We all have our boxes. What's yours?

Companies Grapple with New Sex-Change Rules

Few small businesses appear to be prepared to comply with legislation

Martin C. Daks
Reporter
6/11/2007

TRENTON - New state work force laws that take effect next week could force small businesses and others to reach deep into their pockets to build new restrooms, lockers and other facilities for cross-dressers and other transgender individuals.

Labor lawyers say companies that watch their step may be able to keep out of trouble, but experts point out that many small-business owners are clueless about the new legislation.

“Recent amendments to New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination (LAD) contain certain provisions that may result in a conflict between transgender employees’ rights and the personal privacy rights of other employees,” says Tricia O’Reilly, an employment law partner with Connell Foley LLP in Roseland who represents businesses involved in employment and other disputes. “Employers should be updating their personnel policies, postings, handbook provisions and training programs to include ‘gender identity or expression’ as a protected characteristic.”. . .

Not Your Typical Hairdressers

By Jacob Anderson-Minshall
Published: April 26, 2007

Nick Meinzer

Makeover shows like What Not to Wear and Style by Jury abound these days, illustrating the dramatic impact a new hairstyle can have on a person’s appearance. But some stylists complain their profession still doesn’t get the respect it deserves. “Many people think that our job is easy; especially when they can get any old scissors out and cut off their hair,” bemoans Seattle transgender stylist Lancer Forney.

It’s even more difficult for stylists who don’t happen to be gay men or feminine women, says San Francisco transman Nick Meinzer, also a stylist, complains that even as television shows like Bravo’s Shear Genius highlight the stylist behind the hairstyle, they do little to debunk the stereotype that it takes flamboyance or femininity to successfully wield a pair of scissors.

It’s a stereotype, Meinzer says, that has cost him business—especially when he was still a butchy dyke before he transitioned from female to male. “I’ve had clients come in and refuse to let me cut their hair.” Instead they would demand a gay hairstylist, even when Meinzer had, “been there a decade and he’s been there three months.”

Still, Forney, Meinzer and other transmen who cut and style hair are creating a niche for themselves, serving transgender, genderqueer and other LGBT clients. They say that offering any cut, regardless of their customers’ gender identities or expression, sets them apart from other stylists.

“You’d be surprised how many [stylists] simply refuse to cut women’s hair really short,” Meinzer remarks. “I don’t have strict rules about which cuts belong with which gender.”

Both Forney and Meinzer began their careers in the early 1990s, attending beauty school, and then learning the trade at up-scale salons. At the time, neither had transitioned. Forney recalls that his mother suggested he get into the field because he was always doing something different with his own hair. While Meinzer found the creative aspect of the job appealing, he admits he entered the profession hoping it would force him to become more feminine.

It didn’t. Far from feminine, the post-transition Meinzer is known locally as “the tranny hairdresser,” because he specializes in styling hair for MTF clients, who he says often experience bias and discrimination at other salons—even in the renown gay Castro district.

Forney would find that particularly unfortunate because he believes trans people need the advice of professional stylists. “Our hair and faces change throughout transition,” he notes. “The texture, amount of hair, how it lays and how it looks, all changes when we change our appearances with hormones and different clothing.”. . .

Counterpoint and controversy: Trading My Sorrows

Transsexuals and Multiple Personalities by Walt Heyer

I was originally diagnosed as suffering from gender dysphoria, and the treatment suggested by Dr. Paul Walker was sex change surgery. The transsexual surgery was approved and performed by Dr. Stanley Biber. But trouble persisted with my identity and persona. The trouble was agonizing and mind boggling for several years--working and living in different genders; recovering from alcoholism. As a transsexual female I was working in a hospital psych unit in a Santa Monica California Hospital some 8 years after the sex changing surgery. A very alert psychiatric doctor begin to ask me questions. He suggested I was suffering from a dissociative disorder. After I went to several other doctors over several months it was discovered the sex change surgery was an incorrect treatment and unnecessary surgery for someone who, while he insisted he was "a woman born in a man's body," had been suffering from multiple personalities from a very young age. Thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ, a church family and a wonderful large group of supportive friends who loved me to recovery not only from alcoholism but a tragic and unnecessary surgery, I have been restored to the man God intended me to be. How many others have been caught up in the madness of sex change surgery and transsexualism?

MORE >>

Gloria Hemingway

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Gregory Hemingway)

Jump to: navigation, search

Gloria Hemingway (12 November 1931 – 1 October 2001), known previously as Gregory Hemingway, was the fourth and youngest child of famed author Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. She was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1931. Hemingway died in 2001 of hypertension and cardiovascular disease in Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center. For years Hemingway had been a transsexual and eventually had sex reassignment surgery.^[1][2] She was due to appear in court on the day that she died, facing charges of indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence.^[3]

Hemingway was a doctor, but the authorities in Montana chose not to renew her medical license in 1988 because of her ongoing alcoholism.^[3] She had also battled bipolar disorder and drug abuse for many years.^[4]

Tue Jun 12 John Hemingway reading & booksigning for Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir Website

Schedule

Location	Date and Time
Booksmith 1644 Haight St. San Francisco, CA 94117 map cross street: Clayton district: Haight (Upper)	Tue Jun 12 (7pm)

Description "Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir" reveals the peculiar dynamics between Nobel Prize winning writer Ernest Hemingway and his youngest son Gregory. Gregory, the author’s father, tried to live up to Ernest’s macho reputation. But as a cross-dresser and (eventually) a transsexual, Gregory was obsessed with androgyny and his female half. In this wonderfully crafted narrative, John Hemingway reveals how Ernest and Gregory (who both suffered from bipolar illness and were both fascinated by androgyny) were “two sides of the same coin.” John Hemingway, a grandson of the Nobel Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway, is a writer and translator who lives with his wife and two children in Milan, Italy.