The Week In Transgenderism 7/5/16

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Misty Snow

Misty Plowright

Two trans women in the west — with the same first name — have been nominated for Congress. Misty Snow was nominated to challenge the Utah GOP U.S. Senator Mike Lee and Misty Plowright got the nomination to challenge GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn. If elected Plowright would represent the district that is home to the right wing Focus on the Family organization. Learn more about these two Democratic ladies on the 6ABC website.

We told you in the last TWIT column that the Pentagon was poised to allow trans soldiers to serve openly. They announced last Thursday that effective immediately the ban was lifted. A study commissioned by the military found that out of 1.3 active duty soldiers an estimated 2450 were trans. Read the story in The New York Times.

Jamie Roberts passed along a tip about an article that outlines five issues that will have to be dealt with before everything is worked out on how the military will deal with trans service people. You can find that story in The Washington Post.

A fear that made it’s way around the Pentagon over the last year is the worry that trans people will start joining the military in large numbers just so they can get healthcare related to their trans status. Of course that fear is unfounded and the explanation can be found in Military Times.

Could Princess Jasmine happen to your son?

Will playing with Disney princess toys make your son a sissy? A new study finds that boys who played with princess toys for a year developed higher levels of stereotypically feminine behavior. The surprising thing is that the researchers found that being a girly boy isn’t bad. It helps boys grow up to be well rounded men who are not total products of our macho culture. Learn more about why being a princess loving sissy might be good for you in The New York Times.

Get ready for some hatin’. Caitlyn Jenner is on the cover of the summer double issue of Sport’s Illustrated and she’s wearing Bruce’s 1976 Olympic gold medal. Conservative sports fan’s brains will explode. The rumor was that she would pose wearing only the medal but she sports a stylish casual jumpsuit. Read more in The Los Angeles Times.

Laverne Cox

Last Wednesday Laverne Cox appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and one of the points she made was the need to learn how many trans people actually live in the United States. Ms. Cox is right. If people don’t know we exist all over the country then we’re not going to be considered when it’s time to fund services and programs that benefit trans people. A study conducted by UCLA’s Williams Institute compiled data from 19 state-level surveys and has concluded that there are in the area of 1.4 million trans people living in the U.S. Learn more from Time magazine.

More on the Williams Institute study: They estimated the number in each state, and added those together. They used data from the Center for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to estimate that 0.58% of the adult population identifies as transgender. This is roughly double the previous estimate. Hawaii has the highest percentage, 0.78%, with California a close second at 0.76%. North Dakota is in last place with 0.30%, with Iowa at 0.31%. (The District of Columbia is at 2.77% You can find their study on their website.

Meagan Taylor

The hotel in Iowa that panicked and called the police when two black trans women registered for the night has agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to settle the case. Meagan Taylor spent 8 nights in jail as a result of the hotel staff’s belief that she was a prostitute. Learn more about the story from The Guardian.

Rebecca Root, the transgender actress who appeared in the BBC2 series Boy Meets Girl (we’re still waiting, BBC America) will appear in a Doctor Who radio play. She will play Sable, an alien with a keen wit who is also at home with a gun. Her character has plans for a planet whose inhabitants are in hibernation (until the galactic economy improves? That would be a tribute to one-time Doctor Who writer Douglas Adams), but someone else also has plans for that planet. She will appear with the Fifth Doctor and his companions in the radio play. Radio Times has more.

The Province of Ontario has introduced driver’s licenses and health insurance cards with no gender markers. Available early next year, the driver’s license will have an “X” instead of “M” or “F” for the gender marker. The health insurance card simply has a blank space where the gender marker should be. The Canadian Press has this story, which you can read in the Toronto Sun.

Fifty Muslim clerics in Pakistan have issued a fatwa (religious decree) saying trans people who have had GRS can legally get married. This is a step forward but those who exhibit “visible signs of both genders” are still prohibited from marrying anyone. Another section of the fatwa is a larger step forward as it states that is is sinful for people to humiliate, insult or tease people for being trans. Learn more about the decree in The Los Angeles Times.

Mosier

Trans athlete Chris Mosier made history when he was picked for Team USA and became the first out trans athlete to qualify for a U.S. national team. Now he’s gone and made history again by being the first trans man athlete to appear in the nude in ESPN Magazine’s annual Body Issue. We told you the layout was coming. Learn more on the People website.

