Every once in a while, I try to share news of interest to the trans community with people from outside our community, in the hopes that people will get a better idea about what goes on in our lives. It’s all part of that teaching effort that we have been told we must do before we can ever hope to be accorded equal rights.
What else is new? department:
Item: Transwoman killed in the East Hollywood portion of Los Angeles. This was actually last summer. What is really new is that the office of Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti is offering a $50K reward for information as to the whereabouts of Jose Catalan, who has been labeled a “person of interest” in the case. Catalan may turn out to be a suspect or may be just a witness. But currently he is a missing parolee and is considered to be armed and dangerous.
 Pauline Ibarra |
Paulina Ibarra was stabbed multiple times last August by an unknown assailant.
Meanwhile in San Antonio, TX, a person described in the arrest warrant as “a Latin male” was abducted and raped by a San Antonio police officer. One of these days police officers will discover they might get a whole lot more cooperation from us if they refer to transwomen as women and not men. And, it should go without saying, not rape us.
Item: Harvard University Health Services have decided to offer more equitable coverage for transpeople.
“It’s a huge expense to try to come up with the money to afford surgery, so to have it covered through insurance is a big deal,” says Iain M. Stanford, who is working on a doctoral dissertation in queer theology at the Harvard Divinity School. “Personally, I could not think about surgery unless it were covered by insurance.”
What the coverage has been extended to is so-called “top surgery”, meaning mastectomies for transmen and breast augmentation for transwomen. I would like to point out that almost all of the transwomen I know, including me, grew our own breasts. But I suppose it is the thought that counts.
Although designating this “conflict of body and mind” as a medical condition is necessary to receive medical treatment, many transgender people are uncomfortable that this conflict is classified as a disorder in the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
That brings us directly to the next item:
The American Psychiatric Association publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which defines and classifies mental disorders. The fifth edition is due out soon.
What has people concerned is the fact that the Gender Identity Disorders Work Group contains people who have not worked in the interests of transpeople. The Work Group is chaired, for example, by Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto advocates treating gender-variant children to “adjust to their birth sex”, which has been described by some activists as reparative therapy.
Many of us think that anyone who is quoted favorably by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) should not be in such a position.
In the interest of full-disclosure, I should admit that in the last go-round, I argued against removal of gender identity disorder from the DSM IV-TR, since it was the only diagnosis which allowed us to get medical treatment.
Also a member of the group is Dr. Ray Blanchard, who has classified transwomen as having a paraphilia (a fetish, if you will), which he has named “autogynephilia”.
Two mental health organizations outside the APA, the American Psychological Association and the National Association for Social Workers, released statements in 2008 supporting the civil rights of gender variant individuals and encouraging an end discriminatory practices.
The American Medical Association also released a statement in 2008 stating that its members “oppose discrimination on the basis of gender identity.”
We are very concerned about these appointments. Kenneth Zucker and Ray Blanchard are clearly out of step with the occurring shift in how doctors and other health professionals think about transgender people and gender variance. It is extremely disappointing and disturbing that the APA appears to be failing in keeping up with the times when it comes to serving the needs of transgender adults and gender-variant children.–NGLTF
An update of a previous story: Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women in Vancouver, BC, has decided to open its doors to transwomen. We really didn’t think the world needed more places for “women born women” only.
Media: CNN Presents Her name was Steven.
Shivadwaj’s next film to be about transgender: Naanavaladaaga
World Net Daily is worked up about the possibility of cross-dressing generals and homosexual communists.
Meanwhile, Fox News assures us that the Student Non_Discrimination Act (SNDA), also known as H.R. 4530, will stifle free speech and advance the gay agenda. So we seem to be on a roll.
But currently the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has not been going much of anywhere. SO ENDA lobbying day is this coming Tuesday.
A near-universal 97% of transgender people who responded to a survey on discrimination had experienced some level of harassment on the job, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality, organizers of the lobbying effort. Among the 6,450 people who answered the survey, a shocking 26% had been fired simply for being transgender. Rates of poverty were also stark, with transgender people with an annual income less than $10,000 at more than twice the national average. For transgender people of color, the numbers were even worse, with Latinos and African Americans in poverty at four and five times the national average respectively.
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…available in Orange.