The Week In Transgenderism 8/17/15

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Remember the film Too Wong Foo…? It was released 20 years ago. How did a film about three gay drag queens on a road trip get made 20 years ago? It was the 20th century, not the 21st and it seems like it must have been a hard sell to studio executives. Even with the success of …Priscilla, Queen of the Desert how much work went into convincing the powers that be to make the film? Thanks to Jan Brown for pointing us to the story of how the film got made in The Advocate.

Presidential candidate and popcorn popper squirrel cooker Mike Huckabee added to his TWIT Awards last week when he declared that paying for gender reassignment for military personnel wasn’t going to make our country safer. He seemed to feel it was going to be a big burden financially. Well, turns out it’s just a drop in the bucket of the military’s total budget. Find out how little it would cost to allow our soldiers to serve in the bodies they want by checking out the article in Fortune.

Shiloh Quine

Last week we gave a TWIT Award to California for releasing a prisoner on parole after she had won a legal battle that forced the state to give her gender reassignment surgery. They released her to avoid having to supply GRS. But the decision in her case has helped another prisoner who will now get her GRS and be transferred to a female prison. The state cannot let her out on parole since she is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Read Shiloh Quine’s story in The Los Angeles Times.

We all look at trans teen Jazz Jennings as a brave young lady who is sharing her story with the world. She has done so openly since she was a child. Now that she is on television with her reality show she has been exposed to a wider audience and not everyone is supportive. In fact some of them are horrifying. Read about the comments on her videos that are not even slightly veiled death threats on the People magazine website.

Redmayne as Elbe

When Eddie Redmayne was asked to portray Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl he knew nothing of trans issues. But, he actually started learning how to play a female when he was in school at Eton, an all boys school. He played women’s roles in plays there and later at Cambridge. Redmayne is known for extensive preparation for his roles and this one was no exception. For the Lili Elbe part he consulted with Lana Wachowski and April Ashley, as well as some other trans women. Read all about it in Out.

Franken

Can an American trans comedian find happiness performing in the U.K. That is the question. It can only be answered by comic Sarah Franken who just transitioned earlier this year. She was a male comic before that and has only been performing as Sarah since March. The bottom line? She’s getting bookings all around the U.K. and audiences seem to like her. They say comedy comes from pain and Sarah had a lot of that in her life. Read about her on the Reuters website.

A lesbian woman whose father transitioned to womanhood needed to find some children’s books that reflected her family when she and her partner had a child. She found that books with gay parents were plentiful but trans people didn’t feature in many of the stories. So she set about writing a book about a trans teddy bear. Learn more about Introducing Teddy in The Guardian.

Hari Nef

There’s a new trans woman model on the fashion scene. Her name is Hari Nef and she comes from Philadelphia, Pa. by way of Boston. She is the offspring of top Philly adman David Nef. She was “discovered” after she started taking hormones in 2014 and was posting her photos on Instagram. Since then she has signed with IMG Models in L.A., was profiled in Vogue and landed a role on the original series Transparent. Read her whole story in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The country of Nepal has finally recognized its trans citizens. Monica Shahi is the first person there who has been given a passport that has a third category for gender. Her passport features an “O” which represents “Other.” Nepal is the fifth country to allow a third gender category for passport holders. The others are Bangladesh, India, Denmark, and Australia. Read more about it on the TIME website.

Student Avery Steck

A Pittsburgh, Pa. area high school could be the role model for  policies on trans students. The school has only a few out trans students (Avery Steck, pictures at the left is one) but they have created policies that work to prevent any bullying of trans students, affirm the right of the student to use the restroom of their choice and even provide trans students with pals to go along on restroom breaks so they don’t have to walk into a gendered space alone. Learn more about this progressive school in western Pennsylvania in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Model Isla Tack

There’s a fab fashion show happening this week and it’s part of Fashion Week. It features drag queen models who will walk the runway in one designer’s avant garde fashions during the finale. Drag queen models? Is this in Paris? New York? San Francisco perhaps? No, it’s part of Omaha Fashion Week. The designer is Jennifer Pool and she creates designs for drag queens, so who better to model them? Read all about the show at Omaha.com.

Everyday it seems that more trans milestones are reached. Last week it was the appearance of the first every trans lead character in an animated series. The character is Shona and she and three other gamers are the focus of a series called Gen Zed. The show is aimed at millennials and is available on the Web where millennials spend most of their time. The actress who voices the Shona character is Julie Rei Goldstein. Thanks to Jan Brown for pointing out the story in The Advocate.

