We’ve been barely keeping our heads above water with the move, so I hadn’t had much time to think about what to write.
Teddy’s death hit us hard. There’s a new school year starting…one which I would really prefer not to deal with. A couple of avant-garde ideas almost breathed air.
But nope. I really had not much.
In cases such as this in the past I have either written about why I was struggling to find something to write about (but that is transparent: it’s the moving) or checked the news to see what I could find.
The news proved to be quite sad, for the most part.
Item: The Death of Nana-boo
A vigil is being held in the death of Nana-boo, a well-known Washington, DC transwoman. She and another transwoman were attacked on a sidewalk by a man wielding a knife. She died of a severed artery. The other victim is hospitalized at Howard University hospital.
Family reaction can be viewed here.
I will not connect to the article entitled, nigger she-male named “Na Na Boo” got cut into pieces, but include the title so that people can maybe think about why this shit happens.
Item: Assault
And it doesn’t just happen in the inner-city or to black folks. In Tucson, a gay man was convicted of assault and disorderly conduct for attacking a transsexual Vietnam veteran at a dog-racing track.
Janey Kay, the veteran, was struck in the face and had two hands full of hair ripped out by Richard Ray Young, who was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $1000 fine, three years of probation and anger-management counseling.
After asking Ms. Kay if she were a drag queen and being told that she was not, Mr. Young grabbed her by the hair and tore it out while a cussing a blue streak. How nice.
Mr. Young denied the cussing.
Item: Prison rape
A corrections officer at O’ahu County Correctional Center allegedly sexually assaulted a pre-operative transsexual inmate who had served 8 years of her ten year sentence for burglary. Since she was male-to-female, she was housed with men. She had recently been transferred to OCCC pending her release.
Apparently the guard believed rape was or should have been part of the sentence.
Item: The one that actually broke in the news
Transgender anarchist commits vandalism.
Hint: The fact that this person is an anarchist is connected to the vandalism. The transgender is, however, what is being played up.
Item: Sentencing
Dwight DeLee was sentenced to 25 years in prison, the maximum allowed for first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime, for killing Lateisha Green in Syracuse.
It turns out that the hate crime portion added 5 years to the sentence.
Item: Activism
Kyle Giard Chase, 16, is asking the Vermont Human Rights Commission to require middle and high schools to offer genderless bathrooms.
Note: That is some genderless bathrooms, not all genderless bathrooms.
He said that before he came out last year as transgendered, he was a three-sport athlete and the co-captain of the field hockey team, a girls’ sport, at South Burlington High School.
At an away game, he said he was verbally harassed and threatened by the members of the host school’s football team for using the girls’ restroom.
Additional note: Having to hold one’s pee in class because one has no restroom to use is detrimental to one’s education.
Item: Discrimination
Utah governor Gay Herbert doesn’t believe that GLBT Utahns need protection from discrimination, because if they got it,
Pretty soon we’re going to have a special law for blue-eyed blondes
In fact, he believes that discrimination should be legal:
At a press conference yesterday, Herbert (a Mormon fella, if that surprises you) told reporters that he’s perfectly fine with Utah’s current rules about discriminating against LGBTs in the workplace, in housing, and elsewhere. Namely, that it’s perfectly legal! “We don’t have to have a rule for everybody to do the right thing,” says Herbert. “We ought to just do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do and we don’t have to have a law that punishes us if we don’t.”
 Dancing on the Edge of Light
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Most recently uncovered: Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, 100 Selected Poems by e e cummings, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima, and Where’s Vietnam? by Ferlinghetti, Ginsburg, Levertov, Dickey, etc.
Sometimes I wonder how humans have managed to last this long. So much hate and violence. This is one area I think animals are better than people. They seem to only use violence for protection and food.
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…in Orange.