Tag: transgender

You may have heard about it by now.  Or maybe not.  There haven’t exactly been that many news stories about it.

On Wednesday, April 22, Allen Andrade was convicted of the bias crime murder of Angie Zapata, which occurred in July of last year, as well as the theft of a car and a credit card.  He received the mandatory sentence of life without parole.

I wrote about the trial last week, while it was still going on.  You can read that here if you are so inclined.

I wish I could say I felt some degree of satisfaction about this.  But I don’t.  Surrounding the trial has been so much lack of communication and absence of understanding that I feel like going into my room and never emerging again.

Non-transsexual people are, in some cases, trying to be helpful with what they are trying to share.  Most often what I have read has fallen short of that mark.

My first impulse was to write about the fact that today was the National Day of Silence, which was first observed at the University of Virginia in 1996 and has been sponsored by GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network) since 2000.  If you feel like helping them out, I am sure everyone would be thankful.

But something else has been happening this week as well, out in Colorado.  And this thing, a trial in the murder of a young transwoman, demands words, not silence.  It has my focus, my attention.

Will it grab yours?

I was minding my own business, cooling my heels in Friday Philosophy, hoping for a little more than the usually suspects to show up.  From the activity at 6pm eastern on a Friday, one might suspect that people had actual lives or something.

Anyhoo, jessical dropped by at 8:20 by the time stamp, which is probably something like 8:45 in real time.  So not only had most of the likely readers left by then, thereby missing what jessica left, but most of the unlikely readers no doubt missed it as well.  It’s not like there has been a big Huzzah about it or anything.

Well, except for maybe jessica and me and a batch of other transfolk.

jessica dropped of a link to the text of a decision by the US District Court for the District of Columbia in the case of Schroer v. the Library of Congress.

NL dropped by and left a link to an ACLU announcement.

There was the obligatory article in the Washington Post, from their man on the District Court beat, which appears on B10 the day after the ruling of that court.

I’ve spent a couple of days searching for someone to write the story and explain how this is important to transsexual people, mostly because when news like this comes from me or someone like me, it is too easy to downplay the significance.

Whatever.  Doesn’t seem like this news has a chance of surfacing amidst the roiling seas of financial profligacy.

So, as short and sweet as I can make it [turns out, that didn’t happen – ed], from my own biased point of view, here’s the deal.

Though the Olympics aren’t quite over, I thought it’d be good to bring people’s attention to the openly queer athletes who’ve succeeded in Beijing, despite the stigma often attached whenever sports and sexuality cross paths.  

Stories like theirs often slip between the cracks, despite 24/7 coverage of the games.  But as long as stereotypes exist about the ability of gay, lesbian, bi, and trans athletes to perform at the same level as their peers, we need their stories to remind us that they can and do succeed.  

Here’s a quick roundup of athletes who are not only at the top of their game, but also open members of the LGBT community.

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but it seemed like a good time to let people know what’s going on in the world of queer politics and activism.  I’ll try to post these more regularly again, but my schedule’s still a little sporadic to fix a concrete posting time.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy, and if you have other news blurbs that I’ve missed, please feel free to add them below.

I got over being angry many years ago…around the time that I stopped being depressed, I would suppose, but if there is anything I have learned in this life it is that depression is really not totally evident until after it ends.  I’ve relied on the analyses of my therapists.

Ralph and Kurt, two gay men I will love forever, did not agree with the depression diagnosis, except as how it might be true that the act of transition creates an induced state of depression.  And my MMPI evaluation pronounced me entirely sane.  I have papers.

My own belief is that the difficulty lies in the fact that in order to acknowledge who I was required a different world view, one which was totally at odds with the world I encountered in my off-line life.

That off-line existence became quite ugly when I came out in Conway, AR on September 30, 1992.  If a 15-year old boy can be murdered by a 14-year old boy in California in 2008 because he dressed effeminately, imagine what it was like to be a 44-year old being a known transsexual woman in Arkansas in 1992.  I decided at the time that I had a duty to do my best to ensure that nobody else should be treated like I was…ever.

That’s why I write.  What else can I do?  One uses the skills and talents which one has.

Welcome to a (semi)weekly roundup of news related to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise “Other” community.

• The New York Times reports on the worsening situation for queer Iraqis since the American invasion, which has allowed a sharp increase in religious fanaticism:  
  

  In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”

  He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe.

  The article covers the rollercoaster of social opinions on queer culture from 1990 through now, and is well worth the read.

• Good luck finding student housing if you’re transgender: Southern Utah University is denying a transgender student housing until he can provide a doctor’s note (literally!) verifying his gender, a requirement not exactly placed on its other housing applicants.  The University’s policy requires proof of full, complete transition; otherwise says the housing director, “Where they’re in the process [of gender transition] I have no place to put them.”  Meanwhile the prohibitive cost of gender reassignment surgery will likely keep the student, Kourt Osbourn, from meeting the University’s requirements.
• Accused of homosexual acts, Iranian Makwan Moloudzadeh was murdered in prison by guards earlier this month.  I’m not one to flare up in anger, but this is fucking barbaric.  In the meantime, the U.S. is still considering deportation of Iranian gays begging for amnesty… further proof that our own fundamentalists have more in common with Iran than they’d like to admit.

More below the fold…

One night in the FarAway/LongAgo, I had trouble getting to sleep, so I sat up for several hours thinking about some things and felt like writing a bit about them.  It was a bit of a ramble.

I had not really been sharing much of my writing at the time because I came to a point where I thought that other people in the gender community needed to find themselves more than they needed to listen to what I had to say.  Someone questioned that stance and I thought it through and realized that I had perhaps been too hasty.

The following is a rewrite of that ramble, with some new words hung like ornaments here and there.  It was originally written as an address to my community.  Ultimately, however, circumstances did warrant continuation of that withdrawal.  There are limitations on how thin one can spread oneself and still be able to delve deeply.  Decisions made about which is more important have consequences.