Tag: transgender

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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.

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News Round-Up: April 21, 2017

Some news items you may have missed:

• Fitness model Nick Sandell (above) is giving you serious “seriousness.”

•Xavier Jugelé, the French police officer murdered last night in an apparent terrorist attack on Paris’s Champs-Élysées was a member of Flag, an organization for LGBT police officers in France, and a local hero to his community.

• Intelligence gathered by the FBI last summer suggests that Russian operatives attempted to use Trump advisers, like Carter Page, to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

• After meeting with President Ramzan Kadyrov of Chechnya, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that reports of gay men being rounded up, tortured and killed in the Chechen nation are unfounded.

• With little to show for his first 100 days as prez, Donald Trump is pushing for another run at health care reform. A new amendment to proposed legislation would undermine Obamacare’s existing conditions mandate.

• Caitlyn Jenner, who voted for President Trump, now says she’s breaking with the Trumpster in a new 20/20 interview airing on ABC tonight. She’s so over Trump she won’t even play golf with the prez. Watch below.

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CBS Stands By Decision To Air Transgender Outing On “Survivor”

Zeke Smith on “Survivor”

CBS is standing by its decision to broadcast the very personal revelation that occurred in this week’s Survivor “tribal council” when contestant Jeff Varner outed Zeke Smith as transgender.

Here’s the statement from CBS released to The Hollywood Reporter:

“After the tribal council scene in last night’s Survivor was filmed, we consulted with Zeke Smith and with GLAAD in advance of the broadcast, including the issue of how Zeke would tell his story after the episode aired,” the network said in a statement. “This is his second consecutive season on Survivor. From his first season through the current edition, we have always been guided by the principle that this is his story to tell, and it remains so. We support how [host] Jeff Probst and the producers handled a very sensitive situation and marvel at the grace Zeke exhibited under extraordinary circumstances. We have also respect for how Jeff Varner has expressed remorse for his mistake, both in the episode and in his subsequent dialogue with the media. In the end, we believe this episode, accompanied by Zeke’s own remarkable writing and speaking on the subject, has provided an unexpected but important dialogue about acceptance and treating transgender people with respect.”

I know there’s been discussion among LGBT activists about whether it was exploitive to include the “outing” in the Survivor episode.

My personal feeling is that, since this was done with Smith’s blessing, it’s a good thing.

Not only did the incident highlight how terrible outing transgender folks is, Smith handled the moment with so much dignity, that I think this was a positive for the trans community.

Plus, the reactions of outrage by his fellow contestants showed much broad support for the trans community.

If you haven’t read Zeke’s terrific personal essay about not only the experience of Survivor as a whole, but Varner’s outing of him, you really need to click here and read it.