Friday, June 01, 2007
Ireland: Transsexual wins plea to alter gender on exam certs
By Fergus Black
Friday June 01 2007
A TRANSSEXUAL who sat her state exams as a male has won the right to have her exam certificates reissued to reflect her new name and gender.
In a groundbreaking case described as a "real breakthrough" by the Equality Authority, the State Examination Commission has agreed to reissue her Intermediate and Leaving certificates in her new name and in accordance with the gender she now identifies with.
Equality Authority chief executive Niall Crowley said the case was unique and a real breakthrough for gender equality.
He revealed that the authority was beginning to receive increasing numbers of cases from transsexuals, saying that the issue was one society had yet to come to terms with.
The outcome of the case reflected a valuable and necessary recognition for transsexual people from an important statutory body, said Mr Crowley. . . .
First transgender officer on KC's police force looks to the future
Jessica, a Kansas City police officer, is 6 feet tall with a chin dimple, pink manicured fingernails and a birth certificate that says “male.”
But in her mind, Jessica believes she has always been a female.
She legally changed her name from David to Jessica last year. And in January, she gained the right to dress as a woman at work.
She asked co-workers to refer to her in female pronouns, like “she” and “her.” She started hormone therapy and removed most of her body hair with laser surgery, but she hasn’t had a sex-change operation, known as gender reassignment surgery. She needs to raise $17,500 first.
Her co-workers are slowly getting used to the idea of working with a transgender police officer — a first for the department. But still, some point to Jessica and tell citizens to talk to “him,” prompting the citizens to look around, perplexed, since all they see is Jessica with her pink lipgloss and coiffed copper hair.
The bad guys can be equally confounded.
They see an officer wearing blue topaz earrings but shouting, “Get down on the ground!” in a deep, booming voice.
“When I get loud, I sound like a man,” Jessica conceded. “It throws the bad guys off. They can think whatever they want. I don’t care.”
Jessica understands the confusion because she lived 40 years mixed-up herself, not fitting in anywhere. . . .
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Cris Beam on transgender kids in LA
Click on the title above and then "Full Episode."
This is an audio program, from the "This American Life" public radio international series, based on the book "Transparent: Love, Family, And Living The T With Transgender Teenagers" (2007) by Cris Beam.
A highly recommended book.
A Pride Trans-formation
D.C.'s trans community organizes its first dedicated Capital Pride event
With new protections for transgender people going into effect in October 2006, Washington has the distinction of leading the country in protecting the transgender community from discrimination, according to the D.C. Trans Coalition.
Among the protections offered by the city, transgender people cannot be prevented from using gender-specific facilities, such as restrooms; employers must treat transgender medical needs as they would any other legitimate medical need; and neither businesses nor city agencies can require a person to disclose information about gender transition.
But on June 3, D.C.'s trans community will achieve another milestone, this time outside of the legal realm. On that Sunday, the community will celebrate the first Trans Pride.
''It's very, very, very important,'' says SaVanna Wanzer, chair of Capital Pride's transgender committee, a board member at the Whitman-Walker Clinic, and a self-identified trans woman. ''It's been a terrible fight just getting this event together, with budget issues. The transgender community needs its own event, rather than just using us as entertainment. That's all we've been allowed to do.''
The Sunday event, the first specifically transgender pride offering in Capital Pride's 32-year history, will run from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. at Westminster Presbyterian Church at 400 I St. SW. Admission is free till 6 p.m., with the first five hours dedicated to forums with topics such as social justice and religion, and a health fair. . . .
Spain local election sees first transsexual woman as councillor
| By m.p May 30, 2007 - 10:01 PM | |
Manuela Trasobares holds the political balance of power in her Castellón village
El Mundo reported on Wednesday that Sunday’s local election has left the government of the village of Geldo, in Castellón, in the hands of the first transsexual woman in Spain to be voted in as a councillor.
The paper quotes a report from the ‘Diario Digital Transexual’ that the Partido Popular and PSOE both achieved three seats in the poll.
The remaining seat went to ARDE – Acción Republicana Democrática Española - the party led by Manuela Trasobares. A pact between the two main parties is seen as highly unlikely.
El Mundo says the 45 year old changed her sex at the age of 15 and was married last year in a ceremony attended by almost all the 900 residents of the village.
She says it was her own neighbours who asked her to enter the world of politics, in a village which was governed in the last legislation by an unexpected alliance between the conservative Partido Popular and the left-wing Izquierda Unida coalition, with the Socialists in opposition.
IU lost their one seat to ARDE in this year’s election.
San Francisco Chronicle: Shaking up transgender assumptions
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Transparent
Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
By Cris Beam
HARCOURT; 323 Pages; $25
Real women can have penises. And "the brain and the heart are the only organs with a gender, and ... all genital modification or lack thereof is simply a personal aesthetic choice." These are some of the titillating ideas explored in "Transparent," Cris Beam's first book.
But Beam's engaging narrative does more than just provoke or amuse. It helps readers adjust their assumptions, as Beam admits hers were adjusted, about a world many may be unfamiliar with.
