Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
The body of a transgendered person has been found in the American River in Sacramento, CA. No word yet on how the person died, but we’re bracing to hear the bad news. It’s never a good day when you realize that you’re hoping it’s because of suicide instead of a hate crime/murder.
22 years old, and Latina – which tells me it was a hate crime that put her in that river. Vaya con dios, whoever you are.
Respond to the survey online at
https://online.survey.psu.edu/endtransdiscrim
WASHINGTON, DC September 11, 2008 — In the wake of one of the most violent years on record of assaults on transgender people, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (The Task Force) have teamed up on a comprehensive national survey to collect data on discrimination against transgender people in housing, employment, public accommodation, health care, education, family life and criminal justice.
To date, in 2008, several young gender non-conforming people of color have been murdered, including California junior high school student Lawrence King, who was shot in public during the school day. King’s murder, and the murders of Simmie Williams in South Carolina and Angie Zappata in Greeley, Colorado come in a year in which we are still working to include transgender provisions in a federal bill to protect lesbian, gay and bisexual workers from discrimination in employment.
Hate crimes against transgender people suggest multiple points of vulnerability, which can compound each other: discrimination in employment may lead to unstable housing situations which in turn can leave transgender people at the mercy of public programs and public officials who may not respond respectfully or appropriately to them. These stressors add burdens in a health care system that is often unprepared for transgender people’s needs. The list goes on. “We know that transgender people face discrimination on multiple fronts,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of NCTE. “This data will help us sort out the combination of forces that leave transgender people vulnerable to unemployment, homelessness, and violence.”
Jaime Grant, director of the Task Force Policy Institute noted, “There is so little concrete data on the needs and risks associated with the widespread discrimination we see in the lives of the transgender people we know. This data will help point the way to an appropriate policy agenda to ensure that transgender people have a fair chance to contribute their talents in the workplace, in our educational systems and in our communities.”
NCTE and the Task Force have partnered with Pennsylvania State University’s Center for the Study of Higher Education to collect and analyze the data. Applying rigorous academic standards to the investigation will strengthen any case made to legislators, policy makers, health care providers, and others whose decisions impact the lives of transgender people. A national team of experts in survey research and transgender issues developed the questionnaire, which can be completed on-line at https://online.survey.psu.edu/endtransdiscrim. Paper copies can also be downloaded from the NCTE and The Task Force websites soon.
Keisling notes: “This is an absolutely critical national effort. We urge all transgender and gender non-conforming people to take the survey to help guide us in making better laws and policies that will improve the quality of life for all transgender people. We need everyone’s voice in this, everyone’s participation.”
The real kicker of Sarah Palin’s talk tonight was the “scary ideas from Europe” idea. I mean, seriously? Scary Europeans? Where there’s national healthcare and maternity leave and no gun crime? That scary place?
I’m still flummoxed by just about everything she said tonight. Astounded, even. Aside from the Big Fat Liar issue – she was for the Bridge to Nowhere until she was nominated, and she raised taxes on Alaskans – I can’t believe her entire talk was about the elites, and scary European ideas, and tiny government. (You know, like the kind that brought you Katrina.) I mean, aren’t culture wars so 90s?
But it’s more than that. The cynicism and sarcasm and meanness she expressed blew my mind. I like people who are clever and clear-thinking, but that’s not what she is. It makes me so sad to think anyone might admire her, or find like-mindedness in her comments. She’s like Dr. Laura, and those platitudes don’t work as advice, and they definitely don’t work as policy.
Please, Dems, don’t rest easy. We need to kick this woman’s ass. She cut funding on a center for pregnant teenagers even though she has one. Talk about elitism. She tried to ban books and she got pork-barrel funding for aerial hunting (which is about the lamest, most shameful thing I’ve ever heard of).
The National Stonewall Democrats are doing a cool thing: trying to track transpeople’s donations to Barack Obama. The letter they sent out not along ago is reprinted below the break in full, but the basic idea is that, if you’re trans, & you want to donate to Obama’s campaign, you donate through their website, so that the donations can be “counted” as a bloc.
Excellent idea. Go do it.
A very happy wedding day to all the Californians who are finally able to get married to the ones they love.
It’s unfortunate how much a basic civil right has to be fought for, & unfortunate in so many ways (and not even the ones Mattilda goes into).
And I know many people are bothered by it because it’s not an economic issue, and that more than anything, LGBT people need employment non-discrimination protection. And we do, we do. But I’ll make this argument, as a legally married queer: marriage is also an economic pact. It’s not romantic, but it is something. It’s about being able to be a dependent on your spouse’s health insurance (which saves you money). It’s about being able to live together (which saves you money). It’s about getting Social Security benefits. Amongst other things.
