The Week In Transgenderism 5/14/12

Argentina, Latin America’s first country to legalize gay marriage, has now taken a large step forward for TG rights by passing a Gender Identity law that will let transgender people who want to have GRS and take hormones now get those treatments as part of their public or private health plans. Get the story in The Washington Post.

Gabel’s old persona.

Did you ever hear of a punk band called Against Me!? Probably not, but if you did know who they were you were probably surprised to learn that their angry punk lead singer has announced that he is “becoming a woman.”  His name is Tom Gabel and the story seems a bit odd. Just the way he says “becoming a woman” sort of makes it seem as casual as deciding to cut his hair. Get all the facts in The New York Times and see what you think of it.

Our first Meet The Transsexual story is about transwoman who came out and transitioned while working at a video game company that produces macho games with titles like NHL and Fight Night. Read Kelly Worrall’s story at kotaku.com.

Jackie Green

The focus on TGs in mainstream beauty pageants has shifted to a trans-teen in England. Jackie Green, who had her reassignment surgery in Thailand when she was 16 has won a spot in the semi-finals of the Miss England beauty pageant. Learn all about Jackie in The Huffington Post.

Meet The TS Two is about a young woman who was president of her college’s student senate and then became the president of the student government — as a male. As soon as her term as president was over she announced to the whole school that she was transgendered and she would be presenting as a female when they saw her next. Get Sarah McBride’s story in The Washington Blade.

Could you imagine posing for a photo in drag — with your mom? My mom would have needed CPR if I showed up in a dress for a  photo op. But some queens have mom’s who appreciate their beautiful sons, and what better time to run stories on them than around Mother’s Day. The story is in the Dallas Voice.

You can tell a story is going to be satire if it appears on a website called The Spoof. So when the headline reads “Crossdressers make the safest drivers” you know they’re running it for laughs. But what if there’s a kernel of truth in that story? Maybe the writer is actually a crossdresser? Check it out in The Spoof.

Lady Bunny

Lady Bunny has been on the drag scene in New York for a long time but did you know that in the early days the Bunny took a security gig at a makeup store? Hey, a rabbit’s gotta pay for her daily carrots and lettuce one way or another. Get the dish on Bunny’s survival job at racked.com.

The Democrat-controlled New York State Assembly has passed the Gender Expression and Non-Discrimination Act, again. This is the fifth time they have passed it. Like all the other times the bill has been sent to the Republican controlled Rules Committee where, in keeping with Republican stance that anything the Democrats like has to be stopped, it will be ignored till the legislative session runs out. Get the annoying details in The New York Daily News.

Mitt Romney, robotic presidential candidate, was in the news last week for bullying other students at his rich kid prep school. While people defend Mitt by saying this happened 50 years ago and doesn’t mean anything today, a Talking Points Memo article on how Mitt, then Governor of Massachusetts, threatened to dissolve a state commission that was set up to help GLBT kids escape from bullying — because he saw pictures of a Pride parade the organization had endorsed and there where men dressed as women in the pictures. Fishnets and heels! Oh my! He backed off from immediately shutting down the commission but eventually Mitt did manage to get rid of it. Read about his transphobia at TalkingPointsMemo.com.

Fire victim.

A fire in Brooklyn has taken the life of a popular transgender performer. The Puerto Rican Beyonce was found dead in her apartment after fire broke out in her building. Other residents escaped the blaze due to the heroism of a passerby. Read the story in the New York Post.

Suppose you went to the doctor for a kidney stone and found out you had female genitalia you didn’t know about? Our Meet The Intersexed Person article is about Colorado photographer Stevie Crecelius. In the middle of her life as a male she learned that she had been born intersexed. Learn how she and her family coped with the changes that revelation brought in the Denver Post article.

Hired and fired.

Even if you can get a job, being transgendered can lead to losing it. How about being hired and fired all in one day. A transgender teen in Lincoln, California was hired to distribute fliers for a massage therapy business. Just hours after being hired, probably shortly after one of the managers who suffers from transphobia noticed that she was hired, she got a call telling her she was fired. Get the details in The Lincoln Messenger.

The Esprit TG convention in Washington state is underway this week. It started yesterday and goes till the 20th. What’s so special about an event for the TG community that has been happening for years? It’s so mainstream in Port Angeles, Washington that it’s made the papers. Read all about it and notice how accepting and positive the article is in the Peninsula Daily News.

TGs in New Zealand.

The government of New Zealand will pay for it’s citizen’s gender reassignment surgery. Now don’t start booking a flight down under. The news is not all good. There are so many people on the surgery waiting list that there is an average seven year wait. Find out why New Zealand’s transsexuals have to wait so long and what some of them are doing to get surgery sooner at Stuff.co.nz.

Who remembers The World According to Garp. The movie came out 34 years ago and back then all of the closeted TGs (me included) had to tone down how much we liked John Lithgow’s performance as the transsexual, ex- football player Roberta Muldoon. I still remember reading an interview with Lithgow in which he said that it was a hard role to prepare for since he had to get his whole body waxed. At the time I wondered why that was necessary since he didn’t appear in a bikini, or naked. The Muldoon character was a creation of the novelist John Irving and she is not his only TG character. he seems to have a whole bunch of them in his books. The latest is a TG librarian in his new novel, In One Person. Read a review of the book in Businessweek.

A “Lady of The Night.”

We put this near the TWITs but only because the newspaper carrying the story insists on calling transwomen “transgender men.” A Swedish photographer spent a decade living among the transgender population that clustered around the red light district in Paris back in the 1960s. His photographs document the struggle of the women to exist as they wanted to and the lengths they would go to to break the gender barrier. Read about the photos, the upcoming exhibition of Christer Strömholm’s work, and the lives of the Parisian “ladies of the night” in The Daily Mail. they certainly don’t look like transgender men.

TWITs

Philly TWITs

We have first our TWIT Award recipients! They are Marissa Devine and Miss Phoenix Croxton. Phoenix was a diva on the club scene in Philadelphia for years, hostessing and performing at the Shampoo nightclub’s Shaft parties. (We used to party with that girl.) Ms. Devine is a former Miss Gay Philadelphia. Both of them were arrested as part of an investigation of a meth distribution network that snared 32 people in the Philadelphia area. Get the details on their fall into TWITdom in The Philadelphia Gay News.

Tom Brown is an assistant coach with the Cornhuskers of Nebraska. He recently spoke out against an Omaha gay and transgender anti-discrimination law. Brown is also a Christian minister who heads the FreedMen of Nebraska. Brown attributes his negative statements about TG rights to his “Bible-believing mentality.” Maybe he should do some Bible studying and tell us where it is the Jesus says it’s okay to deny people their rights. Our second TWIT Award goes to Tom Brown. Read the story on the ESPN website.

Tags: featured, news, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News