The Week In Transgenderism 9/7/15

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Miley and queens.

The pansexual pop singer with the longest tongue in showbiz, since Gene Simmons, Miley Cyrus, hosted the MTV Video Music Awards and closed out the show, which was fraught with drama and wardrobe skimpiness, by singing her latest song Dooo It with 30 drag queen backup dancers. The queens were all from RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s wild that Drag Race has been on long enough to have that many former contestants. Read more and see photos and video on the People website.

With two movies coming out soon in which cisgender actors play trans roles, The Danish Girl and About Ray, people are beginning to ask if when casting movies with trans characters should directors look for trans actors to fill those roles or should they cast the best actor regardless of gender identity? Read about the current debate in The New York Times.

Ann Thomas

Meanwhile a trans woman who was working part time as an actor decided to jump on the opportunity presented by the growing demand for trans actors and opened her own trans casting service. Ann Thomas started Transgender Talent and while she is still working at a day job she sees many opportunities for trans actors becoming available. Read an interview with her on The Mary Sue website.

Candis Cayne

For some time most roles for trans women in films and television were negative or comedic, and many times comedically negative. The trans sex worker who “fools” a straight guy. The hot woman a man picks up at a bar turns out to be “a dude.” But for many trans actresses any role means a paycheck so they go to the audition and try to get that crappy part. Candice Cayne did what you should do if you’re offered an offensive part. She walked out of the audition and told them why. And the joke didn’t end up in the episode of the show. Learn which show it was and why the part was offensive on the TIME magazine website.

BD Wong in character.

Another story about casting of a trans role comes from another angle altogether. There is a show called Mr. Robot in which a character who has remained in the shadows for 8 episodes is revealed to be a trans woman. The actor who played the character is BD Wong, who has played a trans woman before in M. Butterfly. Wong debated on whether to take the role with the the controversy over cis actors taking on trans roles. He talks about why he took the role and the challenges of playing it in an interview on Vulture.com.

One problem with discriminatory laws aimed at trans people is exactly how would they be enforced? The “restroom wars” in which many places have enacted or tried to enact laws against trans people using the public restroom of their choice raise the question, what are the lawmakers going to do to enforce their new laws? Station “restroom police” at the door of every facility to do a genital check? The stupidly of this type of discrimination is pointed out by the story of Camyrn Colen and his wife Lexie. Camyrn is a trans man and the county clerk in Kentucky who has refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples readily issued a license to this couple. Read all about it in the Daily Mail.

Last Thursday the Obama administration proposed a ban on discrimination against trans people throughout the health care system. The changes in regulations would expand insurance coverage for gender transition and prohibit health care facilities from denying trans people access to the restroom matching their gender identity. Learn more about the proposed changes from Associated Press on the ABC News website.

Vice Ganda

The openly gay host of a television show from Manila called It’s Showtime was picked to be on the cover of a fashion magazine “reimagined” as a beautiful woman. His name is Vice Ganda and he has been an LGBT advocate for years. Inside the magazine he is interviewed and shown in a variety of dresses. The story can be found on ABS-CBN news.com.

Farmington, New Mexico has taken a positive step toward helping trans people who come into contact with law enforcement. Last week they invited the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico to conduct a training session for all their police officers to teach them the proper way to interact with trans people. Get more information about the training in the Daily Times.

Courtney Act doing her act in the film.

Keep your eyes open for a feature length documentary film about the first international drag festival in Texas that happened earlier this year. Along with the usual acts you’d expect to see in something like this — some of the queens from Drag Race — you meet a group of British drag queens and kings who journey to the Lone Star State to join the fun. See a trailer for the film on the Gay Times website.

Here’s a “good news, bad news” story. We’ve told you in past TWIT columns about a trans woman imprisoned in Georgia who was being kept with the male prisoners and denied hormone treatment and feminine garments. Ashley Diamond was serving a 12-year sentence for burglary and waging a legal battle with the state when she was suddenly released on parole. That’s the good news. The bad news is she believes it may have been motivated by the state’s desire to not have to deal with her anymore. Learn more in The New York Times.

Tomorrow Caitlyn Jenner appears on Ellen and answers questions about her transition. Ellen and Caitlyn get into the rumors about her relationship with Candis Cayne, dating, and what tee she uses when she goes golfing. If you want more info about Ms. Jenner you should tune in to Ellen tomorrow, or set the DVR. An advance look at some of the interview can be found on Yahoo.

Redmayne as Elbe

Early reviews of The Danish Girl are praising Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Lili Elbe, the transsexual who underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1930. Redmayne is known for sinking completely into a role, making him transparent as an actor but revealing the character completely. Read a review of his performance from Rueters in The New York Times.

The Danish Girl was directed by Tom Hooper, the director who made The King’s Speech. When asked about his choice of casting Redmayne instead of a trans actor he stated his reasons to Rueters. You can find his answer in The New York Times.

Former military Jennifer Long.

The military seems to have a high number of trans women who join up and serve as men. After they exit the service they come out about their gender identity. The question one Air Force doctor asked back in the 1980s was how come he was seeing more trans patients than he would have expected. His surmise was that the women were trying to fight their natural gender identity by enlisting in what he called a “flight in hypermasculinity.” Read more on this theory and learn about some people who served in stealth mode in The Los Angeles Times.

Blossom with TV reporter.

