Tag: transgender

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News Round-Up: June 23, 2017

Weekend bound (via Instagram)

Some news stories you may have missed:

• Who’s ready for the weekend? #Yahoooooo!

• Thanks to Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, the spire of One World Trade Center and the Kosciuszko Bridge to be lit with the colors of the transgender flag for Trans Day of Action today, June 23rd. The same landmarks will be illuminated in the colors of the Pride flag on Saturday and Sunday for NYC Pride celebrations.

• Also for NYC Pride – New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared June 22nd officially “Laverne Cox Day” as the actress made an appearance at his official residence, Gracie Mansion.

Said Cox, “Can you believe that a black transgender woman from Mobile, Alabama, raised by a single mother has a day in New York City named after her?”

• July 1st was the date that qualified transgender people were supposed to be able to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces, but military heads are asking for a six month delay.

• California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced yesterday that four states are being added to the state-sponsored travel ban because of efforts to enshrine discrimination against LGBTQ people into law.

• Speaking of lights for Pride, the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago was lit up in rainbow colors, apparently in celebration of Chicago Pride this weekend. But the lights only lasted one night, and when asked the hotel responded with, “We’ve been told not to say anything until the PR person puts out a statement.” Of course, as we all know, President Trump ended the tradition of recognizing Pride Month after eight straight years of proclamations from President Obama.

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Laverne Cox Shares Summer Schedule For CBS Series DOUBT

While Laverne Cox’s nascent CBS series Doubt only ran for two episodes this past season, Cox shares the news that all remaining episodes will get airtime this summer on Saturday nights at 8PM beginning July 1.

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Out Memoir – Janet Mock “Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me”

Transgender advocate Janet Mock chats with People Magazine about her new memoir, Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me.

Here’s an excerpt:

What’s your advice for other trans women as they navigate relationships and romance?

The number one thing is to ensure that they feel safe enough to tell someone their story … It shouldn’t be the responsibility of trans women to disclose to every person that they meet, [that they’re transgender] whether it’s a romantic partner, friend, roommate or coworker… There’s a misconception that trans women are out there deceiving people. We’re not out there deceiving people. We’re not even trying to pass. We’re just trying to be ourselves in a society that has put us into boxes, and has told us that if we don’t fit in those boxes then we don’t belong and we’re not deserving of happiness, of fulfillment, of contentment. [We need to have] agency over who we tell our stories to and whether we want to tell our stories to someone at all.

What did you think of Caitlyn Jenner’s memoir? What is the danger of lumping all transgender stories together?

What’s so great about this time period that we’re in is that we can have Caitlyn’s story, we can have my story, we can have Laverne Cox’s story. We can have a mosaic that shows the complicatedness, the things that overlap. But also I think it challenges us to nullify the notion that there’s a single trans story out there — because there isn’t. [Particularly with Caitlyn Jenner’s experiences], they show that trans folk can be problematic, that trans folk can have conservative ideology and political views that don’t even align with the community that they’re advocating for. For me, as an activist and a storyteller, I’m very centered in ensuring that we show the complicatedness of the human experience that happens to be rooted in my community’s trans experiences.

An excellent read, make sure you check out Mock’s book over at Amazon and other digital download sites.

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Chelsea Manning Covers New York Times Magazine

Chelsea Manning gives the New York Times Magazine an in-depth, deeply personal interview that covers much of her seven years of imprisonment and her leaking of documents to Wikileaks.

Some excerpts:

• “Let’s protect sensitive sources. Let’s protect troop movements. Let’s protect nuclear information. Let’s not hide missteps. Let’s not hide misguided policies. Let’s not hide history. Let’s not hide who we are and what we are doing.”

• “There were two worlds. The world in America, and the world I was seeing [in Iraq]. I wanted people to see what I was seeing.”

• “At a certain point, I stopped seeing records and started seeing people.”

Read the compelling article here.

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Podcast: Texas’ Bathroom Bill, FDA Approves Generic Truvada, Tony Award Predictions & More

On this week’s The Randy Report podcast, I look at these LGBT headlines:

• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling a special session of the Texas legislature to try an pass an anti-transgender “bathroom bill”

• The FDA has approved a generic version of Truvada

• Transgender leaker Chelsea Manning gave her first interview since being released from prison

• “Guardians of the Galaxy” star Dave Bautista has a message for homophobes

• Just a few predictions of who might win at this year’s Tony Awards

All that and more in this episode of The Randy Report.

You can subscribe to The Randy Report podcast (for free!) on iTunes here.

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Chelsea Manning’s First Interview Since Being Released From Prison

In her first interview since being released from prison, Chelsea Manning explains to Juju Chang of ABC News why she risked her career to disclose the information and her fight for transgender rights while in military prison.

Saying she has “accepted responsibility” for her actions, Chelsea shares that she felt it was her duty to give the 700,000 military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks due to the “death, destruction and mayhem” she saw as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq.

Even though President Obama commuted her 35 year sentence, Chelsea’s 7 years in prison is still the longest ever served by a leaker.

