The Week In Transgenderism 5/7/12
Don’t mess with Texas. Or try to go to the lady’s room if you don’t pass perfectly. A TG in Dallas was at the hospital and used the facilities. After exiting the restroom, and hearing someone say “that’s a man,” she was stopped by a police officer who gave her a ticket for using the wrong restroom. Seems as if you’ve got to know when to hold it in Dallas. Get her story, along with a video, at MSNBC’s website.
Things turned out a bit better for a transwoman who has been fighting Aetna Insurance. When she went for a mammogram in 2010 Aetna refused to pay for it saying they wouldn’t pay since she was a transsexual. She has won her fight with the insurance company and the settlement says that they must offer mammogram coverage to TGs from now on. Read about it at ABCNews.com.
Victim: Brandy Martell
Why are there so many TG haters? A transwoman in Oakland, California was shot and killed last weekend and her friends say it was because she was TG. The victim was hanging out with her friends at 3:00 a.m. and was found dead in her car by the police at 5:00 a.m. Get the facts of the case at SFGate.com.
CeCe McDonald, the transgender woman who was taunted by racist jerks, felt threatened and stabbed one of them to death with a pair of scissors, has pled guilty to second degree manslaughter. That will get her 3 years and 5 months in the slammer. The trans community of Minneapolis has rallied to her support and claim that she is the real victim in this case. The dead man was white and had a swastika tattoo. He used racist and homo/transphobic language toward CeCe, then cut her face with a broken glass. So she was wrong to defend herself? Get the depressing details in The Huffington Post.
Kate Bornstein has been a lot of things in her life. She’s an author, performance artist, gender activist and writer. One thing you may not have heard about is her time in the late ‘70s as a Scientologist. Hook up your e-meter and prepare to get clear. Her devotion the church ended badly. Read about it in The Huffington Post.
In ABC show.
Does anyone remember Allen Funt and his Candid Camera show? Funt would hide a camera somewhere and unsuspecting people would react to a situation that Funt had set up. Candid Camera is the godmother of a show on ABC called What Would You Do? The producers, like Funt, hide a camera and then have actors do a scene to see what the general public around them will do. Last week they staged a scene in a diner with a transgendered waitress and a customer who was appalled that his favorite waiter was now a woman. Read about it and see a clip on ABCNews.com.
One of our loyal TWIT readers saw an article in her newspaper that dissed transgender beauty pageant contestant Jenna Talackova and TGs in general. Kudos to Annabelle Larousse for sending us a link to the article in The Irish paper the Sunday Independent.
Speaking of disrespect — A FtM student at Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio was tossed out of a student teaching assignment at a local high school after only a day and a half on the job. Oops! Hillsboro High just may be in a whole lot of trouble with the feds. Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and failure to conform to gender stereotypes. The school claims the student teacher was supposed to be teaching art but he spent time talking about his gender issues. The bounced student teacher says he needed to address the elephant in the room when he heard students talking about his gender identity. Get all the facts at WNEWSJ.com.
Dixie Longate
What is it about selling Tupperware and doing drag? Are queens attracted to the colorful plastic used in the venerable food storage containers? Whatever the reason we’ve had a couple of people in TWIT over the years who hold their Tupperware parties in drag. The latest queen to make waves in the food storage scene is Dixie Longate. Dixie actually uses Tupperware as part of her stage act — actually her stage act is a Tupperware party. She’s one of the biggest sellers in the U.S. and is doing her Tupperware show in England. Read about it in The Guardian.
Chef Soraya
Besides food storage queens are also getting into the cooking show arena. Jackson Heights New York’s Soraya Sobreidad calls herself the Drag Queen of Healthy Cooking and broadcasts her show on the Internet. She specializes in how to cook healthy versions of traditional Puerto Rican dishes. Check her out in the New York Daily News.
Another burgeoning venue for drag seems to be (some) high schools and colleges. Nikki Licious Halston, Miss Rhea Sunshyne and Mistress V are all teenage (or early 20s) drag queens at Fullerton High School or Cal State Fullerton in California. Read all about these young female illusionists in The Daily Titan.
You know that drag is now an accepted art form when it gets reviewed in The New Yorker. Of course this isn’t your run of the mill lip sync show they’re reviewing. This is Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (L). Read the review and see if the show is as pretentious as the title. You’ll find it at The New Yorker website.
Jodie Harsh
What drag queen working today doesn’t count The Spice Girls as an influence? Now on of the Spice’s is working with a drag queen. Melanie Chisholm, the former Sporty Spice, is working on some new music and she has teamed up with Brit drag DJ Jodie Harsh to write and produce some of her latest album. Catch the beat at ContactMusic.com.
