rights as a way to scare some voters, should there be an election. Pink News has this story.

Human Rights Watch reports that there is “systemic violence against transgender women in Lebanon.

The U.S. Ambassador to Dahka, Earl R. Miller, spoke at a book launch at Dhaka University, where he said that transgender people face hatred around the world. This story comes from The Daily Star.

Georgie Stone

Georgie Stone is a transgender teen and advocate from Australia. She fought to get rid of the requirement that transgender minors had to get permission from a court to begin hormone treatment. The Guardian has an interview with her mother, and in the interview, we see that activism runs in the family.

Indya Moore received the Cover of the Year award at the Fashion Media Awards, and the theme of their speech and outfit was the transgender people who have been murdered this year. They had special earrings, which held pictures of those victims. This story caught the attention of The Hollywood Reporter. [The Hollywood Reporter story does not use Ms. Moore’s preferred pronouns. They could be angling for a TWIT Award.] Yahoo Lifestyle has more photos of Ms. Moore’s outfit.

TWITs

Much of the British press seems to be trying to outdo each other in anti-transgender rhetoric. The Telegraph has a story about how “potential harms are ignored, glossed over or falsified” in books and lessons for school children regarding transgender issues. Not telling students about transgender issues, or only presenting negatives about trasngender issues, has a great deal of harm as well, including anxiety and depression. The article conveniently glosses over that. The Telegraph also alleges “serious, irreversible damage” can be done by medically treating transgender children. They again ignore the serious and irreversible damage that can be caused by not medically treating transgender children. Moreover, when a person with more first-hand knowledge of transgender people says, “Well, there’s some truth there, but you’re missing a lot of what’s happening,” they ignore everything that the person says except for the moment of agreement. For twisting the truth to present a biased perspective, The Telegraph gets a TWIT Award.

A blog at The National Catholic Register has a post entitled, “Here’s How We Can Stop The Transgender Juggernaut.” The basic idea is to go to court to “strike at the heart of the four pillars of the ‘transitioning’ process.” This has been tried, and it fails. It fails in large measure because large medical groups are on the other side of this issue, saying that they tried what the religious groups recommend, and it didn’t work. For ignoring what has been happening, Benjamin Wiker gets a TWIT. (P.S., he starts out by saying that “transgenderism will surely be the gateway to social and legal acceptance of pedophilia.” That is a logical fallacy known as a slippery slope.)

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.