11/1/12

Video WOW:1st Brazilian Transsexual Beauty Contest


Brazilian Transsexual Beauty Contest: Advocacy or Meatlocker?

Nineteen contestants compete in Rio de Janeiro for the title of "Miss T Brasil", the country's first transsexual beauty pageant. But this pageant seemed odd since there have been over 100 trans people murdered in Brazil since January of this year according to Keila Simpson, president of the National Counsel to Combat Discrimination of the Secretary of Human Rights to the President of Brazil. So after reading the myriad  of mainstream media articles I wanted to see for my self.

Advocacy or a slab of meat. For your consideration....

10/31/12

East Aurora School Board Acts Out Transphobicly

In what could only be seen as stereotypical reaction to attempts to make safe schools for transgender people the East Aurora school board has taken the following actions:

All but dismissed the board member who introduced the trans protective measures.

Formed a new committee to consider new anti bullying rules, but one explicitly devoid of rules protecting transgender people.

They justified this backsliding with the same reasons I have heard given time and time again while personally advocating for transgender protections.

The protections would 'cost too much' to implement.

The protections would infringe on cisgender students.

There were warned of potential legal ramifications.

Their lawyers needed time to establish criteria defining whom exactly transgender people are.


And the very worst reason of all...

Their are only maybe one or two out of the thousands of students who identify as transgender and after all, we haven't heard any complaints from them.

God. Its because they are terrified, silent afraid, closeted, desperate and near suicidal!

the East Aura School mirrors Mitt Romney's anti transgender actions in Massachusetts except he had the cojones to come out and give the real reasons:

"....May 11, 2006, when Romney decided, out of the blue, to shut down the Governor's Commission on Gay & Lesbian Youth, established by Republican Gov. Bill Weld a decade earlier to address LGBT youth suicide and strengthened by Weld's successor, Republican Gov. Paul Cellucci, to support a broad array of anti-violence and anti-bullying work. Beth Myers, Romney's chief of staff (and today a senior aide), called the chair of the commission, Kathleen Henry, and told her that Romney was issuing an executive order "revoking our existence" because he was offended by the use of the word "transgender" on letterhead where his name was on the sidebar. She told Henry that Romney would replace it with a commission focused on all the state's youth, and that they'd replace all the members of the commission."

Romney's hate is more important to him than our lives.


Source: Webz.org
Sandra Conti is a mental health therapist who has lived in Aurora for seventeen years. Her son, who is transgender, goes to school in Aurora in District 204, which is east of District 131 and extends into Naperville.
She said her son has encountered some difficulty with students and teachers at school, but she believes he’s had an easier time because of her advocacy.

“The frustrating part for me are adults who do nothing,” she said in an interview at the home of a friend. “In my school they do attend to it, but I’ll be honest, I think they attend to it because I’ve been so active in the school district.”

While Conti’s son has chosen to stay at his school despite some difficulty, she says bathrooms, locker rooms, and pronouns were all issues at first. Before he came out and was given access to a private locker room, she said, “he was to the point where I worried about suicide.”
My question is this: Will the good people of Aurora allow the boards hate to override their schools children's welfare?

Lives are at stake.






Transsexuals Are The Same As Drag Queens Before $25,000 Surgery: Rupaul

The idiot in pancake makeup is at it again.

It was by some unfortunate circumstance long ago before trans people got a voice in the matter, drag queens sahawed their purfumed selfs up under the trans umbrellas. One Drag queen a particularly nasty man has done it again. The next offensive? A quip on the October 29th Drag Race episode by RuPaul:
Comedienne Vicki Lawrence asked, “Hey Ru, what’s the difference between a drag queen and a transsexual?”

RuPaul laughingly replies, “About twenty-five thousand dollars and a good surgeon.”

Matting of makeup and hitching your penis between your legs for a occasional night of fun at others expense doesn't make you trans, it just makes you an obnoxious man in a dress. That's all. Being in drag for a few hours doesn't give you the right or even the life experience to speak for trans people.

For all his denials Rupaul knows perfectly well how hurtful 'tranny' is. He used the pejorative to lash out!

On Lance Bass's apology for using the word "tranny," Rupaul says: "It's ridiculous! It's ridiculous!... I love the word "tranny"...And I hate the fact that he's apologized. I wish he would have said, 'F-you, you tranny jerk!'

Huffpost Interview Jan 14, 2012

It's not OK to defame, bully or denigrate others. Not in small groups and certainly not on the world platform that RuPaul has.

Yes, I am lumping all drag queens into this mess.

Its your dirt, your community, you don't like Rupaul's self promotional hurtful stunts? Then grow a pair, stand against the stream, identify yourself and say something to Rupaul about it. Elevate your drag community above that sort of rhetoric.


10/30/12

APA DSM-5 Gender Dysphoria: A Kinder, Gentler Machine Gun Hand


Most all of us who have come to a point in our lives where we feel our transition has been successful, all have one common problem.

Much of the world doesn't recognize or respect our gender expression.

So we are happy, or like me still thrilled, to look in the mirror, to see the external changes. To sit quietly reflecting on our internal growth and the amazing interpersonal relationships which have since sprouted.

