Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
politics, both trans & otherwise
There are 15 out trans delegates at the DNC, and this is them taking the stage at the LGBT Caucus, which happened today.
So why not donate $13 to Obama’s campaign to recognize this historic moment?
(As someone born on the 13th, I can promise you it’s not bad luck.)
WASHINGTON, August 28 – As Democrats from all over convene in Charlotte, NC to nominate Barack Obama for reelection as President, there will be at least 11 transgender people in official roles.
Delegates and Committee members are equally divided between male and female and, under the Democratic National Committee’s rules, should demographically reflect the Democratic electorate in each state. In 2008, each state was mandated to set a goal for LGBT delegates. Each State has their own procedure in electing and appointing delegates. The DNC Chair appoints 25 at-large Standing Committee members to each committee, including the 2 co-chairs and 4 vice chairs. Each jurisdiction also sends its allotted number of committee members.
In 2000, Jane Fee of Minnesota was the first transgender delegate to the Democratic National Convention. In 2004, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas sent transgender people in their delegation to Boston. In 2008, “gender identity” was included in the Democratic platform at the Denver National Convention and Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Texas sent delegates. Now, in 2012, we have our largest and most diverse contingent of openly transgender delegates.
In 2009, the DNC added “Gender Identity” as a characteristic of full inclusion within the party. The language of the 2012 Democratic Platform will be fully inclusive of transgender people’s civil rights.
The 2012 transgender Americans who are part of official DNC Convention are:
You can see all of their photos and statements at the delegates page of the Trans United for Obama website. Continue reading “Trans United for Obama Congratulates Transgender Delegates”
From Maureen Dowd’s column this past week:
Even Catholic bishops, who had to be dragged toward compassion in the pedophilia scandal, were dismayed at how uncompassionate Ryan’s budget was.
Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.
“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.
The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”
Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”
Oh, & um, Ayn Rand was an atheist. Can we get that news out to the Christian Right, please?
This Slate article about Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a remarkable description of the kinds of programs and vision of Obama’s presidency. It’s really amazing stuff.
In the discussion about why the New Deal was popular and Obama’s Recovery Act wasn’t, the author notes:
FDR launched the New Deal after the U.S. had suffered through more than two years of depression under Hoover, while Obama launched the stimulus when the economy was nowhere near rock bottom. Everyone knew about the financial earthquake, but the economic tsunami hadn’t yet hit the shore.
That is, Obama passed the Act long before Americans were suffering the kind of devastating loss that they experienced in the Great Depression. Maybe you don’t have time for the book, but do read the article. It is one of the most clear explanations of what Obama is and has been up to as President. You can either vote for a guy who fires people when industry is suffering, or you can vote for a guy who tries to make sure people don’t starve if they lose their jobs = Not a tough call in my opinion.
Trans United for Obama has set up a national call for Obama supporters on August 20th. Find out more & sign up now.
Her first political ad:
I loved this letter from the father of a trans man to his senator about ENDA and thought you all would, too.
Dear Senator Alexander,
I was on an airplane this afternoon, minutes from landing in Nashville, when my cabin neighbor just happened to utter his first words to me saying, “That’s the one thing I like about real books over E-books. You have to turn yours off and I can keep reading.” He went on tell me how interesting his book was (I think he noticed that I was reading John Irving’s new novel, “In One Body” which has gay, bi-sexual, and transgender characters throughout the story – It makes you think from another perspective for a change.). My new pal was reading, “You Are Not So Smart”, which deals with something called confirmation bias (Our brains resist new ideas, instead paying attention only to findings that reinforce our preconceived notions. That’s what the blurbs say, anyway).
I had the pleasure of attending Lawrence’s 2012 Commencement, where I saw so many of the very best of my former students graduate. But the commencement address by Lawrence ’65 alum Anton Valukas really inspired me, both personally and professionally:
It is so, so rare to hear anyone talk about economic justice and the class system in America. And while I love the “Paint the Bus” idea, I was far more struck with what it would take to “Get Off the Bus” – the story he tells about a minister who had to do so as a Freedom Rider really made me wonder if I could do it. I don’t know that I could. But I do know, from other things I’ve done, what it means to feel that kind of free. They are terrifying and profound moments, but they are some of the only times in my life that I feel an intense connection to life, to being present, to the amazing dignity of what it can mean to be a human being.
Thank you, Mr. Valukas. It’s not often an activist gets this kind of adrenaline shot of re-affirmation.
Good news, at long last.
“To be forgotten,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi added, “is to die a little.” In a quiet, throaty voice on Saturday she asked the world not to forget other prisoners of conscience, both in Myanmar and around the world, other refugees, others in need, who may be suffering twice over, she said, from oppression and from the larger world’s “compassion fatigue.”
She wears flowers in her hair because she remembers her father threading flowers into her hair before he was assassinated, when she was 2. She’s now 67.
I hate being anything like essentialist about gender, but the misogyny coming out of the Republican party just pisses me off.
That said, if you have a vagina you may not be female, and if you don’t have one, you may be. But either way, you probably know and respect someone who has one, so tell these guys to STFU, already.
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