Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
I just wanted to congratulate genderwarrior & trans activist Joelle Ruby Ryan for having won a scholarship from the Point Foundation. She was one of four trans people to win one this year.
The Point Foundation gives scholarships to LGBT students – 38 this year, all told.
More about all four of the trans students below the break.
There’s an event happening in San Francisco (of course) called “Not Queer Enough” on June 27th. Among the speakers are people like Max Wolf Valerio & Julia Serano.
I wish I could be there.
My own feelings of being “not queer enough” I’ve mentioned at various times, usually when I’ve felt shunned at an event or gathering, or been made to feel otherwise square for being married or monogamous or heterosexual. Shoot, I’ve felt “not feminist enough” for being heterosexual & married, too.
& I’m very very certain that plenty of trans people feel “not trans enough.”
But not queer enough? What defines someone as queer? Their politics? Being visibly queer? Their worldview? Their haircut? Who they have sex with?
I don’t know. But I’d like to be in San Francisco that night to hear other people talk about their experiences.
Info about the event below the break.
NCTE has reported today that since they sent out their alert for calls to your senators to support The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act more senators have signed on to support it!
So keep calling! Tell your friends to call!
You can find your senators’ contact information through NCTE.
Not a big surprise, but the former Surgeon General under Bush, Dr. Richard Carmona, has testified that he was asked or told to withhold information on abstinence-only sex ed, emergency contraception, and stem cell research.
They have, of course, found this sap Holsinger to nominate, who I’m going to assume is more their kind of yes man. Not only that, but he’s declared publicly that homosexual sex is unnatural & unhealthy.
Today Senators Kennedy (D-MA) and Smith (R-OR) introduced the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 1585), which is being debated in the Senate this week and next. This amendment could be voted on as early as today. In short, today transgender people are one giant step closer to gaining federal hate crimes protections!
The language of today’s amendment is identical language to that of S. 1105, which the Senators introduced in April.
But to ensure that the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act becomes law, you must contact your Senators now and urge them to support this life-saving legislation.
As you read this, the Radical Right is mobilizing their base to oppose the federal hate crimes bill. They’re using scare tactics and flat-out lies in hopes of killing Kennedy’s amendment. Make sure that your Senators hear your voice and the true importance of this bill.
The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act would:
Find your Senators’ contact information.
The time to act is now! Call your Senators today and urge your friends and family to do the same!
(A sample letter you can copy & paste is below the break.)
I’m up at my usual ungodly hour having just finished a piece for an upcoming anthology called TransForming Community: Stories from Merging Trans and Queer Communities which will come out on Suspect Thoughts Press next year and is being edited by Michelle Tea and Julia Serano.
It comes out of a spoken word series Michelle Tea started a while back; Julia Serano recently reported on her experience at one.
My piece is on queer heterosexuals, specifically crossdressers/transvestites and their female partners, and how we do or don’t fit into queer community, or straight community, or trans community, depending.
It’s also about how to tie your shoes.
When I have a final edit, I’ll put an excerpt of it up here.
For the month of July, the LGBT magazine show In the Life will be showing an episode called “Gender Revolution” and our bit on “Heterosexual Privilege” (originally broadcast September 2004) will be shown with an update to our story. You can also order copies of the show now, & they’ve provided a guide explaining how to request that your local PBS station broadcast the show it if they don’t.
The really cool part is that Charles Busch is the host of this episode, who is a friend of a friend & a very, very talented artist whom we both admire.
An Iraqi LGBT activist was detained & tortured with Americans in a nearby room:
While Hani was in police custody, he heard several different voices speaking English with American accents coming from somewhere outside the room in the detention center where he was being held. “Hani asked if he could speak to one of the American soldiers and explain why he was being detained, in the hope that he might be rescued, but the police refused to allow him access to these Americans,” Hili related.
Just to reiterate: he was tortured by the Iraqi Police Force, that is, “the good guys.”
Donna, one of our mHB forum moderators, happens to be the only person we know of who has ever transitioned while working as an attorney at a law firm in New York. Recently she came upon an article about how great it is to be a GLBT lawyer these days, and her reaction was, “Maybe GLB – but T?” and wrote a letter to The American Lawyer about being trans and a lawyer. She refers to a report by the NYCLA from 2005 (which Caprice, another one of our mHB forum moderators, worked on):
A survey by the New York County Lawyers Association of the 25 largest law firms in New York City in early 2005 asked how many attorneys had ever transitioned (that is, publicly changed their gender) while working at those firms. Every one of the firms answered “none.”
She came to the conclusion that in this case, the use of LGBT is used more “reflexively” and so, for T people, “essentially meaningless.”
Thanks to Donna for being willing, not just to transition openly at a law firm, but in being willing to out herself for the sake of setting the record straight, especially because there are, at this point, quite a few people she deals with professionally who don’t know about her history.
Detroit police have decided to stop asking questions about the death of Andrew Anthos, who died after being beaten by a homophobe. Why? They’ve ruled the man’s arthritic neck was what killed him, not the blow that may have aggravated that arthritis.
Anthos’ cousin is continuing to pursue the case because no one has answered how the man ended up in the hospital with a 2″ scar on his neck, and while she is okay with them disputing him having died of the blow, she insists that he was attacked and that the attack was a hate crime. The Triangle Foundation, an LGBT group, have offered $5000 to anyone who can step forward with more information.
But the really pathetic thing is that the American Family Association of Michigan called on the Detroit police to look into the “filing of a false police report” concerning this incident. If any of us have any doubts, these folks not only want to prevent LGBT folks from being protected from discrimination and hate crimes, but they want to prevent our families from finding justice. Hateful.