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transgender 
Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 15:00:00 PST
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 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.
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Fri Feb 19, 2010 at 15:00:00 PST
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I've become disgusted the past few days. Actually it has been coming on for several weeks, but the last couple of days have brought things to a head.
My basic thought?
It is difficult enough to fight the conservatives who wish to deny us equal rights, strip away the few freedoms and liberties which we do have, and even deny us the basic necessities of life, like even the freedom to use a public restroom without having to choose between being arrested or being physically and/or sexually assaulted.
We should not have to battle the slings and arrows hurled at us by those who one would think we should be able to rely on as our friends.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
It all comes down to a matter of respect. Who deserves some and who has some to give?
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Fri Feb 12, 2010 at 15:00:00 PST
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Earlier today, teacherken posted an essay entitled, American, land of opportunity - Not!. It was mostly about the the limits of upward mobility caused by race and class. In fact, the paper he cited discussed downward mobility caused by those factors.
Downward mobility is not strange to people in the trans community. In the news yesterday was this report from the 2010 Creating Change conference, courtesy of Renee Baker for dallasvoice.com.
Numbers. They were preliminary numbers, but numbers nonetheless. And I'm a numbers person in the eyes of most part, so I thought I would share and comment on them.
They are not exactly new. The numbers come from a preliminary report dated in November. NGLTF released an even rougher sketch of the data earlier in last year.
But the question comes up from time to time. Do transfolk really need to be covered by an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act?
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Fri Feb 05, 2010 at 15:00:00 PST
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We all grow up with a vision of what is right and just in this world. Many, if not most, of us grow up with the idea of pursuing "the American Dream". For some that has meant the pursuit, as when it was first enunciated in 1931 by James Truslow Adams, of achieving a "better, richer, and happier life". In his book, The Epic of America, Adams stated it this way:
that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
Oddly, in view of today's circumstances, Mr. Adams was a banker.
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Fri Jan 15, 2010 at 15:00:00 PST
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I've been "watching" the trial in the 9th Circuit. You know, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, though Perry is only one of the plaintiffs and Ahnold is not, apparently, one of the defendants. More precisely, it might be labeled Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals v. Homophobes.
A keen observer might notice that I omitted Transgender there. Such an observer might ask why. The reason is that transgender people have been made invisible in this trial and the reporting thereof.
It was not unexpected.
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Fri Jan 08, 2010 at 11:00:00 PST
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(6 pm. - promoted by ek hornbeck)
Opening |
The other day there was a Kossack who told me that Worker's Rights were what it (presumably the Democratic Party) all should be about:
My point is that we have taken our focus off the core purpose of the Democratic party by elevating fringe interests above the major problems.
Fringe interests? Aren't the people on the fringe also workers? Although numbers about the "least of us" are often difficult to uncover, one source lists the unemployment rate for transgender people at 35% and claims that 60% of us earn less that $16K per year. Another source "more generously" claims rather that 40% of us earn less than $20K.
Both are appalling, if you ask me.
Anyway, the truth is that I would much rather be working on issues more central to the human condition, but someone has to stand firm for the people on the fringe.
If not me, who? If not now, when?
There is a simple way to satisfy those of us who are on the fringe. Give us equal rights. Then we can work wholeheartedly on those "more important issues."
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Tue Dec 08, 2009 at 11:47:54 PST
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This post is written in response to a very well-crafted argument against the resumption of military conscription. What I will say is that I have engaged in hypothetical discussions at times about what the resumption of a draft would produce in reality, versus what goals and reforms we might assume would transpire as a result. I'm not entirely sure that I agree that those who advocate the return of conscription are making specious or at best hypocritical arguments. Though I am opposed to war in all forms, one cannot disagree that war shapes so much of our consciousness and influences who we are as both Americans and humans to a degree that we are sometimes unaware of its complete impact. War and warfare is that pervasive and it is that enmeshed in who we are as a people that merely criticizing it from the outside may not simply be sufficient.
In another online forum, I suggested that perhaps if women were included in the draft that their presence might successfully overturn gender-based inequalities and begin to reform Patriarchal excesses. A previous generation of Feminists believed that the way to be recognized as the equals of men was to de facto refine the idea of masculinity by building it into its own image and idealized notion. Feminists of today have taken special care to embrace their femininity and sex while simultaneously redefining both in an effort to also reshape repressive ideas of masculinity and manhood. Gender as a social construct has become especially problematic to many, since transgender and intersex rights have turned conventional gender norms and gender arguments completely upside down. If applied to current draft regulations, it could easily raise a huge to-do.