Have you ever seen the perfect dress on a store rack, found it in your size and bought it without trying it on, only to find when you get it home that it will not, no matter how you suck in your waist, zip up? It’s happened to many of us. Especially in the TG community where oftentimes we are reluctant to use a store dressing room. The reason this happens is not just because different manufacturers use different standards for sizing. The sizes have actually changed over the years. Thanks to Jamie Roberts for pointing us at a chart that shows just how absurd women’s clothing sizes are. The story is in The Washington Post.

Riya Patel was her own boss till she sold her stores to finance GRS.

Jamie also passed along a link to a story about how trans people are doing in the workplace. Everyone’s story is different and those who work with the public have special challenges to face. With the rise in awareness of trans identities members of the general public haven’t yet learned the proper etiquette for interacting with their trans nail technician. Read some “trans in the workplace” stories on the Bloomberg website.

Some nations out-do the U.S.A. when it comes to trans rights. Of course back in 2004 and 2007 England and Spain changed the rules and allowed trans people to change their official documents without having surgery. That’s a big step. But some the real leaders in trans rights are in South America. In Argentina, for example, surgery is not required to change documents and medical practitioners are required to provide free hormones and GRS. Learn more about the strides that have been made in the treatment of trans people in South America in The New Yorker.

Zooming from South America to Poland we find that country poised to take a step in the right direction but it’s a grudging step. The Polish Senate adopted the Gender Marker Change Act last week. While it was originally written to make the government drop the requirement that people had to have reassignment surgery before they could change their documents last minute amendments to the Act force those who wish to change their documents to have statements from two independent experts and have a physiologist in attendance to speak on their behalf at the court session seeking name and gender change. We’re not putting this in the TWIT Award section since it is a step in the right direction. Learn more on the Care2 website.

& Other Stories model.

The retail chain H&M has another division of sister stores called & Other Stories. That chain launched an ad campaign last week that features trans models. Not only were the models trans, some of the crew members on the photo shoot were trans. The photographer, stylist, and makeup artist were all trans people. Learn more on the TIME website.

Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner teamed up to visit with gender diverse kids who are participants in the Center for Transyouth Health and Development that is located at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Of course the visit was recorded on video to be part of Jenner’s reality show/documentary series. Learn more at the People magazine website.

TWITs

Presidential candidate and almost absentee governor of New Jersey Chris Christie did stop back at his office in Trenton to do some bill signing last week. One of the bills that he did not sign, but vetoed, was the Birth Certificate Modernization Bill. If it had become law it would have allowed trans people to change the gender marker on their birth certificates with proof of treatment. Christie says he believes the legislation would make it too easy for people to commit fraud. That earns the governor a TWIT Award. Read more on the NBC News website.

There is a nun who ministers to trans people. She does this secretly since the Catholic Church officially does not accept trans people. She uses the pseudonym Sister Monica and she has actively sought to help trans folks for the past sixteen years. We applaud Sister Monica and wish her well with her efforts. We hand a TWIT Award to the religious publication that reported on a story about her in the Religion News Service and called it “propaganda.” It seems to us that the propaganda here is being spread by the Get Religion website.

If we actually sent TWIT Award statuettes to the recipients Fox News would have an entire room of shelves dedicated to holding the ones they have earned. Here comes another one! They featured an attorney (who happened to be a blonde female. What is it with that network and blondes?) on their Fox & Friends morning chat fest who weighed in on the story about the prison inmate in California who will be getting her GRS at state expense. The attorney specializes in divorce law but she insisted that GRS was not medically necessary for the inmate, who has been granted the surgery. She’s not a doctor or psychiatrist but…. She went on to say that this was going to set a precedent and there would be a landslide of inmates applying for surgery and more prisons would have to be built to house them. Oh hyperbole! Where would Fox News be without you? Read all about it and view a video clip on the Raw Story website.

There is a new menace that is intruding on LGBTQ spaces. It is and insidious attack on places where LGBTQ people have traditionally sought refuge. It also directly threatens our drag performers in the place where they are meant to be the one standing in the spotlight. What is this menace? It’s bachelorette parties. Those girls can get crazy. A TWIT Award goes to the bachelorettes who decide to have their party at the gay bar instead of the male stripper bar. Read about the problem on the Slate website.

Tags: drag, dress sizes, Eddie Redmayne, featured, Jazz Jennings, Jennifer Pool, Julie Rei Goldstein, Lili Elbe, Too Wong Foo, Transgender

Category: Transgender Community News