The Week In Transgenderism 2/20/12

Enable your pop up blockers! it’s time to cruise the wide world of transgender news on the Net. Browsers ready? Let’s go!

Has the transgender phenomena been integrated into our general population’s world view? The proof is in the pudding. Well, in the literature at least. There has been a rise in the number of books for teens and young adults which deal with transgender issues. Read about some of these TG-centric reads in The Huffington Post.

Gabriella getting into makeup.

And the acceptance of drag is finding its place in higher education as well. We have found another college newspaper that features an article about a student who is seriously working at the art of drag in hopes of becoming a professional performer. The fledgling queen is Gabriella Divine and she is a student at Western Kentucky University. Read her story in the WKU Herald.

Drag on campus has actually gotten so accepted, and many schools have experienced such a surge in TG admissions, that it’s no surprise you can now take a course at Ithaca College in “communication modification for transgender people.” What that means is they will be teaching TG students how to talk, how to use non-verbal communication and how to modify their voices to the gender characteristics they seek. It’s free to Ithaca students and available for a nominal fee to non-students, faculty, and staff. Check it out at the Ithaca College website.

One country where transgender people are still having problems is Malaysia. There have been at least thirteen attacks against transsexuals in Kuala Lumpur in the past few months. It seems that the attackers ride around on motorcycles looking for their victims and when they find them they beat them with chains, steel bars and crash helmets. The police have not managed to make any arrests. Even when they’ve been provided with evidence. Read the sad details in Asia One News.

Miss West

Raquel Welch, yes, the woman who sells wigs, used to be a star of the silver screen before her lucrative wig career. Since there’s been a retrospective of her film work she’s been dishing to the press about her experience working with an even older star of the silver screen — Mae West. When they worked together on the somewhat awful movie Myra Breckenridge Raquel began to feel that Miss West could actually be a man in drag. Read about her suspicions, and how she got along with the fading diva at starpulse.com.

Piyah

Our Meet The Legless TG Woman Who Sings and Makes Videos story comes to us from The Huffington Post. Her name is Piyah Martell and she was born with a condition that kept her spine and legs from fully developing. She’s an Internet sensation for her videos of songs by Lady Gaga and Mariah Carey and she’s going to appear as a guest on RuPaul’s Drag Race. See the video and get the story here.

More and more doctors are finding children who maintain that they are the opposite of their birth gender. Years ago these kids would have been forced to adhere to their birth gender. Now there are more parents willing to go along with their child if the behavior is more than a temporary thing, and they are seeking treatment from doctors to delay puberty and allow their child to grow up in the gender in which they feel most comfortable. But, there are ethical concerns for doctors. Read about it at delmarvanow.com.

Dani Bunten

Have you ever heard of Dani Bunten? The only way you might know of her is if you are a dedicated gamer. She was a pioneer in the video game world who coded her first game way back in the primitive 1970s. She underwent SRS in 1992 and passed away in 1998. Her story is told at kotaku.com.au.

It could be called old news, since it happened in Australia in the 1920s, but It was a real life Albert Nobbs story featuring a woman who lived her life as a man, married a woman, and was then convicted of her murder. It may not be news from last week but “The ManWoman Murder” case is fascinating. Read the details in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Also old news is the drag queen strip night that has been happening at a pub in a place called Tower Hamlets, a borough in London, England, for twenty six years. But the club’s most profitable night of the year has been threatened by the borough council and the mayor. They maintain that it’s a strip club and they’ll have none of that lap dancing going on in their town. Read the details of the kerfuffle in the London Evening Standard.

The good news is that the New York City Fire Department has hired its first transgendered person. The bad news is that the reporters at the website reporting the story don’t write very well in English. Could they be outsourcing the news writing to China? You decide when you read the poorly written story on newjerseynewsroom.net.

The Obama administration is actively engaged in working with the GLBT community to bring fairness to how GLBT people are treated. To communicate directly with the GLBT community and let them know what the administration is doing — and ask how else they could help — there will be a series of town hall meetings. The first meeting took place last week in Philadelphia and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius delivered the keynote address. For more info on the event and upcoming meetings visit the Washinton Blade.

On the religious front, The Church of Scotland seems to be one of the denominations that is doing its best to be enlightened about GLBT issues. The Church sponsored a storytelling workshop for kids that featured stories about GLBT families raising children. Huzzah Church of Scotland. Of course there are those who disagree with the Church. Read a well rounded article on the storytelling in an online publication from The Christian Institute.

The victim.

The man who was arrested in the murder of a transgender woman at a D.C. bus stop has been arraigned and held for trial. The story is on the Washington ABC affiliate’s website.

We all love our makeup, don’t we girls? And many of us started out wearing Mary Kay products. Now comes word that Mary Kay’s mansion in Dallas is up for sale. It’s pink! And they only want 3.3 million dollars for it. Everyone pitch in and maybe we can buy it and turn it into an old TGs home. Read all about it  at Yahoo.

We’ve been doing TWIT long enough to know that the media, particularly in the United Kingdom, often feature stories about transsexuals with a decidedly lurid spin. A writer in England has an article in New Statesman magazine in which they maintain that the media must stop their transphobic treatment of TGs. Read about it on their website.

Maybe social conservatives are right. What if we’re all going to hell in a hand basket because of a breakdown in gender norms, morals, and sexuality? I mean, Buck Angel, the FtM porn star who bills himself as “the man with the vagina” is now doing the lecture circuit as a motivational speaker preaching empowerment through self-acceptance. Nah. The conservatives are wrong. If Buck Angel can make a buck as a motivational speaker it just means there’s nothing TG people can’t do. Read about Buck’s new career in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Our TWIT Award this week goes to all the people in Maryland who believe that passing a gender identity discrimination law will lead to women being raped in the lady’s room and children being lead into a transgender lifestyle. “Mommy, I saw a man who was a woman coming out of the bathroom and now I want to wear a dress? Duh. They couldn’t get more stupid if they took a college course in ignorance. Opponents of the Baltimore County Anti-discrimination bill, we proudly award you a massive TWIT. Read about the controversy in the Baltimore Sun.

Tags: featured, news

Category: Transgender Community News