The Week In Transgenderism 5/28/12

Sevigny in character.

The television series that Chloe Sevigny shot in England is coming to American television. It will debut in July on DirecTV’s Audience Network. Sevigny’s character is a “transgender contract killer” and male to female transsexual. She learns that she fathered a son who is now 11-year-old, and the boy’s mother has three other children that the assassin is now legally responsible for. Learn more about the show in The Telegraph.

Canada is known for it’s tolerance and just plain niceness. One area where Canadians lag behind much of the world is transgender rights. That’s starting to change though with advances for TG students, trans contestants in beauty pageants and you don’t need to have surgery to get the correct gender on your driver’s license. But there are  still a lot of areas where TG’s in The Great White North are not being treated right. Read about it in the Winnipeg Free Press.

The state of Alaska, which is right next to Canada, is not as progressive as that country in regard to driver’s licenses. They used to say your couldn’t change your gender marker without having reassignment surgery. They’ve fixed that now though. Now they aren’t updating any gender markers for TGs. See why they are acting like that in an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News.

Needles

And the winner is — Sharon Needles. She has taken the crown in RuPaul’s Drag Race and will reign for a year. Needles is from Newton, Iowa and she’s not your typical small town girl. How did her win on Drag Race go over in her old home town? Check out the story in the Newton Daily News.

Soccer, or as they call it all over the world outside the U.S., football, seems to be a sport that is attracting TG players. We reported on a Samoan player a few months ago, Now we bring you the story of a South American TG “futbol” player. Check it out in The Huffington Post.

Uh oh, Warren Beatty’s transgendered son Stephen Ira may not be as trans as he has said. He recently bought a pair of rhinestone high heels to wear to his boyfriend’s graduation ceremony. Wow. Is he regretting becoming a male or is he a gay male crossdresser? We’re so confused! Read the article in The Daily Mail and see if you can figure the boy out.

What does a pop superstar and icon of tolerance toward GLBT people do for fun when she has some time before her concerts in Thailand start? She goes to a ladyboy show. Lady Gaga attended a performance of Bangkok’s top transvestite review, Calypso Cabaret. The queen of the little monsters met the performers after the show and gave them concert tickets. Read about it at zeenews.com.

White

Justice has gone blind and deaf in the murder case against the alleged killer of TG lingerie model Victoria Carmen White. The man arrested and tried for her killing has been found not guilty on all charges. He claims he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger and the jury agreed with him. Read the depressing details in The Advocate.

There is a transgender themed film included in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s by a Quebecois director and it’s called Laurence Anyways. A young man tells his girl friend that he wants to become a woman and asks her if she will stay with him. The director says it was inspired by a conversation he had with one of his crew members on an earlier film. She told him that her boyfriend had said that to her. It’s art imitating life! Read about the film, see a clip and read an interview with the director in The Atlantic. (The clip is in French but there are subtitles. It seems to confuse crossdressing and transsexuality but it’s hard to say if you don’t understand French.)

Swinton

Tilda Swinton is the androgynous actor known for her portrayal of Orlando in the film of the same name, and the White Witch in the Narnia films. She is not known to indulge in glamor. Most of her red carpet award show appearances are characterized by very plain outfits and little or no makeup. The editors of Candy Magazine, a glossy print magazine devoted to trans everything, talked Tilda into getting a drag queen makeover and they put her on the cover. Check it out in The Mail Online.

Hall of Famer Amanda Simpson

I bet you didn’t know the Transgender Hall of Fame was accepting nominations for their class of 2013. The Hall of Fame is a project of the International Transgender Historical Society. Both the Society and the Hall of Fame were established in 2010 so it’s possible you wouldn’t know about them. (And apparently our copy of the press release was lost in the mail.) The Hall of Fame honors “Transgender, Transsexual, and cross-dressing men and women who have achieved major accomplishments in their private and professional lives, despite certain battles they have gone through due to discrimination.” Read about it at examiner.com.

Bathrooms! They’re in the news again as regards their use by transgendered people. Hey everybody! We just gotta pee. Nothing nefarious going on. In Fort Smith, Arkansas a TG student at The University of Arkansas was told to stop using the women’s restroom. She fought being restricted to the gender neutral facility, the Justice Department weighed in, and now she’s allowed to use the lady’s again, just like all the other girls. Thanks to TGF reader Jamie Roberts for pointing out the story at Inside Higher Ed.

Life is full of tough decisions. Most people have a hard enough time without having to wrestle with transgender issues. It can get really hard if you have those issues. For example, what if you’re a FtM who totally identifies as a male but you have an athletic gift that makes you an Olympic quality competitor in your chosen sport — but you can only compete in the Olympics if you do it in the women’s  division? Do you chose going to the Olympics or do you get on with your transition? See what one athlete has decided at NPR.com.

McDonald

CeCe McDonald is the TG woman who had to defend herself from a transphobic racist and ended up killing him with a pair of scissors. Instead of being recognized as a victim she was arrested and charged with second degree murder. The man she killed had a swastika tattoo and though his friends say he was a great guy who would give you the shirt off his back they also mentioned that if he was in the wrong mood he would express racist and homophobic views. CeCe is going to prison for her “crime.” Get the full story in Mother Jones.

The South American country of Chile will soon be offering gender reassignment surgery as part of its public health plan. Private clinics were the only place the surgery could be obtained and it cost between $20,000 and $30,000. Now poor transsexuals will be able to have surgery that will be low cost or free based on their incomes. The story can be found on Google.

Laura Jane Grace

The TG punk rocker Laura Jane Grace, formerly Tom Gabel, has played her first concert as a woman. Her fans at the show seemed to be supportive of her gender change and their only concern was that there may be changes in her singing voice. Read the story in Rolling Stone.

Graduation drag.

A gay crossdressing student at Waller High School in Waller, Texas will be attending his graduation dressed almost as he wants to be dressed. Of course he’ll still be wearing that silly graduation gown (shouldn’t we dump those antedelluvian things by now?) but underneath he’ll be wearing a fitted dress and flats. He has agreed to leave off the hair extensions, earrings and high heels. Read the story and view a video at the KHOU website.

TWIT

Our first TWIT Award is shared between the perpetrator and the publication that carried the story. It seems Erik John Freund got high on cocaine and booze and decided he needed some lingerie to wear while he watched porno videos. So instead of buying his own he entered a neighbor’s home at 5 a.m., picked up a frying pan in the kitchen, went into the female resident’s bedroom, locked the door, stripped down and put on her bra and panties. His heavy breathing woke her up so he socked her in the face with the frying pan and took off. That gets Freund his TWIT. The OC Weekly get’s its Award for trying to make the story more titillating with a Photoshopped picture of Ashton Kutcher in long hair and a bra, and for trying to find some connection to the S&M book Fifty Shades of Grey. Come on OC Weekly, isn’t this story dramatic enough?

Tags: featured, news, TWIT

Category: Transgender Community News