But GLAAD has released a statement "both for him personally and for all who are committed to advancing discussions about fairness and equality for transgender people."
Keep reading to see a photo of Chaz, as he wants to be called, from RadarOnline.com, reputed to be the most recent photo taken of the transitioning celebrity. . . .Read More
In an industry that loves to pigeonhole talent, good luck putting Kerry Washington into a box. Since making her motion picture debut in Save the Last Dance and rising to fame with her critically acclaimed performance in Ray, the actress, now 32, has gone gay on film twice, dabbled in comedy with the Wayans brothers, played the tortured wife of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, and faced off with the Fantastic Four.
Now, always one for a challenge, she tackles her heaviest role to date -- Marybeth, the male-to-female transsexual, heroin-addicted prostitute she plays to perfection in Life Is Hot in Cracktown. From her walk to her talk, Washington nails the part -- and it’s a sure sign her best roles have yet to come.
Washington sat down with Advocate.com to talk about the film, her time on the road stumping for Obama and how she found her femininity in paying trans. . . .Read More
These questions are raised when members of the transsexual and transgender community are denied medical coverage for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) and related therapies, including hormone therapy, hair removal, and breast augmentation.
Transsexual and transgender folks have a different experience of gender than many Canadians. Some trans folks experience their gender opposite to their physical sexual characteristics, a feeling of being in the wrong body. To correct this, they look to SRS. Others experience their gender in ways that are different to the accepted binary theory of gender that says you are either male or female. These folks find their gender on a continuum between or beyond male and female. Some trans folks feel no need to change their physical sex, and may live out their lives as neither traditionally male or female. . . .Read More
If you're a woman in your mid-thirties, the dating scene is challenging enough. You're conscious of feeling older, wrinkles become a reality, and you feel like your stock value as a potential wife has started to head south faster than the housing market. So in the past year, I decided it was high time I met a fabulous man.
In my good moments, I feel quite fabulous myself. I feel like an attractive, successful and snarky strawberry-blond who cooks like a dream and has a joie de vivre unlike most. I was open to meeting all sorts of men. I assumed I'd eventually find a like-minded guy who would appreciate me for me. . . .Read More
June 16, 2009
by Donna Rose
Special to CNN
(CNN) -- It was only a matter of time. The real-life drama of being transsexual has come to Hollywood. Chastity Bono, the impossibly cute little blond girl who, for many of my generation, remains frozen in time as the sweet, chubby-faced cherub closing many a Sonny and Cher show in the arms of her doting parents, recently announced that he is transsexual and will be transitioning from female to male. He will go by the name of Chaz.
As shocking as this news may be to some, it is yet another reminder that all is not necessarily as it appears and that each of us is more complicated than simply the skin and bones of our bodies. Rather, it is our heart and spirit that defines us. . . .Read More
June 18, 2009
by etonline.com
I hope that Chaz can understand that he is not alone and he's never been alone and anyone like him will never be alone," Alexis Arquette offers words of support for Chaz Bono. "It's an important time in his life; a lot of people don't understand that it is very difficult to come out as transgender."
Vivacious and blonde and decked in teal, the actress who has appeared in film and TV projects such as 'The Wedding Singer,' "Californication," "Friends" and 'Last Exit To Brooklyn' -- and is a member of the famous Arquette family -- is energetic, prepared and ready to talk when she walks into the Entertainment Tonight offices to sit down with Thea Andrews. She knows about the public scrutiny Chaz is facing, she has lived it.
Her transition from male to female was the subject of the 2007 documentary, 'Alexis Arquette: She's My Brother.' Her family includes actresses Rosanna and Patricia, actors Richmond and David and sister-in-law Courteney Cox Arquette. In many ways, Alexis believes that their Hollywood backgrounds have made it less difficult for her and Chaz. . . .Read More
CHINA IS introducing its first medical guidelines on sex change surgery that require candidates for surgery to be single, to have no criminal record and an agreement from police to change their sex on their identification cards once the procedure is complete.
There are an estimated 1,000 transsexuals in China, but there are believed to be many hundreds of thousands who would go for a gender reassignment operation to have their sex changed but are unaware of the regulations.
