Tag: transgender

is usually the case, I was searching for stories to cover for my columns.  I stumbled across an editorial in the Washington Blade, entitled We must protect rights of transgender people.  Well I’m all for that.  That is the theme about which I write most…especially so over the past week.

I do have to acknowledge some disappointment over the reception those stories have received.  In my world, human rights have priority #1.  Everything else comes tumbling after.

The Blade editorial focuses on two reports released earlier this month which “paint a disturbing picture of the global status of trans communities – a portrait of human rights violations, violence and marginalization.”

Well, duh.  If you haven’t gotten that much out of what I have been blogging about since 2005, then apparently we have been miscommunicating.

I’m going to cover one of those documents.  I guess I’ll save the other for a rainy day.

Let me note up front that the report covers life to the south of our own country, which concerns me because that usually means nobody will be interested.  But there is no reason to embrace American exceptionalism on this issue.  The United States suffers some of the identical problems as our Latin American neighbors when it comes to the treatment of transpeople.  Indeed some of them do much better than our country.

Yet these reports show how trans people are subject to especially extreme abuse, from many angles.  Lest anyone use these stories as reason to rejoice for not living in one of “those barbaric countries” it’s worth noting that the U.S. racks up one of the higher murder rates of trans people worldwide.  Routine police mistreatment and abuse of trans women in one neighborhood of New York City was recently documented – with stories remarkably similar to those told in Bogota, Johannesburg or New Dehli.

It is also important to note that much of the political agenda advanced in the name of LGBT rights – whether same-sex marriage or “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” – have little relevance to these communities.  A marriage license won’t stop a bullet.  As noted in a statement put out on Dec. 17 by 50 organizations, the LGBT rights movement needs to better address issues of criminalization of trans people.

—Washington Blade editorial

I hope you can wade through to the end.  This is important.  And I think it is even more important to share the first three stories in order to highlight the last one.  So I’ll start in India, then proceed to Indonesia, followed by Cote d’Ivoire.

But those place names could just have easily have been Washington, DC, Indianapolis, or Charleston.  This is one area where America is much less than spectacular.

The places could be anywhere where some people are considered less than human.  For us transgender people that doesn’t exclude much of this planet.

The stories will set the background for the story from New York about UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and others speaking about Human Rights Day.

I caution the reader that there is violence in the first stories.

Somewhere along the line  the concept of equality has become muddled.  We can certainly see that in deliberations around North America in the past week.

In Boise, ID, Helena, MT, East Aurora, IL and Canada we have seen what happens when the public chooses to consider the equality of minority people…especially those of us in minorities that most people don’t know much about, don’t want to know much about and generally detest anyway.

The idea that giving us equal protection under the law will endanger other people because a third set of people might take advantage of our protections is just ludicrous.  It’s like saying that disabled people shouldn’t have protections because able-bodied people might use their set-aside parking spaces.

As reported earlier this month New Hampshire voters chose the first openly transgender state legislator, Stacy Laughton of Nashua, who represents Ward 4 .  That didn’t sit well with some apparently so the Laconia, NH Daily Sun dug into her past and discovered that prior to her transition, she served 4 and a half months of 2008 in jail on a felony conviction of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud.

She was also convicted of tire slashing and at one point reportedly admitted she faked illness to gain an ambulance ride from Weirs Beach back to the heart of Laconia.

Neither of those latter incidents were felonies of course.

According to NH State law convicted felons can vote and run for public office as long as they are not incarcerated and have successfully completed any court-ordered probation.

It was the autumn of 1998, late November.  The previous month Matthew Shepard was found, barely alive and in a coma, having been tortured and tied to a fence near Laramie, Wyoming.  The person who found the body thought at first it was a scarecrow.

Hester had just returned from entertainment engagements in Europe.  She was a statuesque (over 6 feet tall and around 225 pounds) drag performer.  She is said to have had an overwhelming stage presence.  She was also reported to be very kind and well-liked by everyone in the community.

