The Week In Transgenderism 12/10/12

Laughton

There can be times when flip flopping is a good thing. One such instance is the flip flop of the first openly TG state official who was elected to the legislature in New Hampshire and then announced she was stepping down over the controversy caused by her criminal past. Was she a carjacker or murderer? No, she was convicted of credit card fraud in 2008. When the news first came out she said she’d step down but now the flip has flopped and she’s decided to wait for the state Attorney General to rule on whether or not a convicted felon can be elected. Hang in there Stacie Laughton. You’ve paid your debt to society and now you should be able to serve. The story is at LGBTQnation.com.

A transgender festival in Jakarta was shut down when the religious right, members of the Islamic Defenders Front, showed up at the event and demanded it pack up and get out. The Defenders said that the festival, which was an attempt to educate the community that transgender people are not indecent and strange, was actually a beauty pageant for “waria.” Organizers maintain that it was not a beauty pageant and while there was to be a contest as part of the festival it wasn’t based on looks and beauty. Get the story in The Jakarta Globe.

Kiki Scene

So you think the drag balls depicted in the Paris is Burning are a thing of the past? You would be wrong. There’s a new scene in New York City and it’s got a new name. They call it the Kiki Scene and the princesses who strut their stuff at the balls of the new century aren’t old enough to remember the 20th century. Find out what’s hot and happening with the new drag ball culture in the Columbia Daily Spectator’s magazine.

Claudia Charriez

A former transgender contestant on America’s Top Model, Claudia Charriez, was in court last week testifying against her firefighter boyfriend, In August he threw her into a phone booth (they still have phone booths in NYC?) and choked, bit and beat her. Was it a hate crime? No, the boyfriend knew all about her gender status — he had seen her on Top Model before they even met. It was more likely a “love” crime. He just might be one of those guys who can’t handle his woman even looking at another man. Read about the dysfunction in The New York Daily News.

Remember that school district in New Hampshire that said a transgender female student couldn’t use the girl’s room? The case was settled and the girl ended up going to a new school where she is free to be herself. Not learning any lesson from the court case the Nashua School District, where she was discriminated against, has failed to add a rule about transgender students and so the community has started a petition to force the school board to adopt a TG policy. The district says it doesn’t come up enough for them to create a transgender policy. Read the story in the Nashua Telegraph.

Bond, Justin Vivian Bond

Justin Vivian Bond is conquering New York City without throwing it into a phone booth and beating it up. Bond has a new cabaret show called Snow Angel. It’s now on stage at 54 Below and is Bond’s holiday spectacular. Bond is having a good year with the release of a CD title Silver Wells (See a mini review in last week’s TransVocalizers) and the release of a new fragrance for men, women and those in between, called The Afternoon of a Faun. Read an interview with Bond in The Huffington Post.

Danny Ximo

East of New York City, out in the Hamptons, they’ll be doing a show called Holiday Spectacular Spectacular. Friday and Saturday the 14th and 15th the members of a troupe called Our Fabulous Variety Show will be hoofing and vocalizing to holiday faves. They do it with a bit of a twist though in the person of Danny Ximo. Danny is a female impersonator who will be appearing as Marilyn Monroe, Liza Minelli and Carmen Miranda. Ximo says that before he started his impersonation career he made a big deal out of dressing in drag for Halloween. Now he goes out on that holiday in butch costumes. If you seek a cure for crossdressing maybe all you need is to turn it into your job? Read about the show and Mr. Ximo in the East Hampton Press.

It’s time to meet more Brazilian transgender models. We all know about Lea T. and she seems to have been the tip of the iceberg. A modeling agency owner in Brazil says that the county has undergone a seismic shift when it comes to acceptance of gays and TGs so why shouldn’t TG models be the next big thing? Read about the newest girls to walk to walk the runway in The Huffington Post.

Gabrielle Ludwig

If you want to play college basketball on a team of women all you need to prove, besides the ability to play basketball, is that you have a birth certificate saying you’re a woman. That NCAA rule allowed Gabrielle Ludwig, who does possess that item, to play ball with the Mission College women’s team. Did we mention that Gabbi is 50-years-old? Find out how she did in her first game at UPI.com.

The idea that special protections for trans people aren’t needed seems to be a northern thing. North of New Hampshire, up Canada way, their Human Rights Commission seems to feel that gender identity and gender expression is covered already under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Are they ? Read the story at LifeSiteNews.com.

We learned last week that the DSM-V, the manual used by psychiatrists to diagnose patients, was changing the term Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria. Now we learn that the new official term for what we have will be moved totally out of the sexual disorders chapter and have a place of it’s own. Read about the latest in the GID Reform blog.

A Spectrum performer

A few decades ago the only drag to found on college campuses happened when a frat thought it was a good idea to make their pledges dress up like girls for pledge week. In the 21st century it seems like there’s a drag show on campus every time you look. Often they feature amateur student performers along with the professional queens. The latest one happened two Fridays ago at the University of Northern Colorado. The show was called Spectrum and it raised over $1400 for an AIDS charity. Check out the story in The Mirror.

TWITs

It’s crazy how much progress has been made in educating people about the existence of transgender people but there are still people who just don’t get it. When those people write a television show that could possibly spread the wrong information to millions we must step in and issue a TWIT Award. Our first recipients this week are the writers of General Hospital. They introduced a new character on the show and while he’s presented as a gay male nurse he carries lipstick and offers a heterosexual woman a touch up. In the first place, you shouldn’t share lipstick. In the second place where do people get the idea that gay men have lipstick available at all times? Having lipstick would be proper for a MtF TG character. Unless they plan to have the nurse show up at the hospital in drag in an upcoming show they messed this one up. See the nurse character, not wearing lipstick, at towleroad.com.

The sad thing we have learned by doing a lot of Web searches for TWIT bits is that Googling “crossdresser” or variations of that term will get you a few pages of stories involving crossdressers doing stupid and criminal things. It’s like the word is so associated with bad behavior we might as well just go back to being transvestites. The latest crossdresser — or perhaps just plain perv — is a man in Thousand Oaks, California who has been dressing in women’s clothes and exposing his male parts to children. Just stop it! The story is on the ABC News website.

If you simply must rob banks in drag use some of your ill gotten gains to get makeovers and wig styling. Maybe a fashion consultant so they look stylish when they hand over the demand note. If we can’t convince the crooks to stops drag robbery they should at least make a better effort at passing so the headline isn’t “Cross-dresser robs South County U.S. bank, police say.” That’s the headline we found on the KSDK website.

Tags: featured, news, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News