After a few years of Republican assaults on trans rights with red states passing laws to keep trans people out of public restrooms and keep trans high school athletes from playing on the team of their choice some transgender Republicans are beginning to understand that their party doesn’t like them. Read the opinion piece by a life-long Republican trans woman in The Washington Post. Thanks to Jamie Roberts for the tip.

A study shows that transgender students are more likely to be disciplined by their schools than are cisgender students. That is among the findings of a study called Educational Exclusion: Drop Out, Push Out, And The School-To-Prison Pipeline Among LGBTQ Youth. The Greely Tribune of Colorado has more.

Corey Rae

The first trans girl to be elected prom queen at her high school was Corey Rae of New Jersey and it happened back in 2010. Ms. Rae is now 23 and since she graduated from high school she has been in “stealth” mode and hasn’t told anyone of her trans nature. Recently though she came to feel that she would like to be seen as her “true and complete self” by everyone she meets. To start being more open, since that’s what you do, she has started a blog. Learn more about her and the blog on the Yahoo Beauty page.

Why on Earth did the trans people in the restroom issue get so big in 2016? It turns out that where people pee has always been a political question. The trans part is new but public restrooms, particularly women’s restrooms, have long been the subject of much political discussion. Read the political history of where we pee on The Washington Post website. Thanks to Jamie Roberts for the tip.

The governor of New Hampshire has signed an executive order that bans discrimination in state government agains trans people. Get the details from The Huffington Post.

Zoey Tur

Zoey Tur, the formerly male helicopter pilot who covered the O.J. Simpson “low-speed chase” and later transitioned to female and made some controversial statements that got her in hot water with the trans community has surfaced again and it’s all due to O.J. Since the ESPN documentary on the Simpson trial has been airing the media have been digging up anyone who had anything to do with it. Tur gave an interview in England and talked about her relationship with her kids, Caityn Jenner and oh yes, the O.J. Simpson doc. Read it in the Daily Mail.

Avery Jackson

There are many “mega churches” in the USA but only one church of “megabigots.” That would be the Westboro Baptist Church that preaches a brand of hate closely resembling the hate of jihadist radicals, but theirs is directed against LGBT people while the radicals just hate everyone who isn’t following their brand of religion. Avery Jackson is a trans girl who at 8-years-old is standing up to the Westboro Baptists by helping to create a “Transgender House” painted like the Transgender Flag. It is located right next to an “Equality House” painted in rainbow colors. The best part of all? Both houses are across the street from the headquarters of the Westboro Baptists. Read all about it on the Fusion website.

Skarsgard

Alexander Skarsgârd who is currently starring in the new Tarzan movie and who made his name in True Blood, last year went to the premier of his film Diary of a Teenage Girl in full drag. We ran photos of him at the time but he didn’t explain why he dragged up. Finally, in an interview about Tarzan he spills the beans on what made him decide to attend the premier as a tribute to ‘80s Farrah Fawcett. It’s down the page a ways in the Dallas Voice.

Restroom Wars

North Carolina has come up with its alleged revisions to HB2. These do allow people to sue for discrimination in state courts, where the backlog of cases is less, but the only clause to address transgender people’s access to restrooms says, “The State Registrar shall issue a certificate of sex reassignment upon a written application from an individual accompanied by a notarized statement from the physician who performed the sex reassignment surgery or from a physician licensed to practice medicine who has examined the individual and can certify that the person has undergone sex reassignment surgery.” So, surgery is still required. And, they do not specifically rule out the possibility of charging for the card. The draft of the bill also is said to increase the fines for people charged with those offenses. None of this addresses the problems that the NBA had with the current version of HB2. Think Progress has more.

One of the big reasons for making changes to HB2 is that the NBA has said that they will move their All-Star game scheduled for next January out of Charlotte unless North Carolina makes major changes to that law. The parties involved won’t admit that is the reason, but it is at least one reason. Well, the NBA has said that the proposed fix to HB2 does not do the trick. The Washington Blade has this story.