Candidates also must show they have lived publicly as the other gender for more than two years, demonstrated “unwavering desire to change” for at least five years and spent one year in psychotherapy, according to the ministry of health website. They must be over 20 years of age. They also have to have told their family about their wishes. . . .Read More
Be Like Others
Premieres June 24 on HBO
Much of the best science fiction posits a society operating under a set of rules that cast our own society's unexamined assumptions in relief. Let's just say, for example, that homosexuality was a crime, punishable by death. And what if, in this same society, transsexuality were merely seen as an illness, curable with an operation partially funded by the state? But this is no Ursula Le Guin novel — this is Iran, which is second only to Thailand in the number of sex-change operations performed each year. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran, but estimates of transsexuals run as high as 150,000. What happens when gender is mutable but sexual orientation is not? When science produces a medical solution for what religion prohibits? Tanaz Eshaghian, an Iranian-American filmmaker, set out to find out in Be Like Others, which premieres on HBO on June 24. . . .Read More
Hosts of a Sacramento-based radio show apologized Thursday for making offensive comments about transgender people.
“I hurt people,” Arnie States told listeners. “And that wasn't my goal.”
That apology came after gay rights groups decried a May 28 broadcast of the Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning radio show, which airs on KRXQ in Sacramento, where hosts Arnie States and Rob Williams called transgender people “freaks” and “weirdos” during a segment devoted to transgender children.
“If my son, God forbid, if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes,” States told listeners. “I would throw a shoe at him. Because you know what? Boys don't wear high heels. And in my house, they definitely don't wear high heels.” . . .Read More
Gay marriage isn't legal in the state of New York, but that didn't stop two New York City men from marrying in May when one of them posed as a woman. The New York Post reports that despite the couple's marriage license, their marriage is not legally valid.
Hakim Nelson and Jason Stenson filled out their initial marriage license application online. Nelson is a male-to-female transsexual who lives as a woman and hopes to have gender-reassignment surgery. . . .Read More
25-year-old Spaniard transsexual Rubén Noé Coronado made headlines a few months ago when he revealed that he was pregnant with twins shortly after Thomas Beatie (aka the "Pregnant Man") gave birth to his first child last June.
Unfortunately, Spanish newspaper El Mundo is reporting that Coronado suffered a miscarriage in his 17th week of pregnancy and lost the babies. He and his partner had already picked out the names Rubén Noé and Luis MarÃa for the little ones. Coronado told the paper, "I began to have some pains this week. There were a few days where I realized that my stomach had seemed to shrink and that seemed strange to me. I went to the doctor and they had to scrape my uterus.". . .Read More
Question: What does someone that identies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual or queer-fluid...have in common with someone who is transhuman?
Answer: These are terms that people use to define themselves regarding their own sex, gender, body.
Eventually, he found a plastic surgeon to help him, and his physical changes were complete by 1949, but his family rejected him. The British tabloids hounded him. To escape publicity, he was forced to carve out a life for himself virtually alone. He became a Buddhist monk, and died in Tibet in 1962 at the age of 47.
His name was Michael Dillon, and he one of the Western world's first transsexual people, that is, someone who changes sex and/or gender by medical means. His extensive writings were suppressed and destroyed by his family -- only fragments survive. . . .Read More
Transgender men fighting for legal protections say Thursday's announcement by Chastity Bono, child of Cher and the late Sonny Bono, that she will be transitioning from female to a male as Chaz Bono is a welcome break from an all too common "invisible" paradox.
For reasons that are part biology and part society, transgender men say in some ways they have an easier time being accepted and recognized as masculine than transgender women have being perceived as feminine.
Yet at the same time, there has been a virtual black hole in public awareness of female-to-male transgender people.
"Testosterone is a powerful chemical," said Justin Tanis, a female-to-male transgender man and the community education and outreach manager for National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington, D.C. "For people who are female-to-male, it really changes your body and it makes it easier for people to perceive you as male.". . .Read More
This trans thing I’ve been writing about isn’t some modern invention, folks. Transgendered people have been around since the dawn of time (at least I have — or I feel like it most days).
But Colorado, as conservative as its reputation has been in the past, has actually been at the forefront of a lot of progressive social movements, and trans issues has been one of them.
Most people aren’t even aware that the Denver Metro area has one of the oldest gender centers in the country — the Gender Identity Center of Colorado (GIC), founded in 1978 and incorporated in 1980. In fact, most people don’t even know what a gender center is. So let’s find out …
What in the heck in a gender center?
