The Week In Transgenderism 12/1/14

The Week In Transgenderism where our motto is, “If you haven’t heard it it’s news to you.”

Irish drag queen Panti Bliss

Drag performer Panti Bliss, who became famous for an impassioned speech she gave about the oppression of gay people in Ireland, is getting the Person of the Year Award (which is much more exciting than getting a TWIT Award) to be presented this coming Saturday. The awards will be broadcast live in the U.K. This marks the 40th year the awards have been given out. Read more in the Herald.

Could a minor change in a Pentagon personnel policy mean that trans troops in the military can come out to their commanding officers? It seems that way. Three months ago the policy change said that soldiers with “congenital or developmental defect” can now only be discharged if their “defect” interferes with the performance of their assignments. Being TG is considered a “defect” by the military. Of course that’s what a TG think tank believes. Learn more in the Military Times.

Monica Jones

The Arizona trans activist convicted of prostitution under a vaguely worded law that makes it easy for police to profile trans women as sex workers is appealing her conviction. Monica Jones goes to court today to argue that the ordinance she was convicted under is not only vague but unconstitutionally so and it infringes on free-speech rights. Read about it in The Advocate. (They may make you watch a commercial first.)

Women’s colleges are having to deal with the issues surround admission of transgender students. Of course there is the question of admitting trans women to these colleges but there is also the question posed by the admittance of female students who come out as trans men during their college years. Read, or listen, to one trans man’s story about his experience at Wellesly on the NPR website.

19th century CD

Men who wanted to crossdress in the 19th century had the advantage of the advanced corsetry of the day so they could easily achieve feminine figures. However beard cover was not as developed so there tend to be more photos of bearded ladies of that age rather than smooth faced beauties. A website has assembled several shots of crossdressed ladies of long ago. They admit some of the photos may have been altered using Photoshop or the primitive techniques of the day but you may still find them interesting. Check them out at Queerty.

The Canadian Senate has been acting a bit like the U.S. Senate has for the past few years. Two years ago the House of Commons passed a bill to provide hate crimes protections to trans people. The Senate has sat on it and used bureaucratic slight of hand to avoid bringing the bill to a vote. They just kicked it down the road to next year and one MP is accusing conservatives in the Senate of blocking the bill to kill it by delaying a vote. Read the story in Pink News.

Thornes

There’s a play running in New York City titled On a Stool at the End of the Bar. It’s about a woman raising three teenagers in New Jersey with her blue-collar boyfriend. Their world is rocked when it gets out that the woman is trans. The character is played by a woman who is trans. And her world may get rocked now that the show is geting publicity. She is mainly a rock singer and performer and her rock and roll connections don’t really know she is trans. It may be a case of life imitating art. Read all about Antoinette Thornes and the play in The Advocate.

Sometimes the health care system is hard to navigate. It’s even more difficult for trans people. Ignorance of transgenderism makes some healthcare providers insensitive to trans patients. Other providers react to trans patients from a biased viewpoint and are actively hostile. Trans women being addressed as “sir” and “mister” are just some of the grievances reported in a 2011 report on the state of TG healthcare. Of course, as with most things in our society. it’s poorer people who bear the brunt of abuse. Since they don’t have the money to go to doctors who are better informed about trans issues they have to accept bad treatment from the providers they can afford. Read more in The New York Daily News.

Alaska Is A Drag

A short film that made noise on the film festival circuit, taking the Iris Prize for LGBT short films, is trying to grow into a feature film. To do that they have started a Kickstarter campaign with the modest goal of raising $50,000. The film is about a gay drag performer who lives in Alaska and has a day job at the local fish cannery. It’s called Alaska Is A Drag. The director describes it as “Billy Elliot in reverse, or Rocky in drag. Learn more at Queerty.

Have you ever pondered why some websites and publications are using the word “trans” with a asterisk behind it? As in “trans*.” Some of you may have wondered about what that asterisk is supposed to mean but were not motivated enough to Google it. Don’t worry, we took the time to Google it and this is what we found on the Q Center website.

Our Lady J

The Amazon television show Transparent was criticized for not having any trans writers on their staff. The show’s creator had announced that they would find a trans woman to work on the show for the second season and they even had a contest where writers submitted samples of their work. However they arrived at their decision, the trans performer, singer and classical pianist Our Lady J has announced that she will be taking off a year from performing to write for the show. Get more info at the Autostraddle website.

If you happen to be in San Francisco don’t bother with the flowers in your hair. Get your tush on down to the Safeway Holiday Ice Rink on December 11 for a San Francisco only treat, and we ain’t talkin’ about Rice-a-Roni. We’re talking about Drag Queens on Ice! That’s a holiday show that features over a dozen of San Francisco’s best drag performers wearing ice skates. Read more and find out how to get your tickets in Broadway World.

