Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
politics, both trans & otherwise
First, email Sheldon Silver and tell him to advance GENDA. His email is speaker@assembly.state.ny.us.
Then go tell CBS & FOX to take their heads out of their asses & show the condom ad; their shows are packed full of sexual situations and they’re being prudish about condoms? How lame is that?
This Washington Post article about women & voting, sent to me by MichelleNYC, is so frustrating & depressing:
Worse, women consistently score 10 to 20 percentage points lower than men on studies of political knowledge, regardless of their education or income level. Studies dating to 1997 have shown that fewer women than men can name their senator, or know one First Amendment right. They even know less about the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade than men do.
So ladies, please read more politics. Idealism and character do not political change bring.
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.”
The Hate Crimes Bill has passed the House this afternoon. For more information, check our thread on the boards about it.
We are down to the wire on the federal hate crimes bill (H.R.1592).
This Thursday, May 3, the federal hate crime bill is scheduled to be voted on in the U.S. House. We really have a chance to pass this life-saving law this year.
But what we are hearing today is that the radical right has turned their lie machine on force blast and turned out their followers. Members of Congress and their staff are telling us that the people who hate us, who are lying about us, are contacting Congress in greater numbers than we are. That’s not unusual, but it is very dangerous. It is not unusual because that’s what they do: they scare their followers into calling their representatives in Congress. It is very dangerous because it could work this time.
What YOU Can Do
1. Find your member of Congress and call him or her.
2. Sign our petition supporting the hate crimes bill by clicking here.
3. Support the passage of this bill by joining us for NCTE’s annual Lobby Day on May 14-15!
ENDA has been introduced to Congress, which is a fantastic thing – to protect LGBT people from employment discrimination.
For more info/overview, check HRC’s site.
For a specific explanation of the gender issues & language, check Transgender Workplace Diversity.
Come out in support of ENDA by contacting your senators and representatives, or by donating to an org that’s working for ENDA’s passage: The Task Force, NCTE.
Betty said she hadn’t seen my Penn State Dickinson School of Law talk because I put it up on the date I spoke, so here’s a link if you missed it, too.
They’ve also added the video to their website.
I’m hoping that this talk was recorded as planned and so will be available on Penn State Dickinson School of Law’s website, eventually, because there were a lot of interesting questions discussed in the Q&A after I spoke. Prof. Rains also added a lot of useful legal insight.
I started with a kind of preface in order (1) to define terms like transgender, MTF and FTM, and also (2) to explain that while people like drag queens and crossdressers are considered part of the transgender community, discussions about legal marriage issues don’t always or often effect them; that is, this talk concerns people who identify nearer to the transsexual end of things. that said, drag queens are often already gay and so deal with the same marriage discrimination all gay people do, and crossdressers often suffer with the stigma of being perverts, and one of the reasons they are not out is exactly because they don’t want their wives to divorce them, or lose custody of their children, or lose their jobs, all of which can & does happen to crossdressers who come out.
I never expected that any aspect of my life would cause me to speak at a law school to future lawyers about the odd ways that my life has become complicated by laws about gender and marriage. I’m surprised two-fold: for starters, I never expected to get married, since as a younger and Very Serious Feminist I saw it as a Tool of Patriarchy, symbolic at least of the ways women have always been chattel, and so, not for me. But I also never expected to get married because I was, starting as a teenager in the late 80s, an ally of gay and lesbian people.
& Then I met Betty, who at the time we met presented as male, and as she likes to explain, we knew, both of us, nearly from the get-go that we were supposed to be together. It’s a difficult feeling to explain, and poets have tried, but it took us a few years to decide once & for all that we were in this thing together. We decided to get married because things were so easy between us; on our 2nd date we sat together and read, one of us The Nation and the other The New York Times. When you’re something like an old married couple on your 2nd date, you know that you’re doomed.
A trans woman is leaving her job as a librarian despite discrimination protections. Jillian Todd-Weiss comments on her blog:
“Philadelphia has an ordinance prohibiting gender identity discrimination, as do a number of cities in Pennsylvania, some major corporations have gender identity EEO policies, and the state is considering legislation to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity. There is obviously a lot of good-will in Pennsylvania for employment non-discrimination. But it doesn’t necessarily penetrate to the ordinary transgender person. “
Which leads me to conclude that the legislation or even inclusion in EEO policies will not fix it all: education is still absolutely necessary and required. The laws are no good if no one bothers to enforce them, after all, & authorities will not enforce them if they are prejudiced against trans people themselves.
Maple, one of our mHB board regulars, pointed out that some Christians have decided to put up these lovely billboards presenting an alternate vision of Jesus’ attitude toward homosexuality. There are more billboards at the site www.wouldjesusdiscriminate.com.