The truth of the matter is that if a draft were resumed today, only men would be drafted. My argument, which again was set forth purely as food for thought, was that if women wished for full equality with men then they ought to seriously consider lobbying to be included as part of the process. My rationale for this was that women have for far too long been seen purely as keepers of the hearth and home and that their presumed status solely as nurturing figures and caregivers is restrictive and based on assumption, rather than reality. Another huge can of worms that goes along with this is that if Don't Ask, Don't Tell were ever to be revoked and if LGBTs were allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, the draft laws as written would apply to gay men, but not to lesbians. One gets in thornier territory than that when the question of trans men, trans women, and intersex individuals enters the picture. When we are only now beginning to confront the fact that what constitutes "male" and what constitutes "female" is far more fluid than any of us could have ever before believed, then we see what happens when the gender binary falls unforgivably short.
I seek not to seem ignorant or unaware of draft board realities. My own father did not serve in Vietnam because of his high draft number. By sheer luck, the highest number called for his group was 125 and, since the system focused on date of birth to determine draft status, his announced number 215 worked out in his favor. Still, Dad was labeled 1-A (available for military service) and taking no chances he continued to pursue a college degree and served for a time as a state trooper, since both of these options made it unlikely that he would be forced to serve in combat. I do recognize that if those times were our own, then as now, those unable to afford college or so poor that they could not use the privilege of middle class or upper class affluence to their benefit, advantages that most of us take for granted---they would be the first to go. My grandfather used his business connections with the people at the local county draft board to ensure that his sons did not go to Southeast Asia. In business, in politics, and in all of capitalism, ultimately it comes down to precisely who you know.
Assuming the draft was (God forbid) ever resumed, perhaps a brand new group of underprivileged souls would be sent off to fight and die. It's not as though gay men live and are born only in affluent cities, states, or regions. Nor is homosexuality a phenomenon relegated purely to Whites. Perhaps the recent transitioned trans man, fresh from top surgery finds zirself for the first time as a prime target to be forced to fight for a country that still hasn't quite acknowledged the unique struggles of transgenders. One would hope that if this situation were ever to come to pass that it would not force trans men to be disinclined to undergo the process of claiming a gender of which they were not assigned at birth while desperately seeking to feel authentic to who they are inside. One would also hope that resentment would not build within the gay community due to the unfortunate fact that gay men could be sent off to die but gay women could not.
One now understands why Don't Ask, Don't Tell, for all its flaws, is still in force. But I do understand my history, as well, and I know that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment raised the uniform voting age in this country from 21 to 18. A compelling argument raised by young Vietnam War Protesters, which stated that young men who were being drafted and sent to die in the jungles were without the right to vote in or vote out the legislators who were in charge of making that awful decision---this push led to resolute action. Quite unlike the legislative logjam we are now facing today in other reform measures, the process of enactment and ratification was not a particularly contentious one and it didn't take long for the amendment to take effect. When I consider today how many eighteen to twenty year olds only vote when the name Obama is on the ballot, it really makes me sad. Yet, at least that right exists, and at least combined effort towards good produced satisfactory results. We might learn from that when it comes down to pushing our own unique ends and aims. If we are going to increase the scope and span of conscription, an act so unfair and so completely unjustified as to border on complete evil, perhaps we might be forced to learn some lessons and to confront the hypocrisies that don't merely influence some, but influence all.
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Fri Nov 06, 2009 at 15:00:00 PST
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Once upon a time, way back at Forest Hills Elementary School in Lake Oswego, Oregon, we were taught about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Included in that was the Whitman Massacre by members of the Cayuse and Umatilla tribes, who blamed the Whitmans for bringing measles to them along with their religion. I remember going to the library and reading, among other things, about the Nez Perce and how they were treated by our government. They now have a reservation in Idaho and who usually call themselves the Nimiipuu.
Out of such things are activists born.
I became, at that moment a firm believer that people should have equal rights in the eyes of the government, that nobody should be treated as second-class citizens, or worse.