Speaking of queens, it’s hard to believe that season 7 of RuPaul’s Drag Race will be starting its engine in January. They will be announcing the lineup of contestants on December 7 during the 2014 NewNowNext Awards broadcast on Logo. It’s just one of the Drag Race events slated for Logo this month. Does Logo even have any other programming? Read a bit about it in The Huffington Post.

First same-sex marriage in Texas.

A gay couple in Texas were the first same-sex to get married in that state. It happened over 40 years ago and it only happened because of a tactic that is worthy of a Linda Jensen tale. One of the men was a female impersonator and he had a voter registration card that said he was “female” and that, along with his long, frosted blonde wig, fooled the county clerk into issuing a marriage license. Of course it didn’t work out in the long run but not just for the couple. Their marriage provoked the state to take steps to stop things like that from happening, Read all about it in The San Antonio Express-News.

The Human Rights Campaign has had a troubled relationship with the transgender community. Too often in the past they have done little to include trans people. It got so bad that the new head of the organization felt needed to go to Southern Comfort and make a speech in which he promised that the HRC would do better and not marginalize trans people. Then they decided to keep silent in the past few weeks while other organizations came out supporting the President’s nominees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC is charged with enforcing non-discrimination protections for transgendered workers. HRC’s support for the nominees should have been immediate. Instead they waited for days before telling the press just yesterday that they support the nominees. Are they up to something? Read about it in The Washington Blade.

Miss Eldorado, 1926

The 1920s were called the Roaring Twenties in the U.S.A. In Berlin, Germany the citizens would have thought America’s roaring was boring. Berlin was home to an uninhibited gay scene; German scientists had decided that same-sex love was normal; crossdressing was done openly and there were many clubs and transvestite balls. Of course Adolph Hitler had to come along and spoil everyone’s fun but until he did Germany was the place to be if you were gay or trans. (After he arrived it was best to get out quickly.) They even pioneered gender reassignment surgery in Germany. Learn more about this fascinating time and place in a review of a new book featured in the Mail.

Trans man Krem.

The world of fantasy gaming is mostly a place for nerdy dudes to pretend they’re warriors and heroes and while there’s a lot of first person shooting and blowing things up there’s not much discussion of gender and sexuality or inclusion of LGBT characters. So heads up all you gamers. Well, if you’re gamers you probably already know this. The gaming world changes right now with Dragon Age Inquisition. That’s because the game has a trans man character and also offers gay, lesbian and bisexual characters. Don’t bother to read more about it if you don’t understand gamer lingo but the story in on the Observation Deck website.

TWITs

A couple of weeks ago we told you about the first ever trans pride parade in Bangladesh. Around the same time there was a pride parade in Bangalore, India. While the Bangladesh parade went well a few days after the Bangalore parade the police started arresting hijra. At least 167 were detained without any charges. They were said, by the police, to be violating India’s Beggary Act of 1975. But hijra were in their homes or doing their chores when they were rounded up. Other hijra who came to the police station to assist their sisters were also arrested. This goes way beyond a TWIT Award but we’re issuing one to the police in Bangalore. Read this awful story on the 76Crimes website.

Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean are not known for their tolerance of crossdressing. The local people don’t care too much if tourists do it but when other locals do it they tend to equate it with homosexuality and the crossdressed person may be assaulted or even killed. So it was with some surprise that we found a bit of reasonable advice for a Jamaican woman who caught her husband wearing her clothes in a column called Doctor’s Advice. But, not all of the doctor’s advice was factual. For the errors in the doctor’s advice we issue a mini-TWIT Award. But kudos for at least urging the woman to talk wither husband and let love find a way for them to stay together. Read the doctor’s advice in The Gleaner.

Two men in Mexico were murdered a little over a week ago. The two were good samaritans who passed out food and water to migrants riding the rails north. One of them was a transvestite who said that he empathized with the migrants since he felt like he was an outsider, too. The other man was a Honduran who got off a train one day and decided to stay there and help the transvestite. Both were harassed by local criminal gangs and corrupt police but they continued to help the migrants. We wish we could issue more than a TWIT Award, something more like a Cruise Missile, but a TWIT is all we can send south of the border to their evil killers. The story is on the KPBS website.

Here’s a crazy tale from Vietnam. A reportedly trans woman was pulled over by police and for some reason stripped down to her panties in front of the cops. Images of the panty clad women went viral on the Internet and all sorts of explanations for her behavior were tossed around. Some said that she took her clothes off to protest her treatment by the police, The official line on the incident is that the woman wanted to “show off her body.” At 9 a.m. on a busy street? We think there has to be more to this but the woman was let go and we may never know. We’re issuing a TWIT Award to everyone involved since protesting by taking your clothes off is tacky, and taking your clothes off to display your body while you’re pulled over by the cops is really tacky. And the cops saying she wanted to show off is just plain odd. Grow up, people! Read the story and see (blurred) pictures of the incident in The Thanh Nien News.

Tags: Alaska is a Drag, Antoinette Thornes, crossdressing, Drag Race, featured, HRC, Monica Jones, news, Our Lady J, Panti Bliss, Transgender, Transparent, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News