The Week In Transgenderism 1/7/13

Laughton

There are good reasons why you shouldn’t ever break the law and get convicted of a felony. Especially if you want to go into politics. Stacie Laughton has learned that the hard way after a series of reversals. She won a seat in New Hampshire’s legislature as a representative. Then she was revealed to have been convicted of credit card fraud in 2008. She vowed to fight it then changed her mind and resigned. A special election was instituted and Stacie said she would run in it to get her seat back. Then she found out that she is still not eligible to hold office in New Hampshire. Get the details from the Nashua Patch.

Arizona. Need we say more? The latest adventures of Thomas Beatie, the transman who decided to bear children after his wife was unable to, now includes getting thwarted in his efforts to divorce that wife because the judge ruling in his divorce case has doubts that the marriage was legal since Beatie is transgendered. Get the regressive details at LGBTQnation.com.

Batgirl

TG characters in DC Comics? It is in the works. The writer responsible for Batgirl has vowed to include a trans character in the series this year. Interestingly, speculation as to who the TG will be doesn’t seem to take into account that the character could be an FtM. Transwomen have appeared in DC Comics in the past and Batgirl has featured transwomen. Find out more at comicbookbin.com.

Last week we reported that the Be-All convention that has been held annually in Chicago for many years is going out of business. Rumors flew that First Event 2013 had been canceled, too. We are happy to report that First Event 2013 will go on as scheduled January 23-27, 2013. Get the details from PRLOG.com.

Convicted killer Michelle Kosilek really riled up the right wing when the judge ruled that the state of Massachusetts had to pay for her GRS. Now two Republican State Representatives have introduced a bill that would give every law abiding citizen of the state $700,000 to cover any legal fees they may incurr. They say it’s only fair if a “vicious murderer” gets large sums of money from the state that the law abiding citizenry should be able to get theirs. Read about the crazy response to the Kosilek lawsuit that would bankrupt Massachusetts at thinkprogress.org.

Justin Vivian Bond

To many performers a review in the New York Times is a treat. When it takes some swipes at your gender identification maybe a Times review isn’t that nice. Recently a Times critic wrote up his take on Justin Vivian Bond’s holiday show Snow Angel. Bond was not thrilled. While it was positive overall concerning the performance, Bond felt that there was a negative feeling about transgenderism lurking below the surface, as well as some openly written slights. Read about Bond’s gripes with the review at queerty.com.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, was a queen. Well, Fitzgerald didn’t dress up all the time but he did dress from time to time and his picture en femme appeared in The New York Times in 1916 when he was performing on stage in a show at his college. Was he a queen? Drag in 1916 was an accepted form of entertainment and college theatricals with men playing the female roles were all the rage. Check out Fitzgerald as a lady at perezhilton.com.

An upcoming television show from the producer of True Blood and Six Feet Under has a preposterous premise; A master thief assumes the identity of a small town sheriff in order to hide out from gangsters who feel he has double crossed them. He both upholds the law and carries out criminal enterprise at the same time. We only mention it because his right hand man, a martial arts expert and computer hacker played by Hoon Lee (Premium Rush, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), is a crossdresser. Read all about the new show at queerty.com.

Needles

Things you did not know about Sharon Needles. She dropped out of school at 16 and traveled the land before becoming that tastiest of all burgers, a Pittsburgher. Aaron Coady is her real name and she’s working as a horror movie hostess on Logo and has a new album coming out next month. Read an interview with Sharon Needles in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and learn even more.

Another Drag Race alumna, Willam Belli, is also not doing too badly in the work opportunity area. This Tuesday Willam will appear on The New Normal on NBC. Willam plays a character named Nana Queen. Get the story, along with a blurry picture of Willam in character at newnownext.com.

The Catholic church has a holiday called the Feast of the Epiphany. It was January 6th. An epiphany is a sudden realization. In a moment you see something that you hadn’t considered before or recognize an essential truth. This past Feast of the Epiphany was sort of special since it was during this past year that the church, or some it, has had an epiphany about transgendered people. They now are starting to realize that TGs are people too, and they can be religious. Read about it in The National Catholic Reporter.

Sushi and the shoe

In Key West they celebrate the new year by dropping a giant red high heel containing a drag performer instead of a ball encrusted with crystals. The tradition has been going every New Year’s Eve for the past 16 years. The very first time the shoe dropped was the result of a sudden realization, or epiphany, that it would be a totally awesome thing to do. The police thought otherwise since no one had filled out the proper paperwork for a shoe drop and the drag performer heard a policeman say to her, “Get out of the shoe.” The story of what happened in 1996 and since can be found at CNN.com.

In San Francisco drag queens are not dropping from the sky in giant high heels. They are too busy making fun of Sex and the City. While it was an enormous hit Sex and the City did leave many openings for satire. And it’s even funnier when drag performers play the role of the characters from the show. Carrie Bradshaw is portrayed by Heklina and they’re doing the Sex and the City: Live! show every Wednesday at the San Francisco club Rebel. See a promo video on Queerty.com.

Conselor Victoria Ortega

The problems Latino/a people have in our culture are exacerbated by being transgendered. Poverty and lack of education is enough of a handicap but adding transgenderism into the mix makes it extremely hard to become the person you know you really are. Depression and addiction often occur and that makes the struggle seem to be just too much. In Los Angeles the Clínica Monseñor Oscar A. Romero is providing a place for Latino/a TGs to come together and get organized to help themselves. Read about it on the NBCLatino website.

TWITs

You’ve been locked up in a mental institution since 1989 for your habit of strangling people to death, or severe injury, and one day last week you decide to make a break for it. If you were the the Black Dog Strangler where would you go to hide out? The Strangler went straight to a gay/drag bar in Newcastle, U.K. He was chatting up the regulars and had been having a jolly time in the bar all day. For not heading out of the country as fast as possible — and for being a strangler in first place — we give one TWIT Award to the Black Dog Strangler. One of the drag performers in the club tells how it all went down in ChronicleLive.

Ricky Gervais is in hot water with the transgender community. That should not surprise anyone since Gervais does tend to get people in many communities pissed off. This particular outrage may not actually be because Gervais said something offensive to TGs. It seems that he recently tweeted a short conversation (145 characters or less!) between Gervais and his pal Karl Pilkington. Gervais said that transsexuals “think they are women trapped in a man’s body” and Pilkington asked if that was going to mean that people would be going to doctors to live as their inner gerbil. The poop storm then descended on Gervais. To say they were upset is an understatement. What you have to realize though is that Pilkington is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And, if we were to give a TWIT Award to Gervais for anything it would be for the manner in which he makes fun of and ridicules his “pal.” So the TWIT Award goes to those who believe that Gervais said anything negative about transsexuals. Get the full story and the writer’s defense of Gervais in GayStarNews.

Tags: featured, news, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News