daffodil with friends

Nepali becomes both man and woman

By Charles Haviland
BBC News, Kathmandu

The authorities in Nepal have granted a man who dresses and behaves as a woman both male and female citizenship.

The unprecedented legal status was given to 40-year-old Chanda Musalman.

Conservative and religious Nepal, like many Asian countries, has a sizeable community of people who are born male but behave as women.

It is unclear how this unique legal status will play out in practice - for instance, how it will affect Chanda's marriage rights.

Constitution

With elections approaching, government teams are currently touring the country issuing certificates of citizenship.

One team came to Chanda's village in western Nepal.

Chanda, who has had no sex-change surgery, asked the officials to erase the words male and female, listed under gender.

They obliged, and ascribed Chanda's gender as "both".

A local campaign group, the Blue Diamond Society, has thanked the government for the move, which it described as a victory for sexual and gender minorities.

In the past the group has accused both the police and the Maoists of harassing transgendered people in the streets of Kathmandu.

It is now lobbying to get the rights of sexual minorities explicitly protected in the new constitution, to be drawn up after the elections.

February 1, 2007

At Home With Renée Richards

The Lady Regrets

By JOYCE WADLER

CARMEL, N.Y.

BEFORE Dr. Renée Richards had a sex-change operation, when she was an up-and-coming eye doctor and one of the top-ranked amateur tennis players in the East, she could be, by her own estimation, an arrogant fellow, tough and demanding. Talking with her three decades later, one still has the uneasy sense, at times, of that impatient male surgeon trapped in her body trying to break out.

Not that Dr. Richards, 72 and still practicing, is ever anything but polite. She comes outside in the rain, in sneakers, warm-up pants and a red sweater, to greet her visitor, reining in her enthusiastic, 140-pound Bernese mountain dog. She’s had her assistant, Arleen Larzelere, 60, prepare lunch. She provides a tour of her cozy three-bedroom cottage in the hamlet of Kent Cliffs, in Putnam County, an hour north of New York City: the faded chintz armchairs, the walk-in closet where a mink shares space with a golf bag that bears her name.

But as the conversation prompted by Dr. Richards’s new memoir, “No Way Renée,” runs to two hours, she grows restless. Dr. Richards is 6’2”, with the rangy body of a lifelong athlete, and in maturity, her angular bone structure seems to be pushing its way to the fore. And as she wearies of the interview, her body language seems to become more traditionally male, suggesting an athlete who is wearying of the game.

“You’re writing this book all over again,” she grouses.

And, later, on another subject, “I can explain, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to follow it.”

Time to talk about, uh ... décor. Those antique tennis illustrations; the plaque marking your induction into the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000. It appears, Dr. Richards, that there are no photos of you as a man.

“I don’t like to have pictures of me as a guy in the dining room or living room,” says Dr. Richards, who was once Dr. Richard Raskind. “I threw away most of the pictures of Dick. In fact, pictures of Dick with a beard, I destroyed.” She leads the way to the bedroom, where there are photos of her as both a handsome young male Naval officer and a good-looking middle-aged woman. In one photo of herself, Renée stands with her father, who refused to acknowledge her sex change, even when she visited him in a skirt.

He’s smiling at you, the reporter says.

“Sure he’s smiling, you kidding?” Dr. Richards says. “The sun rose and set over me. Every clipping about me, Dick or Renée, he saved.”

Dr. Richards never wanted to be a pioneer. But in 1976, while taking part in women’s amateur tennis competitions, she was revealed to have once been a man, setting off a media feeding frenzy. The next year, when the United States Tennis Association tried to prevent her from playing in the women’s events at the U.S. Open, Open, she went to court and won the right to play.

“No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life,” written with John Ames, deals with the long-term consequences of her surgery. Dr. Richards writes of life as a very young boy, when an older sister, “after pushing my penis into my body,” would say “Now you’re a little girl”; of their psychiatrist mother who occasionally dressed him in a slip. As an adult, there was off-and-on use of female hormones, which left Dr. Richard Raskind with breasts. He tried to compensate in the early years of his marriage by acting tough.

“I swaggered like a macho man,” Dr. Richards writes, “but I jiggled when I did so.”

The marriage, which produced a son, ended in divorce. Nor did Dr. Richards’s sex change bring her the great love affair with a man of which she dreamed, although there was affection and sex. Romance with a woman does not interest her. Though she has lived with Ms. Larzelere, her former office manager, for almost 25 years — she turns over her check each week and Ms. Larzelere handles the grocery shopping and cooking — their relationship is not romantic.

Dr. Richards says there is a bond because both were scarred by their childhoods, Ms. Larzelere by an alcoholic father who beat her. Ms. Larzelere, a warm woman who is so insistent about being a caregiver that she calls the reporter three times with an offer to pick her up at the train station, explains it more simply. “I just take care of people,” she says, “that’s what I do.” Now divorced, Ms. Larzelere says she gave up on men in her mid-30s.