Clay Aiken and Raven-Symoné went to North Carolina to ask local people what they thought of the anti-trans law. They traveled to a diner in Sanford, North Carolina to ask people what they thought. Then they took the results of their survey to The View last week. 70 percent of those they talked with were against the legislation. Find out that the other 30 percent thought on the Towleroad website.

The anti-trans laws and negative rhetoric aimed at trans people is causing problems for trans people who live in the states that are banning them from using the restroom of the gender they identify with. Read the stories of some trans students in Georgia who may have been better off before the restroom laws. Find the article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The U.S. Department of the Interior has announced that visitors to America’s national parks are welcome to use the restroom facility that corresponds with their gender identity. This is not a new policy with the park system. People have always been able to use the restroom that aligns with their gender. Keep in mind that national parks exist in many of our cities. If you need the restroom just head for the park. Get the story, and some of the conservative blow back from WRAL.com.

TWITs

It seems that Republican lawmakers, a lot of them, are convinced that being trans is a mental illness. They even point to the high suicide rate among trans people and attribute it to the supposed mental illness. Having no empathy they are unable to understand that being trans in a society that doesn’t believe you exist could be enough to drive you to suicide. But they insist that we are nuts and that is what drives much of the anti-legislation. We give all the lawmakers who deny the current thinking among mental health professionals and cling to their outmoded and false conceptions of why people can be differently gendered a TWIT Award they can pass around among themselves. Read an opinion article that lays out the facts in The Los Angeles Times.

Conservative (and wack-a-doodle) talk show host Laura Ingraham has a “solution” for those who are worried about having to use public restrooms with trans people. She advocates that everyone should wear diapers. While it is nice to be able to just let it go in your Depends it really doesn’t solve anything and it’s enough to make you suspect she’s working for the adult diaper lobby. A TWIT Award to Ingraham, even if she said it tongue-in-cheek. Read more about her statement on the Baby Center website. Listen to an audio clip on the Media Matters site.

The Pentagon has lifted its ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. However, at least two members of Congress are trying to unring that bell. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) is the chairperson of the House Armed Services Committee, and he issued a press release with his disapproving remarks. The takeaway quote is, “The Administration seems unwilling or unable to assure the Congress and the American people that transgender individuals will meet these individual readiness requirements at a time when our Armed Forces are deployed around the world.” He promises to investigate, which implies that he will hold hearings. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has called for hearings, but so far has no details on when these hearings will take place or who will be asked to testify. Both of these lawmakers get TWIT Awards for stepping in after the announcement, months after they were told this would happen. You can read stories in The Washington Blade and The Hill.

Nikki Sinclaire is a trans woman from Britain and a former MEP. (MEP is Member of the European Parliament, the legislative body of the European Union.) She is currently charged with padding her travel expenses and money laundering — for which she is receiving a TWIT Award. She is a member of the UKIP, the far-right party which fought the hardest for Britain to leave the E.U. It is hard to believe that she got along that well with the other members of the European Union, given her party’s political stance. On the one hand, when you suspect that others might not be particularly friendly, it’s a good idea to be careful not to give them anything to accuse you of. The Daily Star has more.

From Canada comes word of a change in the rules for blood donors who happen to be trans. Previously trans blood donors were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Starting August 15 the Canadian Blood Service will have new donor criteria which will treat trans women who have not had GRS as “men who sleep with men” and that means they will not be able to donate. There are other parts of the rules that are even more egregious. Nurse, prepare the TWIT Award for the CBS. Get the story from LGBTQ Nation.

The cliche is “don’t mess with Texas” but Texas seems to be happy to mess with people it finds distasteful. The attorney general of the Lone Star state has claimed that trans-inclusive policies related to trans students are in violation of state law. He wants to keep “lines of communication open between schools and parents” but if you parse that you can figure out that he wants the schools to “out” their trans students. That’s a TWIT Award winning idea and Attorney General Ken Paxton gets one. Read the story in Teen Vogue.

Portions of TWIT were researched and written by Cecilia Barzyk.

Tags: Caitlyn Jenner, Chris Mosier, Corey Rae, featured, Laverne Cox, Meagan Taylor, Misty Plowright, Misty Snow, news, pentagon TG policy, princess toys, Rebecca Root, Transgender, TWIT, Zoey Tur

Category: Transgender Community News