A trans woman in Jackson, Mississippi, who had a good GPA and college admission test scores had been trying to get into nursing school without success. She had applied to six schools and was rejected, with blatant discrimination over her trans status. Then she got some media attention which caught the eye of Caitlyn Jenner and Ellen DeGeneres. They brought her on Ellen’s show (which airs Tuesday, Sept. 8) to tell her story and then there was one of those daytime chat show “big surprises.” Since this story isn’t in our TWIT Award section you probably have a clue that it turned out well. Read the story and view video on the WAPT website.

There’s an event coming this fall in the U.K. called Autumn Conference. The big agenda item is improving services for trans people in the U.K. For example, there is only one trans youth clinic in Scotland and the waiting time to get an appointment is seven months. The Conference is also concerned that gender identity clinics are generally underfunded and some areas of the Kingdom have none. To read more of their concerns check out the story in the Liberal Democrat Voice.

Kathleen Turner will star in a new off-Broadway play called Will You Still Love Me If… It’s the story of a lesbian couple with a baby on the way and one of them is considering gender reassignment. Turner will portray the mother of one of the women. Get more about the play on the BBC website.

TWITs

Lila Perry

We have a whole high school full of TWIT Awards to hand out to the students of Hillsboro High School in Missouri. Last week a trans teen named Lila Perry was told she could use the girl’s locker room and restrooms by the school administration. In allowing this the school was following the rules established by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. When Perry attempted to enter the school she was met by around 150 students protesting her right to use the girl’s room. No wonder trans teens commit suicide so often, with ignorance like this to put up with. Read her story in the Boston Globe.

Pope Francis has made some statements that support the idea of the Church becoming more forgiving and a bit more progressive in its views of many issues including homosexuality, abortion, income inequality and treatment of poor people. But the Church is getting a TWIT Award for issuing a ruling that says it’s “impossible to allow” a trans person to be a godparent. It seems they came to this ruling by confusing sexual identity with gender identity and finding it immoral. Learn more on the Newsweek website.

While this story has a happy ending we have to put it in the TWIT section. A 48-year-old trans woman seeking gender reassignment was forced to go to court when her parents said she was mentally unsound and couldn’t be responsible when making her decision to transition fully. The TWIT Award goes to Christine Kitzler’s parents for attempting to stop her from living the way she wants. They claimed that she was unstable because she suffered from depression and alcohol and drug abuse. As if those weren’t symptoms of having to live as the wrong gender. The happy ending? The judge ruled that there was no reason to block her surgery. Get the full story in the Daily Mail.

Next up with a story that gets them another TWIT Award is Breitbart.com. The website ran a story with the headline “PREVIOUSLY DEPORTED CRIMINAL ALIEN ALLOWED TO STAY BECAUSE HE IS TRANSGENDER.” That is so loaded with negative connotations it could easily develop into a black hole. The “criminal” was driving drunk and injured some people in an accident. Not really a good thing to do — yes it’s illegal, and getting a DWI was totally appropriate. The way Breitbart spins it the accidental injury is equivalent to armed robbery, breaking and entering or rape. Throughout their article, in which the trans woman is called “he” or “he/she,” the tone is “This criminal man is being allowed to stay in our country by a liberal, activist judge and this trans thing is a scam so this crook can stay.” Nice work, Breitbart. You have released more negative propaganda to your readers looking for people to hate. If you want to you can read the story at Breitbart.com.

We told you a while back about a kid’s book titled George. It’s aimed at children in the 3rd to 7th grade. The book is meant to help kids understand how someone like its heroine could be born with genitals indicative of one gender but feel like the other gender. The TWIT Award goes to the Christian Broadcasting Network who ran a story about the book and said that NPR (pointing out that NPR is taxpayer funded when they are only partially funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which does get tax dollars) was giving the book free promotion. They were reviewing it as they might any book. CBN said that NPR only provided “one-sided coverage with a pro-transgender agenda” and that the title of the book had been changed from Girl George to just George in order to trick people into buying. It. They also manage to pull The Hunger Games into their screed against the book’s publisher. The story is on the CBN website.

Boy, have we had to issue a lot of TWIT Awards today. And here’s another one. The National Review ran an article last week by one of their writers and staff attorney, David French. It’s titled Transgender Entitlement: The New Orthodoxy on Campus. Just the title is telling you this is not going to present trans people in a positive light. But it gets worse. The author contends that trans students are being “catered to” when in fact trans students are being recognized as trans and given protections against anti-trans discrimination. French decides early on in this piece that being trans is nothing more than “the troubled fantasies of a tiny, disturbed population.” A TWIT Award goes to Mr. French who is a close minded conservative, and one goes to The National Review for publishing this misinformation about a population that needs protection. The lies and distortions are in The National Review.

What Mr. French cannot appreciate is the central, core aspect of gender and when your gender does not match your body you can’t be comfortable. On top of that society does all it can to diminish you and cast you out. For example trans people of faith are routinely denied membership in congregations in the U.S. And it is a problem for Muslim trans people as well. A TWIT Award goes to the Islamic Cultural Center of Tempe, Arizona for telling a trans woman who transitioned in 2011 that she had to provide them proof of her anatomy or she could not pray in the women’s section of the mosque. When she provided medical documents proving she was female they shared the contents of the documents and then she was kicked out of the women’s section, again. She went on YouTube to tell her story. You can view the video and read about it on the Slate website.

Tags: Ann Thomas, Ashley Diamond, BD Wong, Blossom Jones, Candis Cayne, Eddie Redmayne, featured, Miley Cyrus, Mr. Robot, news, The Danish G, Transgender, TWIT, Vice Ganda

Category: Transgender Community News