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and sometimes you want to go where nobody does. A gender center provides both through weekly support meetings where you can meet your friends and talk about specific issues, or come to listen and learn, remaining anonymous and saying as much or as little as you want. . . .Read More
After the May 28 broadcast, Rob Williams and Arnie States, two of three talk show hosts of the "Rob, Arnie and Dawn in the Morning," heard in Sacramento on KRXQ 98.5 FM, came under fire following a discussion about an 8-year-old transgender boy in Omaha. Both men justified the use of violence to "correct the behavior" of "drama queen" transgender and gay youth the men called "freaks of nature."
The third host, Dawn Rossi, tried in vain to convince her co-hosts that no child would willingly choose to be different or the subject of ridicule and repeatedly apologized to "any listeners who are transgender."
The live show was pulled from broadcast for several days this week. . . .Read More
Rashad Robinson of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said Monday that the general manager of station KXRQ-FM told him that talk show hosts Rob Williams and Arnie States also plan to apologize during Thursday's show. . . .Read More
Transsexual Thomas had conceived through artificial insemination.
Sources said it was a "natural childbirth" and that the boy was healthy and well.
Thomas, 35, was born a woman and became the first man to give birth after having daughter Susan Juliette last June.
Thomas, of Bend, Oregon, changed sex in his twenties.
He had a breast removal op and legally became a man - but kept his ovaries. . . .Read More
An Aussie Rules football fan is looking to become the first transsexual to play the competitive sport, according to an article in Sunday's edition of The Age.
Will, who asked not to use his last name, told The Age writer Jill Stark, "I'm just an ordinary guy who wants to play football, just with slightly different circumstances of how I came to be a guy."
The 25-year-old had a sex change two years ago and has had a double mastectomy. He takes hormones to induce body hair growth and to lower his voice. The article stated that Will "does not feel the technology is advanced enough to create a functioning penis."
The Australian would-be footballer has gained the support of Victorian Country Football League's president Glenn Scott, who told Will that in order to play he would need to legally change his birth certificate to reflect his male sex, but that otherwise his attempt, if successful, would be allowed. . . .Read More
Virginia Prince, a pioneer of the cross-dressing community and longtime activist for transgender rights, died on Saturday, May 2. She was 96 years old.
Prince's philosophies attracted fierce criticism, especially from transgender people. She was staunchly against sex-reassignment surgery, writing in 1978 that she believed it was "perfectly possible to be a woman without having sex surgery." She is widely believed to have coined the term "transgender" around 1970, but as a description exclusively for heterosexual people who did not wish to have reassignment surgery. . . .Read More
Even by the flexible moral, ethical, and professional standards of American talk radio, the May 28th segment of KRXQ 98.5 FM Sacramento's Rob, Arnie, & Dawn in the Morning radio talk show makes for a sickening half-hour of ugliness and cruelty. For once, the focus was not LGBT adults, but minors. The hosts, Rob Williams and Arnie States, devoted the segment in question to a vicious diatribe against transgender children, some as young as five, focusing in particular on the case of one Omaha family raising a gender dysphoric child, and their decision to support her transition from male to female.
Williams and States took turns referring to gender dysphoric children as "idiots" and "freaks," who were just out "for attention" and had "a mental disorder that just needs to somehow be gotten out of them," either by verbal abuse on the part of the parents, or even shock therapy.
"Allowing transgenders to exist, pretty soon it becomes normal to fall in love with the animals," they said. . . .Read More
Harvard University will endow a visiting professorship in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, a position that, it believes, will be the first endowed, named chair in the subject at an American college.
The visiting professorship was made possible by a gift of $1.5 million from the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, which will formally announce it at a dinner on Thursday, after Harvard’s commencement exercises. With the gift, Harvard said it would regularly invite “eminent scholars studying issues related to sexuality or sexual minorities” to teach on campus for one semester, according to a draft of a university press release.
The chair is being named for F.O. Matthiessen , a Harvard scholar and literary critic who “stands out as an unusual example of a gay man who lived his sexuality as an ‘open secret’ in the mid-twentieth century,” according to the release. . . .Read More
But beneath her beauty lay a secret which had troubled her from an early age — she felt she was a MAN and found herself attracted to girls rather than guys.
The 31-year-old says: “For years I was a man trapped in a woman’s body. And although I was a beautiful woman I felt ugly because I was not who I wanted to be. Now I feel complete and it is fantastic.
"Going through the op to be a man was scary but it's the most fulfilling thing I've done and I feel right for the first time in my life."
Katherine - who has changed her name to Adrian - is single but hopes to pursue relationships. . . .Read More
Andre Edwards, 50 - who was born a man and was known as Andrew - said her bosses and passengers could not cope with her bizarre lifestyle.