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7th Circuit Court Of Appeals Rules In Favor Of Transgender Student

Via press release:

Today the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a groundbreaking ruling in favor of Ash Whitaker, the transgender student plaintiff in Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District. In a unanimous decision authored by Judge Ann Claire Williams, the court upheld the preliminary injunction, issued by a federal district court in September 2016, that has allowed Ash, a senior at Tremper High School in the Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD) in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to use the boys’ restrooms at school throughout his senior year without fear of discipline or invasive surveillance by school officials.

In this landmark decision, the unanimous three-judge panel held that transgender students are protected from discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The court agreed with the lower court’s conclusions that Ash was harmed significantly by the Kenosha Unified School District’s discriminatory practices that singled him out from other students and that KUSD failed to provide more than “sheer conjecture” that permitting Ash to use the boys’ restrooms would harm anyone. The court wrote:

“The School District has failed to provide any evidence of how the preliminary injunction will harm it, or any of its students or parents. . . . , whereas the harms to Ash are well-documented and supported by the record.” The court further described the school district’s actions as “arbitrary” and in violation of Ash’s Constitutional rights.

With this decision, the Seventh Circuit (which covers Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana) is the first federal appeals court to find conclusively that a transgender student has the right to be treated in accordance with the student’s gender identity at school under both Title IX and the Constitution. Notably, it is also the first decision to reach that conclusion without reliance on the Obama Administration’s guidance on schools’ Title IX obligations to transgender students, which the Trump Administration rescinded in February.

Before the injunction, Ash had been using the boys’ restrooms for the first seven months of his junior year without incident until school administrators intervened, threatened him with disciplinary action, and subjected him to constant surveillance. To avoid punishment, Ash tried to avoid using the bathroom at school altogether. As a result of being singled out for discrimination by his school, Ash suffered serious depression, anxiety, and other physical and educational harms.

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News Round-Up: May 18, 2017

(via Instagram)

Some news stories you may have missed:

• It may be Thursday, but no one’s throwing him back – photographer Frank Marando shoots Instastud Nick Sandell for Adon Magazine (above).

• Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn stopped a military plan Turkey opposed before he was fired. But – Flynn didn’t disclose until after he was fired that he received $500,000 from Turkey to represent their interests. #ThingsThatMakeYouGoHmm

• Wing-nut commentator Alex Jones says National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s bald head means he’s a “leather daddy” who looks like “he could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.” Homophobic much?

• The United States has denied visas to gay Chechen men who are trying to flee the country in light of the torture and murders of gays in the Russian country.

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a surprising statement underlining the Justice Department’s commitment to prosecuting bias-related crimes against transgender individuals. Sessions has had a worrisome history when it comes to LGBT rights and protections.

• Jimmy Kimmel Live takes a cue from School House Rock to musically explain how truth, or the lack of it, works in today’s White House:

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Chelsea Manning Released From Prison Today

Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Manning, who leaked hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents via Wikileaks, has been released from prison today.

From The New York Times:

Sentenced to an unprecedented 35-year prison term for disclosing archives of secret files to WikiLeaks, Ms. Manning spent about seven years in prison — already double the second-longest sentence in any leak case. She was freed 28 years early because President Barack Obama, in one of his final acts, commuted the bulk of her remaining sentence.

Ms. Manning was known as Pvt. Bradley Manning in 2010 when she was arrested on suspicion of having copied hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic files from a classified computer network, to which she had access as a low-level intelligence analyst at a forward operating base in Iraq. After her conviction, she announced that she was a transgender woman and changed her name to Chelsea.

Hoping to inspire “worldwide discussion, debates and reforms,” as she wrote at the time, Ms. Manning had uploaded the files to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks. It published them in batches, working with traditional news organizations, including The New York Times.

Her leaks brought to light numerous hidden facts, including previously unknown civilian bystander killings in the Iraq war, back-room diplomatic dealings and discussion of local corruption around the world, and intelligence assessments about Guantánamo Bay detainees.

“For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea,” she said in a statement last week ahead of her release. “I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world.”

Manning attempted suicide twice during her 7 years at Fort Leavenworth.

She will remain on unpaid active duty while her military court conviction is under appeal. During that time she will continue to receive health benefits from the Army.

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News Round-Up: May 8, 2017

Some news items you might have missed:

• Pretty fair to say Ryan Kelsey of the Chippendales (above) is ready for summer. Me? #MoreWine

• The Trump campaign has deleted all references to the now-infamous press release stating Donald Trump’s call for the “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States.

• The Texas Senate will soon debate whether the state’s high school athletics organization should be able to disqualify a transgender athlete who is undergoing hormone replacement therapy.

• NPR has a First Listen to the yummy new Broadway cast recording of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler.

• A Chechen fugitive reports that a gay 17 year-old was thrown off a 9th story balcony by his uncle in order to “wash the shame” from his family.

• Tom Holland, the newest actor to spin a web as “Spiderman,” pulls off a no-holds barred performance on Lip Sync Battle with full-on drag and dance to Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” Watch below.