To know in my heart this is who my artistic first wife saw when she drew a picture of who she knew I would be in my mature years. No one including myself believed I could be such a wise intuitive soul, but she did.

Much of the world still doesn't know. It's been a battle extraordinaire fighting for my life at the first full time job since transitioning in 2007. Yes five years.

I am winning. I am being grudgingly granted respect by the last of the management holdouts, not because of any revelation on their part, but because I am a person of extraordinaire worth to the company.

A hybrid of sorts. Physically enabled like a athletic man, yet with accessibility of a woman and with the compassion and understanding of a mother. A hybrid gender.

So in a nutshell, I am happy even ecstatic. Then what was holding me back?

"social role dysphoria"

I can't blame all the hardships I have endured getting to this point on the APA, the people largely responsible for creating a social toxic atmosphere, but I will say if they stopped adding gas to the haters fire, the air would start to clear.


Kelly Winters who authors GID Reform doesn't advocate for a total reform arguing that retention would continue to aid many who's insurance covers transitional needs. In all my life I have yet to shake one of those peoples hands, but hey, I know you are out there. But what about the vast majority of us?

Kelly Winters offers these brilliant observations:

"Transitioned individuals who are highly functional and happy with their lives are forever diagnosable as mentally disordered under flawed criteria that reference characteracterics and assigned roles of natal sex rather than current status. For example, a post-transition adult who is happy in her or his affirmed role, wants to be treated like others of her/his affirmed gender, has typical feelings of those in her/his affirmed gender, and is distressed or unemployed because of external societal prejudice will forever meet criteria A (subcriteria 4, 5 and 6) and B and remain subject to false-positive diagnosis, regardless of how successfully her or his distress of gender dysphoria has been relieved."

Then she goes on to address the rigid gender stereotyping at the crux of the issue:

The criteria for children are slightly improved over the DSM-IV-TR, in that they can no longer be diagnosed on the basis of gender role nonconformity alone. However, the proposed criteria are unreasonably reliant on gender stereotype nonconformity. Five of eight proposed subcriteria for children are strictly based on gender role nonconformity, with no relevance to the definition of mental disorder. Behaviors and emotions considered ordinary or even exemplary for other (cisgender) children are mis-characterized as pathological for gender variant youth. This sends a harmful message that equates gender variance with sickness. As a consequence, children will continue to be punished, shamed and harmed for nonconformity to assigned birth roles.

So essentially the APA has recognized they are killing us and are seeing if they can get away with using a kinder more gentle machine gun hand.

Stop killing us! Please sign the petition demanding the APA remove Trans From The DSM-5, Yours is the voice they can't deny. Yours is the kick in the pants that's bringing the undeniable truth out of the shadows.

The APA has lone profited from our deaths. No More Machine Gun Hand.

10/29/12

Roseanne Barr Apoligizes For Transphobic Tweets, Sort Of.


Roseanne Barr is a Radfem,

Cathy Brennan  thinks so anyways, but should we pigeon hole her with such obnoxious haters as Brennan?

Lefty Girl leaves not much maneuvering room for Barr.


Roseanne defended her wide brush stroke transmisoginist tweets on her website  as defensive in response to a onslaught of transgender and transsexual's because one of one misunderstood tweet. Barr didn't post the offensive tweet but Jezebel sniped them so I'll do that for her.

Epic fail. In the grandest of Radfem traditions Barr works her anti trans agenda by associating us with of all things her acceptance of pedophilia.

A common tactic of our most vile haters.

Barr has sort of apologized for tweets before but obviously she has not gleaned an important gem of knowledge about tweeter. Every Tweet stands on its own, lashing out in anger, no matter how justified you feel you are has consequences.

If you act like a Radfem you are a Radfem. Perhaps Barr will learn from this experience, if you tweet offensively towards trans people you will suffer the consequences.

Apology accepted. Sort of.



10/28/12

NYPD Still Harassing Transgender People Despite New Patrol Guide lines

June 13th of this year seemed a watershed for trans people's march to equality in the Big Apple. New patrol guide lines had been issued which seemed at the time to adequately address the inhuman behaviour of the NYPD towards trans people.

But this is not the case, especially for trans people of color and other racial minorities.

For these people, the most vulnerable of our community, the harassment only intensified. The indignities and assaults suffered at the hands of transphobic NYPD officers became even more frequent.

The Daily Kos reports a study was conducted by Make the Road, New York which contacted 305 residents of Jackson Heights, 167 of whom identified as being LGBTQ. Of that group, 51% of LGB respondents said they had been stopped by police. A third of those stopped say had also been physically harassed. Of the 69 transgender respondents 59% had been stopped by police and nearly half reported being physically harassed. 28% of respondents who were not LGBTQ were stopped by police.

Stop and frisk of transgender people in Jackson Heights is epidermic, police using this tactic to stifle and subdue what they see as the most threatening to their authority, transgender people. Most transgender woman are visually recognizable making us easy targets of opportunity. And we are loud and proud as Melissa Sklarz so finely exemplifies, fighting at the very cutting edge of the human rights movement.



What can New York Trans people do? Contact your council member and tell him you want the local law currently laid over in committee Prohibiting bias-based profiling by law enforcement officers passed.  Secondly know your rights and by god, know that police officers will treat you with the dignity and respect EVERY citizen expects.