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Tue Aug 04, 2009 at 10:16:56 PDT
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( - promoted by buhdydharma )
No one following the health care debate can fail to know the Conservative movement in this nation is doing everything they can to stoke the level of fear of their base in an effort to spread the disease of fear to the nation as a whole and the Members of Congress in particular. Their overall goal is to keep any major changes in how health coverage is sold (which is what we are really talking about in this round of reform) from happening.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
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Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 15:00:00 PDT
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In a life not dominated by the desire to change the world so that it would be a better place to live, moving would be a great excuse for taking a month away news and politics and trying to spread the word.
But my life is dominated by that mission.
So I flipped a coin to see whether I should try to wrap some new words around an idea or two or post something old. When one gets to be as old as I am, it gets more difficult to "write something new" since one may find that almost everything has already been addressed in the past couple of decades...or the 292 diaries posted here...or the 260 poems written. As much as I would like for people to read my old diaries, in the spirit of learning about lives they cannot conceive, I know that the past gets forgotten very easily and reading someone's old diaries is an unlikely occurrence.
Unfortunately for me, since it meant no nap this afternoon, on the last day before the moving begins, "something new" won.
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Sat Jul 25, 2009 at 00:10:13 PDT
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For today's story, we will travel far afield from the typical domains of politics or science or law that have so often provoked our thinking into an often overlooked area of human relations:
To which gender do you belong?
It's a simple question, or so common sense would tell us-either you're male, or you're female.
As it turns out, things aren't quite so simple, and in today's conversation we'll consider this issue in a larger way. By the time we're done, not only will we learn a thing or two about sex and gender and sexuality, we'll also learn how to offer a community of people a level of respect that they often find difficult to obtain.
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Fri Jul 17, 2009 at 15:00:00 PDT
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Here it comes again.
At a time when the country of Pakistan, not what anyone generally conceives of as a bastion of progressive attitude on GLBT rights...Pakistan for %^&$%^'s sake...can have its Supreme Court rule that transfolk should be able to enjoy the same rights under the law as do the so-called normal people, there is a struggle in this country to even admit we are human beings, deserving of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Or, failing those, at least the use of a bathroom.
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Fri Jul 10, 2009 at 15:00:00 PDT
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Since we had to go house hunting Friday afternoon, I decided to put together a summary of some trans news items for Friday evening's column. But while I was doing so, one of my favorite movies came on, namely Carl Sagan's Contact.
The news, of course, is what it is. The movie put a different spin on the whole thing, so maybe this will come out as not only commentary on those items but also a statement about the state of the universe.
Just maybe a few readers out there will get the point of what I am trying to say. There is always hope for that.
| Wanna take a ride?
--S. R. Hadden |
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Fri Jul 03, 2009 at 15:00:00 PDT
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It's been a long hard work, trying to get back into the swing of teaching. The course we are teaching only lasts for 5 weeks and is at a very low, introductory level (Computer Literacy), but that is where these students are. The program is part of the New Jersey Equal Opportunity Fund, an attempt to rescue students who had fewer opportunities for advancement during their time in high school. Most are from the inner city areas of Jersey.
Last weekend Debbie and I decided to march in the New York Pride Parade for the first time since we moved to the area in 2000. We are, generally speaking, not designed for marching. I marched in both the Dyke March and the Pride Parade in Seattle and in the San Francisco Pride Parade once upon a time, but that was back in the 90s. I was so much younger then; I'm older than that now. Debbie is from Los Angeles originally, but never marched there.
Anyway, we gave it a shot this year in The City. We didn't make it all the way. Having to stand in the heat and wait for 3 hours before we could start marching took most of the starch out of us.
But I took plenty of pictures. The point of these words is to provide some wrapping for those pictures.
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Sun Jun 28, 2009 at 00:39:28 PDT
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(11:00AM EST - promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
Last week I posted a diary about LGBT legislation before Congress, suggesting that all was not doom and gloom in the fight for LGBT rights. Now there's more good news coming down the pipeline: on Friday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posted on its website the words that activists have been waiting years to see:
Title: Medical Examination of Aliens: Removal of HIV Infection as a Communicable Disease of Public Health Significance
With this we move one significant step closer to getting rid of one of the worst and most discriminatory bits of immigration law currently on the books: the HIV travel ban.
