Tag: transgender

Transgender Equality News

Sometimes there are so many small stories swirling around that I feel the need to gather them together in one larger compendium.  In the present case, some of them are updates to previous stories and some of them just don’t seem to fit anywhere else.

Item:

Irish Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton will publish legislation in the next year to provide for recognition of the acquired gender of transgender people.  The long-awaited report on legal recognition of transsexual people in Ireland was presented to the Cabinet on Wednesday.  Irish transgender rights law…or rather, the lack of same…was found to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights some time ago.

Hate Groups at it Again

Here we go again.  Massachusetts is debating An Act Relative to Transgender Equal Rights that would provide protections from discrimination in public transit, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, schools, and bathrooms, and the usual suspects have skipped by all the items until they got to bathrooms.

Ah, yes.  Men dressed like women are going to rape your daughter and/or your wife in public toilets if transgender people are accorded equal citizenship.

Has there ever been a case of a transperson committing such an act in a public restroom?  Research comes up empty.  How many sexual predators dress as women in order to perform their nefarious deeds?  And is it fair to punish transpeople for the perceived misdeeds of people who are not trans?

Our Day Will Come

While the New York State Senate was approving same-sex marriage, the most recent version of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) was lying fallow.  Passed by the Assembly 78-53 for the fourth time (it was originally passed by the Assembly in 2007, then again in 2009, 2010, and this year), and having a reported 32 senators committed to voting for the bill, which would be enough for passage, it was never brought to the floor for debate or a vote.  And unlike marriage equality, there was no visible public campaign demanding a vote.

The majority leader, Long Island Republican Dean Skelos, controlled the agenda in the Senate, so GENDA was parked in the Rules Committee, which he controlled, where it sat until time ran out on 2011’s regular session.

Taboo

Etymology:

–1777 (in Cook’s “A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean”), “consecrated, inviolable, forbidden, unclean or cursed,” explained in some English sources as being from Tongan (Polynesian language of the island of Tonga) ta-bu “sacred,” from ta “mark” + bu “especially.”  But this may be folk etymology, as linguists in the Pacific have reconstructed an irreducable Proto-Polynesian * tapu, from Proto-Oceanic * tabu “sacred, forbidden” (cf. Hawaiian kapu “taboo, prohibition, sacred, holy, consecrated;” Tahitian tapu “restriction, sacred;” Maori tapu “be under ritual restriction, prohibited”). The noun and verb are English innovations first recorded in Cook’s book.

Etymology online

The word itself (taboo) is used in more than one signification. It is sometimes used by a parent to his child, when in the exercise of parental authority he forbids it to perform a particular action. Anything opposed to the ordinary customs of the islands, although not expressly prohibited is said to be “taboo”.

–Herman Mellville, Typee

Some taboo activities or customs are prohibited under law and transgressions may lead to severe penalties. Other taboos result in embarrassment, shame, and rudeness. Although critics and/or dissenters may oppose taboos, they are put into place to avoid disrespect to any given authority, be it legal, moral and/or religious.

Wikipedia

We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

–William Hazlitt

Suing for equal health coverage

Alec Esquivel, 42, is an Oregon transman.  He works as a law clerk for the Oregon Court of Appeals.  Alec’s doctors said it was a medically necessary procedure to have a hysterectomy because of his heightened risk of ovarian and uterine cancer due to the hormone therapy he began in 2001.  Providence Health Plans, third-party insurance administrator for the state, and the Public Employees Benefit Board denied coverage for the procedure, stating

services related to a sex-change operation, including evaluation, surgery and follow-up services are not a covered benefit of your plan.

Alec is therefore suing the state of Oregon and the PEBB to cover his medical care related to the hysterectomy as well as $250,000 in damages and attorney fees.

Alec Esquivel was denied coverage for a medically necessary procedure specifically because he is transgender. This type of discrimination is unlawful and risks the health of hardworking, productive citizens of Oregon.

Dru Levasseur, Lambda Legal transgender rights attorney

The Next Civil-Rights Movement [sic]

The Cheat Sheet at The Daily Beast  provides us the following:

The Next Civil-Rights Movement

The 700,000 or so transgender people in the United States are, Eliza Gray writes in The New Republic, “some of the least protected, most persecuted people in the United States.”  One transgender person is murdered each month; more than one-third have attempted suicide; more than one-quarter say they’ve lost a job due to discrimination.  Gray tracks the story of one particular transgender woman, Caroline Temmermand.  In 2009, at the age of 55, she came out as transgender and soon thereafter began telling her family and children.  Last spring, she organized a vigil for Chrissy Lee Polis, the transgender woman whose attack was caught on video camera after she attempted to use a woman’s bathroom in a McDonald’s. “Transgender people clearly need more protection from our laws and society,” Gray writes. “But they can’t win these victories on their own.”