Dr. Richards’s book also deals with the effects of her surgery on her son, Nick Raskind, now grown. Mr. Raskind was 3 years old at the time of the sex change, but was not told about it until he was 8. (When Dr. Richards saw her son during that period, she dressed as a man and wore a short gray wig.) Dr. Richards takes responsibility for her son’s problems: getting tossed out of prep schools; running away to Jamaica at 13. These days, Mr. Raskind is a New York City real estate broker specializing in lofts in the financial district, and Dr. Richards bunks at her son’s Park Avenue apartment when she works in Manhattan.

Would Mr. Raskind be willing to talk about Dr. Richards?

“If he thinks it would help him sell some lofts, he will,” she says.

Mr. Raskind seems perfectly comfortable speaking about the woman who still considers herself his father — although he’s annoyed that his problems were always blamed on the sex change. He also refers to Dr. Richards as “he.”

Why?

“Because I have a mother that’s a woman,” he says. “My father could have an elephant change — he could be a dromedary — and he’d still be my father.”

He has no memory of being told about his father’s change.

“For a kid, it was a non-event,” he says. “I was a pretty fat little kid and I used to get teased about being fat a lot. Then between the time I was 10 and 13, kids at school did know about it and I used to get teased about it. That was the driving force behind me getting into martial arts very seriously later in life.”

Back to Dr. Richards, who is surprisingly conservative. She calls the 2004 decision of the International Olympic Committee, which allows transsexuals to compete, “a particularly stupid decision,” explaining that when she sued to play at the U.S. Open, she was 40. “I wasn’t going to overwhelm Chris Evert and Tracy Austin, who were 20 years old.”

And while she believes same-sex couples should receive the same benefits as those who are married, her idea of marriage demands a man and a woman.

“It’s like a female plug and an electrical outlet,” she says.

In Ms. Larzelere, she seems to have a wife, she is told. “How many famous actresses have said, ‘I want a wife,’ ” Dr. Richards says. “Katharine Hepburn had somebody like Arleen who lived with her for the final 30 years.”

In her book, Dr. Richards never writes that she regrets having had her surgery, yet she lists so many regrets relating to her sex change that it is like someone who returns again and again to the edge of a great pit, but refuses to leap in. Those feelings were also evident in past interviews.

“In 1999, you told People—” the reporter begins.

Dr. Richards interrupts.

“—I told People what I was feeling, which I still feel: Better to be an intact man functioning with 100 percent capacity for everything than to be a transsexual woman who is an imperfect woman.”

In the same interview, Dr. Richards talked about wishing for something that could have prevented the surgery.

“What I said was if there were a drug, some voodoo, any kind of mind-altering magic remedy to keep the man intact, that would have been preferable, but there wasn’t,” Dr. Richards says. “The pressure to change into a woman was so strong that if I had not been able to do it, I might have been a suicide.”

Does she regret having the surgery?

“The answer is no.”

Dr. Richards’s game is no longer tennis; her knees are shot. Her great passion now is golf.

“I swing a golf club four times a week, every chance I get, ” she says. “I try to cram in what I didn’t have until starting 12 years ago. And I can’t do it. No matter how excellent an athlete I was, maybe it’s like having a sex change, it’s something I can’t undo: I can’t undo the fact I didn’t play golf when I was a kid.”

And, see No Way Renee: The Second Half of My Notorious Life at your favorite book seller.

Christian college in Jackson fires transgender professor

I suppose the argument is "God didn't create a TG professor. The devil made him do it!"

February 4, 2007
ASSOCIATED PRESS

JACKSON — A private, Christian university is firing a transgender professor who began appearing as a woman on campus in 2005.

John Nemecek, 55, who goes by Julie Marie Nemecek and often wears a wig and dress, is fighting the dismissal by Spring Arbor University, which takes effect June 1.

The ordained Baptist minister has filed a discrimination claim with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“I have worked hard for this university, have been praised for my performance, and I have done nothing immoral or sinful,” Nemecek told the Jackson Citizen Patriot for a story published today.

Officials at Spring Arbor, which is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, declined to comment to the newspaper. They said in a statement released by a public relations firm: “We expect our faculty to model Christian character as an example for our students.”

Faculty who “persist with activities that are inconsistent with the Christian faith” may be fired, the statement said. In their response to Nemecek’s EEOC complaint, college officials said the Christian mandate is critical to Spring Arbor and is protected by civil rights laws.

Nemecek, who has worked for the university for 16 years, was told in December that he had violated an updated contract that included a ban on his appearing as a woman on campus or in the town of Spring Arbor, a city of 2,200 located 95 miles west of Detroit.

Nemecek began his transformation in 2005 with estrogen therapy. Soon after, the college prevented him from teaching in classrooms, interviewing prospective employees or attending graduation ceremonies.

Nemecek has worked out of his home for more than a year, directing online classes.
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"My Unique Family" will air on TLC this evening at 10 PM, SF Bay Area, Comcast channel 50 in my area.

I'm told it will include something dealing with a family situation involving a TS.

Replayed at 1 AM for you late birds.

Check your local listings.