Tag: transgender

What is being described as the first known transgender korimako (New Zealand bellbird) has been observed at the eco-sanctuary Zealandia (and perhaps the first ever known transgender bird).  Zealandia is also known as the Karori Sanctuary (in Maori,  Te Māra a Tāne, The Garden of Tane, who is the Maori creator of trees and plants.  

The photo to the left is of a male korimako.

Staff have taken to referring to the bird as the “butch bellbird.”

The bird has had its DNA tested when it was a chick and has been classified as female, but the bird acts like a male bellbird and has a mix of plumage usually attributed to each sex.  Males are olive green with a dark purplish sheen on their head and black outer wing and tail. While females are a duller olive brown with a blue sheen on the head and yellowish-white stripe curving from the base of the bill to below the eye.

Now 18 months old, the bird has the typical white cheek stripe on one side, but the dark body plumage of a male.

It could be due to a hormonal imbalance or it could be a reaction to shock or an incomplete moult – given the appearance and behaviour, any of those would be unusual though.

–Ben Bell, Victoria University moult expert

Ida Hammer, 34, is originally from Utah and now lives in the borough of Queens, New York City.  Raised a Mormon, Ida is a writer and an activist.  She moved to NYC four years ago and immediately began hormone treatment and living as a woman.

Among the places she publishes her writing is The Vegan Ideal.  She also has published in On the Issues magazine.  Trans Violence Is Violence against Women is from last December.  She organizes Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project.

Ida has won an enormously important battle with her insurance carrier.

Ida approached her insurance company, MVP Health Care, in July, 2011 about having her genital realignment surgery covered.  Of course, MVP declined…twice.

My insurance company denied my claim on the grounds that it was ‘cosmetic’ surgery.  (But) my doctors determined that the surgery was necessary, and the insurance company was second-guessing my doctors.

–Ida Hammer

An elementary school in Nashua, NH, has agreed with the parents to allow an unidentified transgender third grader to dress appropriately for her gender at school, be addressed as a girl, be treated like a girl, and use the female restroom.

The child and her parents were represented in the proceeding by Janson Wu of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD).

I think that as the environments become more and more welcoming to transgender and gender variant youth, we’re going to see a lot more students coming out.  And that’s something that schools and parents will need to be prepared to deal with.  Children often have difficulty having schools respect them for who they believe they are.  If a transgender girl wants to be able to wear feminine clothes to school and be addressed as a girl, often times we see schools feeling a fair amount of discomfort around that.  What we’re hopeful is that when the schools work with the student and the parents is they learn to understand that this is a sincere belief on the student’s part and they learn to support that.

As parents and educators and community members, you want to do what’s right for the children.  When you speak to the youth themselves, you really do get the sense that these are children who have sincere belief about who they are.

–Janson Wu

With the anniversary of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell just passed, questions are arising over the military’s continued stance that transgender people are unfit to serve.

The Advocate tracked down some current and recent transpeople who are serving or have just finished serving.

In the interest of full disclosure, this author must admit to serving in the US Army during the Vietnam Era  (1971-1973).  She did not serve oversees , but rather was stationed at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, KS, where she was a correctional specialist who rose to the pay grade of E5 (Spec-5, which is equivalent to sergeant).  She separated with an Honorable Discharge and a Presidential Commendation.  

This was all around two decades before she transitioned.

A body of a transwoman  found on Labor Day in the Frankford neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia with a gunshot wound to the head has been identified as Kyra Cordova, 27, who also used the name Kyra Kruz on social media.  Her body was found in a wooded area near a Wawa where she was last seen purchasing food and drinks.

Kyra was a volunteer and former employee at the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (GALLAEI).  According to Facebook, Kyra graduated from North Penn Senior High School in Lansdale, PA in 2003 and was attending college, majoring in biology, with “aspirations of opening her own transgender medical facility”.

Cordova began volunteering at GALLAEI in 2010 and was soon hired as an HIV tester.

The big news about transpeople is not something which is likely to help us win friends and influence people.  On the other hand, the headlines are of some interest.  Transgender-inmate ruling is movement’s latest win says the AP’s Megahn Barr.  