Successes and Failures

I’ve noticed recently the tendency to start reviewing this year’s legislative and governmental progress…as if this were the end of the year.  Admittedly it is in many cases the end of the legislative session, but my calendar still has a good six months to go.

Autumn Sandeen has a commentary in the San Diego LGBT Weekly, which highlights the fact that we have equality in three more states (HI, NV, and CT) and fought off a challenge to equality in Maine and that antidiscrimination protections were added administratively for federal employees.  And soon we should see that trans clients of our government (at least at HHS and the VA) have equal rights to the services we seek.

[For those who don’t know, transpeople will not gain anything from the repeal of DADT since we are excluded from service for other…administrative, not legislative…reasons.]

All that is good, but I was taught as a child that we learn more from our failures than from our successes.  So what of our failures this year?

Our Sister’s Keeper

Tonight Independent Lens will be presenting Two Spirits, movie about the death of a young Navajo in 2001.  I will be there.  I hope others will also find the time.

I expect this to be an intense experience.

There are some stories which I do not enjoy the privilege to share.  One is the story of the two-spirit people of Native American culture.

This is the true story of a Navajo boy who was also a girl.

On one level I understand that so very well.  But on the other hand, I am not Navajo, so I cannot ever be nadleeh.

TAMU anti-sex conservative group prompts move of transgender conference

The Third Annual Texas Transgender Nondiscrimination Summit was scheduled to be held at Texas A&M in August, but a conservative group expressed its outrage over the idea…after there was a seminar on Safe and Fun Sex sponsored by the TAMU GLBT Resource Center.

[Sex therapist Cay] Crow taught students in graphic detail ways to enhance fellatio and cunnilingus (i.e. oral sex). She specifically discussed how to put a condom on someone with one’s mouth, deep-throating, G-spot stimulation, tongue piercings, condoms, genital shaving, and changing the temperature of one’s mouth.

Link

Their response?

Texas A&M should not be using taxpayers’, students’, and donors’ money to teach unchaste sexual behavior to young, unmarried men and women.  What does the university administration have to say about this funding inequality and bias?

–Justin Pulliam, chairman of the Texas Aggie Conservatives

Feds issue new guidelines for Trans employees

While we struggle along a state at a time on the right to nondiscrimination in the workplace, having just reached 14 of them and having ongoing efforts to increase that number in Connecticut and Massachusetts, the Federal Government has issued new guidance about the employment of transpeople (Guidance Regarding the Employment of Transgender Individuals in the Federal Workplace).  Attached was information about How to Reconstruct a Personnel Folder due to a Change in Gender Identity and an FEHB Carrier Letter authorizing change of gender on insurance and health records (but noting that sex-specific care such as mammograms and prostate exams should still be covered).

The guidance comes from the Office of Personnel Management, directed by John Berry.

It is the policy of the Federal Government to treat all of its employees with dignity and respect and to provide a workplace that is free from discrimination whether that discrimination is based on race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity or pregnancy), national origin, disability, political affiliation, marital status, membership in an employee organization, age, sexual orientation, or other non-merit factors. Agencies should review their anti-discrimination policies to ensure that they afford a non-discriminatory working environment to employees irrespective of their gender identity or perceived gender non-conformity.

Clowns and Bathrooms (with talented eye-candy)

clownfish Pictures, Images and PhotosAs per usual, I spent some time wandering around the Interweb, looking for stories that might need elucidation…or at least response.  Sometimes I find some good stuff, like the recent good news out of Nevada.  More often than not, I find depressing stuff, like the transwoman who was beaten by four people in Fredericksburg, Virginia just for being trans…and apparently for chastising a young man because his dog was a loud barker.  One of the assailants is thought to be a relative of that young man.    

On the plus side this week is Steven Petrow’s essay at Aol Healthy Living, Straight Talk: when a Daughter Changes Her Gender, Does She Become a Son?

And he is indeed her son — no need for quotation marks around the word. One of the basic concepts of gender identity is that you are the gender you think and say you are. The external genitalia that make a doctor proclaim, “It’s a girl!” in the delivery room are not the sum total of that individual’s gender identity.

Like he said.  For some reason, people have this fixation that gender is determined by one’s chromosomes and so sex should be inelastic.  I guess they’ve never met a clownfish.

(Cue Nemo).  

Searching for trans heroes and heroines

In my experience, which is not inconsequential, all transfolk sometimes cringe at the way other transfolk express our common situation/predicament.  Some call it a malady.  Some have called it a birth defect, while others of us find nothing defective about who we are and have rejected that framing.

When people are fighting for their common humanity, sometimes framing is all they have which they can address.

Well, now there is a means for people to address that framing…to make a mark on the story of what it means to be trans.  

Chaz Bono and Janet Mock have had their turn.

Janet Mock?”, you query.

If you want your turn, pass to the other side of the squiggle.

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