What city in the United States would you probably never associate with a vibrant drag scene? Sure, Bransom, Missouri, but what other city? Nashville, of course. It’s most often thought of linked to music. The name evokes visions of dudes driving around in pickup trucks, cowboy types carrying guitar cases and girls in Daisy Dukes. It seems that Nashville has had a drag show scene since the 1940s. Get schooled in Nashville’s drag history in Out & About Newspaper.
A British author has won an award for her book, the tile of which is almost as long as that show reviewed in The New Yorker. (Maybe longer.) It’s called Recognising Transsexuals: Personal, Political and Medicolegal Embodiment. It has won the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. The author, Dr. Zowie Davy (that’s right, Zowie) interviewed 24 transsexuals and focuses on how transpeople view their own body image and how others make judgements on trans bodies. Learn more at This is Lincolnshire.
Entertainment Weekly is stepping on the territory occupied by Out magazine. They’re alleging that John Irving, the writer who gave us The World According to Garp, is infatuated by transgender characters. Well, they may have a point. He’s done several books with trans characters. His latest book is called In One Person. Read the review in Entertainment Weekly and see how many TGs he included this time.
TWIT
Our TWIT Award goes to Gary Allen Guy. Mr. Guy is another one of those crossdressng criminals who make us cringe every time they get press for pulling a job in drag. Guy dressed up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and robbed someone on the street. He’s in the Tulsa County Jail. Please! Criminals, stop wearing women’s clothes when you rob people. You’re giving the general public the wrong idea. Check out Guy and his criminal past at NewsOn6.com.
Category: Transgender Community News
About the Author (Author Profile)
Angela Gardner is a founding member of The Renaissance Transgender Assoc., Inc., former editor of its newsletter and magazine, Transgender Community News. She was the Diva of Dish for TGF in the late 1990s and Editor of LadyLike magazine until its untimely demise. She has appeared in film and television shows portraying TG characters, as well as representing Renaissance on numerous talk shows.Subscribe
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Okay, I was just wondering where y’all were going with your comments. They seemed incongruous with a website dedicated to supporting the TG lifestyle. I agree that our society is rough out there for us. It has taken me many years to even begin to feel comfortable interacting with the general public, though I am still quite careful about where this happens.
oh no thats not what I meant at all Kimberly its more of a statement on our society in general..I can imagine the same scenario that might involve anyone who for whatever reason that doesn’t meet up with peoples ideas or beauty or “fitting a mould” such as to short to fat to thin to tall or has a big nose or a wart…I just feel many ppl would have let the guy go on ranting
No, I think what we’re saying is that people respond to things that don’t look right to them. If a TG is beautiful and there are no masculine aspects to her presentation then she will be accepted by the general public. An example is the Canadian pageant contestant who many people supported since she fit in with the other pageant women. But we all have the need to express our feminine natures, whether full time or part time, and for those of us who can’t slip by without causing people to take a second look life is a bit harder. We have to be prepared to hear “that’s a dude.” That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t express our femininity in public. We should be proud of who we are and go where we want, beautiful or not.
So if you are transgender but not beautiful then you should just stay in the closet? Is this really the message you want to spread?
Angela, I entirely agree with your observation here:
It has been my contention for a long while that it’s mixed gender cues that make people upset.
I’ve always felt that cisgender people react so strongly against us because we mess with their heads (even though we don’t mean to). People have certain notions about how the world is supposed to work, and it can be disturbing when something isn’t working according to plan. Imagine if one morning the sun suddenly came up in the west. That would be very weird, a sign that there’s something seriously wrong.
Gender is something very basic to people’s world view. So when people like us mess with it, it can seriously upset them.
Best wishes, Annabelle
Angela, the reference to the old Candid Camera show and Allen Funt made me imagine how he might have introduced this back in the 60’s during Camera’s heyday with his heavy New Yawk accent: “We put a transgendah waitress in a dinah on Bleeckah street. Watch how awhdinarry New Yawkahs react to the hilarious consequences!”
Hmm I wonder how many people would defend the pretty passable waitress if she wasn’t as pretty?…or passable?
Exactly! It has been my contention for a long while that it’s mixed gender cues that make people upset. When they can identify a person who was born male dressing and acting as a woman they are confused and then sometimes angry. A transwoman who is lovely, feminine and conforms to female gender norms is accepted. (Unless she is with a male partner who doesn’t know she was born male.) Our society also discriminates against masculine looking women and fat women. Beauty will always get more acceptance.