So congratulations, bride & bride, and groom & groom: you may now fight with your spouse about money, & forever have your credit record linked to theirs.
A couple of recent memes:
and
If the killing of Lawrence King wasn’t sad enough, there are too many other stories — all murders of trans POC that took place this year.
This article from The Root has a list.
And this murder, committed a little while back, has recently come to more widespread attention, as has the murder of Simmie Williams.
My students have asked, because they’re reading Stone Butch Blues, if the violence against gender diverse people is still as bad as it was then. And what can I say? Ask Lawrence King? Ask Adolphus Simmons? Ask Sanesha Stewart? We can’t. They’ve all been killed as a result of trans/homophobic violence. The daily threat might not feel so great for many of us. But that doesn’t mean people who don’t conform to gender norms aren’t at greater risk.
I so long for a new president who will get gender identity included in Federal Hate Crimes protection, whether it does any good or not. What I want is to see articles written about people like Sanesha Stewart that at least respect their choice of pronouns, as well as articles that don’t ask what the person was doing at the time – as if what a person is doing at the time she’s murdered makes it more acceptable for her to have been murdered! When are the powers-that-be going to understand is that sometimes all you have to “do” is be queer to be killed?!
The news also came through this week that Gabrielle Pickett, twin sister of Chanelle Pickett, was killed during the summer of 2003. Chanelle was killed in 1996.
I’m just tired this week. Tired of counting the dead. Tired of feeling so sullen and leaden with grief.
Lantos was thought to have introduced the first pro-transgender effort in the U.S. Congress – the resolution he introduced would have condemned, “all violations of internationally recognized human rights norms based on the real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of an individual.”
The only survivor of the Nazi Holocaust ever elected to the U.S. Congress, Rep. Lantos was a strong supporter of human rights for all people. He was a co-sponsor in 2007 of both the federal hate crimes bill that passed the House of Representatives and of the unified and inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (H.R. 2015) that was eventually abandoned this fall.
Our thoughts are with the family and friends of this brave leader.
For more about Lantos, do check the Mercury News article about him.
I read a bunch about the Bread & Roses Strike when I was living up near Lawrence, so I figure I should poke around Wisconsin’s history and what do I find but this quote:
“The purpose of this ridiculous campaign is to throw the country into a state of sheer terror, to change public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion. People are being unlawfully arrested, thrown into jail, held incommunicado for days, only to be eventually discharged without ever having been taken into court, because they have committed no crime. But more than this, if every preparation for war can be made the excuse for destroying free speech and a free press and the right of the people to assemble together for peaceful discussion, then we may well despair of ever again finding ourselves for a long period in a state of peace. The destruction of rights now occurring will be pointed to then as precedents for a still further invasion of the rights of the citizen.”
The scary part is the guy who said it died in 1955, so he wasn’t talking about the current war or the current destruction of rights – but he could have been. (The guy was “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, former Governor of Wisconsin, Congressman, Senator, and onetime candidate for President – who carried 17% of the popular vote, no mean feat in a two-party democracy.)
I said I’d catch people up on how it’s been for me here in snowy Appleton, WI since Betty left on the 10th – more than two weeks ago. Mostly, I’ve been busy teaching. I’m somewhat convinced I do more homework for my classes than my students do, whether in preparing discussion questions, in-class lectures, or even reviewing readings or documentaries I want them to watch.
Other than that, I go outside on the front porch to smoke, since I can’t smoke in the resident housing, and that’s definitely been interesting. I find myself a little less able to focus with the huge decrease in nicotine consumption, actually. But so far I don’t seem to be eating more, & that, at least, is a good thing. It’s also a good thing to smoke less because the air is so cold; asthmatics must have a time of it here. The one thing I am sure of know is that if I could ever keep my habit at about 5 a day (which is what I’m smoking here), I wouldn’t bother quitting.
It’s quiet – other than today’s fire alarm that got triggered when my next door neighbor burnt his lunch – and the daily scraping sounds of the snow plows and shovels. I’m not complaining, by any means; as long as I don’t have to shovel, they can make as much scraping sounds as they want, and at 5am if need be.
Teaching itself is really interesting work and I’m a little amazed at how good a job it is – teaching two courses, which is what I’m doing, is considered a full-time teaching load – but also how time-consuming. I enjoy watching the lighbulbs go on, the same as I do when I’m giving a workshop for trans people at a conference.
And in fact I met some local trans people just this week, & I’m hoping to meet some in Milwaukee in a few weeks as well.
In some ways it’s a break from New York, a trade off: instead of high densities of crime and people and ethnicities, we get an awful lot of snow, an awful lot of Packers fans, & an awful lot of fish.
But in either place, mostly I spend my free time reading about gender: more on some of the new stuff I’ve discovered in another post.