She was always nice to everyone.  She was very, very, very liked by the whole community, so what happened to her was like a real shock.

–Charito Suarez

Around 6:15pm on November 28 Rita Hester’s neighbors heard loud banging coming from inside her Allston, MA apartment.  One neighbor later reported that someone inside had yelled for help.  Police were called and arrived around 6:30pm.  They found Rita’s lifeless body in the apartment.  It had multiple stab wounds.

This past Tuesday evening I included the following snippet in my diary, School Daze.

The average person has a 1 in 15,000 change of being murdered.  A transperson has a 1 in 13 chance of being murdered.  Additionally transpeople are eight times as likely to commit suicide.

Rightly so, cordgrass commented:

you buried the lede

a transperson has a one in thirteen chance of being MURDERED!  I had no idea!  What does that say about our society?

Do you have more links for that?

The data was taken from one of my links, but it should rightly be viewed with some skepticism.   So I went looking for the source.  I had the advantage of knowing who it was, so that made my search easier.  Back in 1999 Kay Brown (proprietress of Transgender Roadmap) shared the data  with students in her class when she was the instructor for “20th Century Transgender History and Experience” at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco, (Washington Blade, Dec. 10, 1999).

Nashua, New Hamphire voters elected the first transperson ever to the New Hamphire House of Representatives on Tuesday.  Stacy Laughton, 28, places gender issues at the top of her agenda, but wants to be treated like any other woman on the House floor.

Laughton has been politically active since she was a teenager.  When she lived in Laconia, she was unsuccessful in several attempts at securing city positions and one attwempt at a run for the State House while running as a Republican.  

She worked on John Kerry’s campaign in 2004 as an independent.  Her shift in allegiance had a lot to do with Gov. Craig Benson’s budget cuts.

He cut welfare funding, he cut special ed funding, he cut a lot of these vitally important programs, and these were programs that I knew lots of people who were on, and I started to see their lives change, but they didn’t change for the better.

–Laughton

Laughton became a Democrat in 2010 and was elected as a selectman in Ward 4 in Nashua, where she now lives.  Several friends and mentors suggested a run for higher office, but it was newly-elected Rep. Maggie Hassan’s plea for people to run which ultimately caused her to do so.

This area of New Hampshire needed somebody like me, somebody who understands the complex issues that this district faces, somebody who understands what it’s like to live with a lower income, somebody who knows the people in the area.

–Laughton

Maxwell Zachs is 25-years old and was born female. He is a citizen of London, England, has degrees in English literature, indigenous studies and constitutional law, and is a rabbinical student at a yeshiva in Sweden.  Three years ago he began his transitioned to male.  He began testosterone treatments in 2009 and had a double mastectomy and chest contouring in Thailand in 2010.  He recently was one of the cast of England’s My Transsexual Summer

Maxwell recently filed a petition at Change.org calling for the World Health Organization to eliminate transsexualism from its list of mental disorders in the International Classification of Diseases.  He says that the designation only contributes to discrimination.

I know there is concern about Change.org.  I’m not the person who set up the petition, which last I checked had 46,814 supporters.

If you would like to get to know Max Zachs better, he has a blog.

There is nothing wrong with me. I am perfectly healthy, I just happen to be transgender.

–Maxwell Zachs

The East Aurora, IL school board unanimously adopted a policy recently affecting transgender students.

The new policy specifically states that transgendered and gender nonconforming students have the right use the restroom that corresponds to their gender-related identity that is consistently asserted at school. The student has the right to be addressed by the name they want to be called, too.

The new policy does not require a court-ordered name change or gender change and does not require a change to official records.

In most cases, transgendered students should have access to the locker room that corresponds to their gender-related identity, according to the policy.

In no case shall a transgender student be required to use a locker room that conflicts with the student’s gender-related identity.

Student participation in gendered team sports will still be governed by state policy on an individual basis.

Good on them, right?

Not so fast.