She said: "It's not easy when people shout things at you and call you vile names."
But yesterday bosses insisted Andre was fired after customers complained about HER "bad attitude" - and for upsetting staff by criticising their appearance.
Andre is undergoing "gender re-alignment" after getting hormone replacement pills on the internet, but hopes to have a sex change operation next year.
She has already had electrolysis to get rid of facial hair. . . .Read More
Identity politics refers to a political action to advance the interests of a group whose members perceive themselves to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalised identity (such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation).
Two weeks ago, a colleague of mine summoned me into his office and played a news clip dating back to August last year. It involves a Kenyan transgender girl been brutally beaten up in the streets by a group of women and men. Her face is swollen and her clothes torn. She begs for mercy but her pleading is drowned out by the laughter of women and children. She tries to cover her tiny breasts but a man uncovers them for the cameraman to capture it all. After this macabre footage, a female news anchor laughs before yapping about something else 'important' (probably the trauma of gender violence among abused women).
A week ago, I got hold of a collection of hallowing experiences that a group of Kenyan women went through during the infamous post-election violence.[1] One of the accounts reveals a woman who was raped by a group of 11 policemen as her son watched in horror. In the process, she was infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Another lady reveals that she had full-blown Aids and was bedridden when Kenya went to the elections in 2007. But this did not deter a group of Kenya's General Service officers from raping her. She further revealed that her husband had died a year earlier and her health had deteriorated to the level of her giving up on anti-retroviral therapy. Apart from religious fanatics who believe everything happens for a purpose and God knows and plans everything, who would justify these horrendous acts? Who would want these things to happen to oneself whether there was any purpose or if God had planned them? . . .Read More
RACHEL and Kimberley Rae say they owe their lives to Dr Trudy Kennedy and the gender dysphoria clinic she worked at. Theirs is an unlikely love story.
Born male, they both longed to be female, knowing from the age of five they weren't like other little boys. In adulthood the decision to "stop living a lie" brought them together.
They met in 2002 a week after Rachel's surgery, which transformed her from Bob, previously a carpenter, a welder and a security guard from central Victoria, into a woman who had finally found peace but who had lost her family as a result. . . .Read More
The approximate cost of surgery to transition from a man to a woman? Around $20,000.
The cost for a woman to become a man? Roughly $80,000.
The peace of mind that comes after years of hoping, dreaming and planning to make the gender you feel match the sex you are? Priceless, according to Carol Allan, a local transsexual woman who made her transition nearly two decades ago and is now beginning a PhD on the topic.
Transsexual people, both pre- and post-surgery, have been in the media across Alberta since the provincial government announced in April that it would no longer fund sexual reassignment surgery.
But while Allan fully disagrees with that move, she says transsexuals have been portrayed as needy people lapping up welfare money, unable to stand on their own feet. . . .Read More
Two former patients of Australia's controversial sex-change clinic say misdiagnosis and wrongful surgery destroyed their lives. Jill Stark reports.
HE WILL never forget the noise. Lying on the hospital trolley being pushed towards the operating theatre he heard a primal wail. He looked back to see his younger sister sobbing, traumatised by what he was about to do.
Andrew*, born male, was minutes away from an operation that would make him a woman. Psychiatrists said he had a female brain in a male body. Gender reassignment surgery was the only way to ease the mental torment.
But as he headed to surgery he was struck by an unshakeable thought: "It's not right." He remembers telling the surgeon: "I think I'm doing the wrong thing, I think we've got to stop it."
The surgeon stroked Andrew's face, telling him it was natural to feel frightened before an operation. He protested again. Then it went black. When he woke up he was sure the surgery had been cancelled. The tales he had read of transsexuals who awoke post-surgery feeling "reborn" convinced Andrew, then 21, the operation had been halted, because he felt no different. "Then I remember lifting up the sheets and … feeling it all bandaged. I just started bawling my eyes out and screaming … I remember saying to myself, 'how could you be so bloody stupid?"'. . .Read More
Do you have questions about the coming out journey? The Human Rights Campaign has a set of resources to help you along the way. Download a copy of our newly released Resource Guide to Coming Out, or read it online. Or download our Resource Guide to Coming Out for African Americans, the Spanish-language GuÃa de Recursos Para Salir Del Clóset or our guide to Living Openly in Your Place of Worship.