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Fri Jun 26, 2009 at 15:00:00 PDT
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They're here.
After...how long is that? Forever? Really?...the Congress has a couple of bills before it which would actually be beneficial to the GLBT community. And...horror of horrors...to transfolk as well.
What's up with that?
The two bills go by the unofficial names of the Matthew Shepard Act and ENDA. They cover two of the parts of what I have in the past considered the heart of The Gay Agenda:
- the right to not be fired for being GLBT
- the right to not be thrown out of our residences if discovered to be GLBT
- the right to be served in a restaurant
- the right not to be beaten up every other Tuesday
I am aware that other people think that marriage equality and the right to serve in the military are also at the heart of said agenda. I'm of the feeling that maybe they are more of the lungs. What I listed in the box affect all GLBT people, including those who are not in relationships or who have no interest in the military (including those who, like myself, who have already served, thank you).
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Thu Jun 25, 2009 at 14:38:03 PDT
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(10:00AM EST - promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
(Please rec at dkos too)
Michael is nineteen years old. He lives in Tennessee, otherwise known as hell on Earth for transgender people. He goes to school in a relatively more liberal part of the state but things are still ridiculously hard on him. Add to that the fact that his parents don't really accept or care about him the way he is.
His parents, if you can call them that, are your typical homophobic conservatives who are not adaptive to any sort of change whatsoever. He came out to them as a boy four years ago, and you'd think by now they'd gain some sort of understanding or at LEAST want to learn more about being transgender, but that's not the case with those people. His dad recently told him, paraphrasing, he is a GIRL and his dad will never recognize him as a boy. Ever. In case you haven't figured it out already, this is mind-numbingly stupid.
It doesn't help that there are so many misconceptions about transgender people, but honestly, it doesn't help that they won't take the time to learn about it and rid themselves of their incorrect views on it. His parents seem to think that transgender and intersex are the same, and that he's somehow trying to say that he has ambiguous genitalia or looks. He looks like a guy, because, you know, he IS, but they argue that he doesn't and they also argue that if he does, it doesn't matter because he's not a boy. They argue that he's been constantly indoctrinated and brainwashed by people and by "facts" he read on the internet. Michael is a really smart guy. Probably the most intelligent guy I've ever met, really. When he first realized something was off with his body, he started reading about it. He posted on transgender internet forums and met people who were the same, so he could learn about what's making him feel that way. This is a logical step for anyone. This isn't some sort of secret plan to turn oneself into a boy. He wanted to understand and to be closer to people. He wanted to stop feeling so alone and scared.
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Fri Jun 19, 2009 at 15:10:29 PDT
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( - promoted by buhdydharma )
Once more to the well.
Without rehashing the last weeks' debates over President Obama's relationship with the LGBT rights movement, I wanted to outline a list of legislation that is currently in play, along with recommendations about what we can do to help speed the processes along. There's nothing worse than the feeling that we have no say in the political process, but here are four opportunities to get vocal in a concrete, direct way:
1. the Domestic Partner Benefits and Obligation Act
2. the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
3. the Matthew Shepard Act
4. the Military Readiness Enhancement Act
And the best part is, you really can help. All four of these bills are before Congress (or about to be introduced), and your representatives are waiting to hear from you.
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Fri Jun 12, 2009 at 15:00:00 PDT
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So I was trying to spend the first part of the week continuing with a a fictional story I have been working on. Wall. There was this realization that to really do the story justice, I needed to write a whole historical background for a people who had none.
Big wall. Immense wall.
Then I had a rather severe allergy attack. Putting the two of those together left me in a panic because Friday was fast approaching and I had nothing for the column.
But I was saved, sort of. Chaz Bono came out. That may seem a bit weird, being as how not long ago Bono was Director of Entertainment Media for GLAAD. But there are different kinds of coming out:
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Fri Jun 05, 2009 at 15:00:00 PDT
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The WeaveMothers watched the train switch to the happentrack which they had just finished. The transition was as smooth as ever it could be.
The Engineer guided some steam through the whistle.
And the Storyteller began the tail of the Girl and the Five Fears.
Somewhere in a swamp
In mystic crocodiles' domain
Live Loneliness, Humiliation,
Loss and Death and Pain
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Reform Immigration -
March for America
Sunday, March 21
March on Washington
Saturday, March 20
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