Beam teaches creative writing at the New School and Columbia University and has written for Teen People, Parenting, Out, Mademoiselle and the radio program "This American Life." But in 1998, she was a freelance magazine writer with spare time. She began volunteering at a high school in Los Angeles for gay and transgender teens.
After 2 1/2 years Beam burned out and quit. But she loved her students, even with "their attitudes, and the occasional danger and regular tragedies," and she maintained contact with several of the kids.
"Transparent" is the result of those meetings, which occurred from 1998 through the summer of 2005. Beam found her way into this nuanced world through the lives of four transgender girls, Christina, Domineque, Foxxjazell and Ariel, genetic males living as females. She intersperses their stories with edifying facts, figures and definitions, clearing away the distortions and misconceptions embedded in today's gender-rigid society. . . .
Transgender American Veterans Association
It's a trans world
Jan. 5, 2007 | "Transgender": Does even the word confuse you? If you were asked to define it, could you?
If not, you're hardly alone. For years, the transgender community has existed in the shadow of the gay, lesbian and bisexual rights movement -- though most trans-people agree that redefining their gender has little to do with their sexual orientation. The word is applied to everyone from drag queens and sex reassignment surgery patients to femme gay men and butch straight girls. And these days, when discussions of transgender do happen, it's usually in the context of the sex industry or debates about unisex bathrooms and gender-blind hallways in college dormitories. With such boundless, cloudy meanings, is it any surprise that even the most sex-savvy, gay-friendly, politically correct among us still have a hard time explaining the term?
Cris Beam, the author of "Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers," hopes her new book will help take on some of the mysteries and misconceptions that still haunt the transgender community. Beam, now 34, moved to Los Angeles in 1997, while her girlfriend attended graduate school. Lonely in her new city, she became intrigued by Eagles, a local high school specifically for gay and transgender kids; with the time left over in her freelance writing schedule, she began to work there as a volunteer. During the two and a half years Beam taught at Eagles, she discovered a complex but marginalized tribe of transgender teens who had nowhere to go but the streets. "Transparent" chronicles those stories, and describes how, within a few years, Beam found herself deeply involved in the kids' lives, entangled in their dreams, disappointments and their search for the truth about themselves and their gender. . . .
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
The TRANSSEXUAL PHENOMENON by Harry Benjamin, M.D.
Looking Back: Friday, Dec. 02, 1966 - A Body to Match the Mind
When ex-G.I. George Jorgensen went to Denmark and returned, after a series of operations, as "Christine," the U.S. public and medical profession alike were appalled at what seemed to be "mutilative surgery." Attitudes have changed so much since 1952 that last year a Baltimore court ordered Johns Hopkins surgeons to perform an identical operation on a 17-year-old boy. And last week the university announced that it has opened a center for the diagnosis and treatment of transsexuals. Hopkins surgeons have already operated on five men and five women.
Emotional Crossover. The longtime champion of these unhappy people is Berlin-born Dr. Harry Benjamin, 81, who swings his practice between Manhattan and San Francisco. It was he who coined the word transsexual, and his new book, The Transsexual Phenomenon (Julian Press; $8.50), is already the standard reference on the problem. It is of prime importance, says Dr. Benjamin, to define what a transsexual is not. He is not a hermaphrodite, to whom a cruel quirk of nature has given some of the organs of both sexes. He is not a pseudohermaphrodite, with the organs of his own sex so unusually formed that they are mistaken for those of the other. He is not a homosexual in the accepted sense. He usually has a normal male physique, but feels emotionally like a woman. The converse criteria apply to the masculine-oriented woman. Both types of transsexuals are likely to be transvestites, preferring the clothing of the "opposite" sex.
There is no explanation in heredity or hormones. A possible cause in some cases is that a boy was born when his mother wanted a girl, and she treated him as a girl. By adulthood, says Dr. Benjamin, the crossover of emotion and thought may be so deeply ingrained that "true transsexuals feel that they belong to the other sex, they want to be and function as members of the opposite sex, not only to appear as such." Psychiatric treatment, including long-continued analysis, has proved virtually worthless to patients who do not want to be changed emotionally, leading Dr. Benjamin to conclude: "Since the mind of the transsexual cannot be adjusted to the body, it is logical and justifiable to attempt the opposite, to adjust the body to the mind."
Radical Procedures. Adjusting the body means, for the male transsexual, castration and the creation of an artificial vagina. For the female, it means enclosing the urethra in a pseudo penis (which is not capable of intromission) and reducing the breasts. These procedures are so radical that most U.S. surgeons have been reluctant to try them. Among Dr. Benjamin's 152 transsexual patients, only 51 have had surgery, and nearly all have had that surgery outside the U.S.
Last week's announcement from Johns Hopkins marked the first time that a prestigious medical center has risked its reputation to give organized help to transsexuals, who are estimated to number 2,000 or more in the U.S. They are probably about evenly divided between men and women, according to Hopkins Psychiatrist Norman J. Knorr, but more men than women ask for, and get, sex-changing surgery.