So I guess we have won recognition as a “movement”.  On the other hand Michelle Kosilek is not going to win us any friends.  Federal Judge Mark Wolf has ordered a state-funded gender reassignment surgery for Kosilek, who during her transition in 1990 murdered her wife, Cheryl McCaul.  He strangled her with wire and left her body in the trunk of a car at a mall in North Attleboro, MA.  Kosilek is currently serving life without parole.

Wolf has ruled that Kosilek has suffered from gender identity disorder (newly rechristened “gender dysphoria”) since she was a young child, was “born in the wrong body” (Goddess, I hate that phrase), began taking hormones while in prison and requested treatment for her disorder.  Such treatment was denied.  As a result Kosilek twice has tried to commit suicide and also has attempted self-castration.  For 12 years her attorneys have been arguing that the Constitution states that she has the right to treatment for her condition.

Here’s a great story.  Before I delve into it, I’d like to point out that there is some controversy over it.  At base it is about a boy who likes to wear skirts and the actions of the boy’s father.  Now, the story is in German at the feminist magazine EMMA.  oneandonlygabriel has provided a rough translation.  Then Gawker picked it up.  And Aravosis added his two cents about whether or not the child is transgender.

In my view, it doesn’t matter whether or not the child is transgender.  Because the child was born with a boy’s body and likes to wear dresses, the child is gender-variant.  And the father in question still gets my applause.

On June 18, 2010 I published a diary about the Compton Cafeteria Riots of 1966.  On August 20, 2012 there was a gathering/march in San Francisco honoring the survivors of those riots and the decades to follow.

Lest one try to parse the difference between the drag queens of the time and today’s transwomen, one might note that the participants who showed up have mostly transitioned since that time.

That original diary follows.

Every so often I find there is a series of stories which just aren’t likely to get their own diary…even though they very well may deserve one.  Time is a limited quantity after all and it’s about to become a much more limited quantity quickly, what with the new semester about to run us over.  Syllabi are due next Thursday and classes start the following week.

So you can think of this as a Friday trans news dump…stories with not enough lurid interest to grab bigger headlines given short shrift on a Friday evening…or you can think of it as the news from the transgender community on a reel.

The District of Columbia has had recent problems vis-a-vis the transgender community, what with a rash of transwomen being shot or otherwise killed, including at least one time by an off-duty police officer.  In 2000 a government study of the DC trans community showed a 42% unemployment rate and that 47% of the community did not have health insurance.

The study also indicated that in order to survive, many transpeople resorted to sex work.  MPD responded to that news by instituting a policy of using condom possession as evidence of prostitution.

These actions discourage sex workers from using condoms, increasing the risk of HIV-a particularly worrisome possibility for transgender people in the District, where the rate is already so high across the population, says Megan McLemore, a senior researcher in the Health and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

As you might imagine, this has caused a lot of tension between transpeople and the city government.  Imagine our surprise, then when the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights announced that it will launch what it believes is the first government-funded campaign aimed at stopping anti-transgender discrimination.  The effort will commence in late summer/early fall.

Many moons ago…back in the early 90s when I was transitioning, I had an online transwoman friend who lived in England, was blind, and had attended one of the colleges at Oxford.  I don’t recall which college it was, but it was definitely Men Only at the time.  It was Men Only to the point that it refused to recognize any graduates which may have transitioned from male to female, preferring to remove them from the historical list.

I am sure my friend is amazed at how tradition has now been altered at Oxford University.  Amid concerns that its strict academic dress code was unfair to transgender students, Oxford has adopted new regulations removing the requirement that students wear ceremonial clothing specific to their gender.

That is, male-born people will be allowed to sit exams in skirts and stockings and women-born people will have the option of wearing suits and bow ties.

George Brown is a psychologist who served 12 years in the US Air Force and worked for 13 years in the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Back in 1988 he wrote a paper entitled Transsexuals in the Military: Flight into Hypermasculinity (pdf).  A copy of that paper was present in Bradley Manning’s housing unit, according to testimony at his Article 32 hearing.

To be a boy is to be macho, to have weapons, to be a fighter, and to  kill, at first in play, then maybe later in a war.  

–John Money,  1980

In that paper Brown speculated that male-to-female transgender enlist in the services as a way of “purging their feminine self”.

Current military policies, in association with the proposed hypermasculine phase of transsexual development, may actually result in a higher prevalence of transsexualism in the military than in the civilian population.

–Brown, 1988

Brown claims to have new research data to support that thesis.