Dr. Benjamin and the Hopkins group, of which Surgeon John E. Hoopes is chairman, emphasize that they are not interested in simply transforming a male so that he can more nearly simulate a female sex partner. They are concerned with the entire health and personality of the crossover deviate, whom they maintain on hormone treatments for the rest of his, or her, life. Dr. Benjamin evaluates the results in his 51 patients as: good, 17; satisfactory, 27; doubtful, 5; unsatisfactory, 1; and unknown, 1. As evidence of good results, he cites twelve formerly male patients who have married successfully as women; some have achieved motherhood by adoption.
Dr. Benjamin admits that many patients remain disturbed after the operation, but he insists that they are better off than before. He contends that if a miserable male transsexual can be happier as a woman, society benefits as well as the individual. Hopkins Surgeon Milton T. Edgerton Jr. says: "We're not sure yet that we are on solid footing. We're still looking for the best ways to bring these patients full relief."
Pakistani couple gets prison for lying to judge about sex-change operation
| By Asif Shahzad THE ASSOCIATED PRESS |
| |
| |
LAHORE, Pakistan— A couple who sought legal protection from harassment were separated and sentenced to three years in prison yesterday for lying to a Pakistani judge that surgery had turned one partner into a man.
The case of Shumail Raj, who was born female but had breast- and uterus-removal operations 16 years ago, and Shahzina Tariq has raised issues of homosexuality and transsexualism largely taboo in this conservative Muslim society.
The couple, who married last year, had approached the Lahore High Court for protection against harassment by Tariq’s relatives. They said they wed to protect Tariq from being sold into marriage to pay off her uncle’s gambling debts.
Court-appointed doctors who examined Raj ruled the earlier operations were not complete and that Raj was still a woman. The couple admitted they had lied about 31-year-old Raj’s gender because they were in love and wanted to live together. Raj, who has a close-cropped beard, has expressed a desire to go abroad for surgery to become male. . . .
Church to hold transgender forum
"I've met someone I think might be, but that person has not said they are," Thompson said Tuesday.
"But I'm going to," he added.
That's because Thompson, an elder at The Church of Reconciliation, is helping to bring a transgender minister to town next month for a free weekend workshop on transgender issues.
The Rev. Erin Swenson, a Presbyterian minister, is the first known mainstream Protestant minister to transition from male to female while remaining in ordained office, according to conference organizers. . . .
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Christine Daniels blog
Christine Daniels is a veteran sportswriter who has worked at the Los Angeles Times for 23 years -- as Mike Penner. Christine shocked many readers on April 27, 2007, when she announced her decision to change gender. She will be blogging about her transition over the days to come.Click on the post title above to access her LA Times blog.
Transgender status unlikely to derail Stanton
The Sarasota manager job will go to the most qualified candidate, leaders say. Their top pick and a runnerup will be announced Wednesday.
By LORRI HELFAND
Published May 29, 2007
SARASOTA - Here are three factors that probably will help determine whether Susan Stanton becomes Sarasota's next city manager:
Communication skills, budget know-how and experience as a city manager in Florida.
And here's one that people who know Sarasota well expect to play a lesser role - if any - in the decision:
Stanton's transgender status.
"If Susan is not selected, it is because there's another candidate that is more qualified, " said former Sarasota City Commissioner Mary Anne Servian, who met Stanton two years ago and encouraged her to apply for the job.
It would not be, she said, "because they lack the courage to select Susan if she's the best." . . .
India: Transgenders in Tamil Nadu get more than government help
United Methodist pastor speaks of transgender experience
May. 25, 2007
A UMNS Report By Linda Bloom*
A transgender United Methodist pastor has shared his story with other members of the denomination's Baltimore-Washington Conference in the hopes of promoting a broader discussion about gender identity.
The Rev. Drew Phoenix - formerly the Rev. Ann Gordon - spoke at both a closed clergy session and a general plenary session on May 24 during the annual conference meeting at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. He is pastor of St. John's United Methodist Church in Baltimore.
"I was very grateful for the opportunity to be able to share my story and who I am," Phoenix told United Methodist News Service in a phone interview following those sessions. "I was very pleased at the number of people who were very honest in their reflections and questions."
He said he has been undergoing medical procedures for the transition from female to male during the past year, with "a great team of medical people who helped me think it out."
In his statement to the plenary session, the 48-year-old pastor explained that "last fall, after a lifelong spiritual journey, and years of prayer and discernment, I decided to change my name from Ann Gordon to Drew Phoenix in order to reflect my true gender identity and to honor my spiritual transformation and relationship with God."
By sharing the story of his spiritual journey and relationship with God, Phoenix said he hoped the conference participants "will commit ourselves to becoming educated about the complexity of gender and gender identity and open ourselves to those in our congregations who identify as transgender."
Phoenix, who was ordained in 1989 and previously served in the Bethesda area, said he joined the ministry because of "a calling to be in service to folk who are oppressed, who are poor, who are excluded, who are marginalized."
Although he was named Ann and declared a girl, Phoenix said he always felt he was male and had trouble understanding "the disconnect I was experiencing between my physical, external self and my internal, spiritual self."
"Fortunately, today, God's gift of medical science is enabling me to bring my physical body into alignment with my true gender," he told the plenary session. . . .
